New ActionScript Stuff

ActionScript is the coolest but to prove the point here is a few things that I've come across my travels lately.

New Photoshop Elements made in Flex
Adobe is starting to take clue web 2.0 area of getting away from the desktop and doing a pretty good job of understanding the market. Other efforts like Adobe Connect isn't really mind blowing if you ask me but this is a pretty nice application that I can see a lot of people using. It is a little to simple for me but I also am not really the target audience so I still think it is pretty great. It is nice that Adobe is using there own products to create but it also scares me a little. I don't want them taking the thunder away from other businesses that are creating comparable products with there technology already. There are a few of products that already have this type of functionality but it is Adobe's niche also so I understand but hope that it doesn't continue to much. Buzzword was questionable but they are adding some nice text features that I imagine were inspired by this purchase.

An ActionScript Compiler written in ActionScript
This is an amazing project that I think was missed buy the ActionScript community at large. The ability to compile within ActionScript opens the doors to all kinds of dynamic functionality that is currently very limited. I use methods like getDefinition all the time trying to create some form of flexibility within my projects but eval()eval()() has been greatly missed and I look forward to maybe one day coming back to ActionScript. I haven't spent a lot of time with this project but I'd like to see what it is capable of with out crashing everything.

ActionScript ActiveRecord for AIR SQLite
I'm working on a big AIR app and have already written all my database stuff but next time totally using this. It also comes with some really nice utilities that would be great to

JQuery in ActionScript: as3Query
This is really awesome but the thing that really pulls me back is it's still written in compiled ActionScript, it would be really nice if something like this could be rendered from a dynamically. This opens my mind to a few things for Wrapper but not really with this implementation.

Physaxe: Haxe Physics Engine
Pretty nice, it visually seems faster then anything else I have seen but testing would have to be done to prove that. But pretty impressive for realtime flash stuff.


I also have to add, I've been working in Flex a lot and I don't agree with the component architecture or the size of the framework. My biggest gripe is that it promotes the creation of projects that have more code than is comprehensible and requires a developer to trust the structure to much. To many things are automatically done for you without very much control for overriding or restructuring. It's all or nothing and the whole thing is big and slow. But also take into account that I still use it because there are some nice things about it too.