AS2 ---> AS3
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- Aa77
I am starting the process of learning Actionscript 3.0 after spending the last two years working and learning 2.0. I have been checking a few different books and using some of the lynda.com tutorials.
I can understand how some things are easier and more user-friendly in AS3, but I personally like the functionality of how things are done in AS2 much better. If it were up to me, I would stay in AS2, but I don't want to get left behind in the industry as it seems like AS3 has now become the norm.
Is anyone else in the process of making the transition, is there any advice you can offer? What books do you think are the best?
- moldero0
yeah AS2 was a lot more forgiving for us non coders
- tommyo0
TaDa!
http://www.qbn.com/topics/587810…
And don't worry, it's just the learning curve you're feeling right now. It gets easier, and then when you poke your head back into AS2 you gag and cry. Cheers!
- Aa770
I guess my main problem is the technique that I used to make a lot of things work in AS2 don't work in AS3.
most of what I learned in AS2 came from a lot of experimenting and trial and error. I suppose that I wasn't doing everything in AS2 the 'correct' way....but at least it worked.
I know in the long run I will be better off for learning AS3 the 'right' way...but for now it just seems frustrating.
- I had all kinds of movies I recycled: Scrolling text boxes, video players with audio control that would fade sound, form stuff. I'll have to remake all of those.CyBrain
- tommyo0
^^ Yeah man I know exactly what you're saying. The new 'right way' adds a few steps to the way we could quickly prototype in AS2. It gets much easier though, it's just a retraining of the brain. I remember at the beginning I'd compile and wonder, 'what the fuck, why isn't it displaying?!?!' Then after wasting 20 min double checking everything it hits me, addChild...fuck you addChild. But slowly it all becomes second nature like AS2 was.
- tommyo0
juhls,
I swear the hardest part about AS3 is unlearning AS2... so yeah I'd recommend halting all AS2 studies.
- kumori040
The biggest hurdle when I was learning AS3 is the importance of Garbage Collection and its impact on memory use. Trust me, this is handled uniquely in AS3 projects and will cause you problems if you don't spend time studying it. Grant Skinner has a great series of articles that can help understand it:
http://www.gskinner.com/blog/arc…
- SteveJobs0
the drawing api is the shittiest i've seen of any technology i've ever worked with. whoever came up with the idea of display objects and the abstract presentation of all that mess should be fired. or set on fire. or both.
- what other drawing APIs do you have experience with, and why are they superior?acescence
- acescence0
on the bright side, instead of being on the AS2 island off by yourself, you'll be learning useful knowledge that can be applied to a number of different languages. AS2 really was an ass-backwards hack job.
- SteveJobs0
i will say as3 is somewhat of an improvement over as2. drawing in as2 was absolute shit as well.
another problem with as3 is that it doesn't welcome casual users. back during the heyday of as2, i put together a few things very quickly with pretty much no meaningful knowledge of flash. didn't give much of a shit for the technology, but it certainly had/has its uses - and going in and knocking out a quick app in a couple hours with a little googling was very gratifying. it was more of a RAD technology. now, they've gone and made it cumbersome and you actually have to dig through the api to figure shit out... fucking dumb.
a better move would have been to have flex for large-scale projects where shit like design patterns and uml shit were pertinent, and streamlined as3 for flash for better productivity... you know, to get shit done!
- Boz0
I agree with Tommyo.. I has AS1 and AS2 in my hand and built whatever I wanted, then AS3 came along and created so many unnecessary complications from a logic standpoint but after a little bit I realized that they did this in order to unify the platform (Air/Flex/Flash), bring real OOP to Flash and make project management actually good since it was a clusterfuck in previous versions.
My biggest problems were exactly what tommyo says, for those who were great in previous AS the biggest problem is unlearning the wrong way of doing things. I like the fact that now in Flash when you pick AS3 they won't allow you to put code on buttons :)
Some things bother me in AS3, by adding so many steps for a simple thing, but I can freely say that the time I lose there, writing valid code, I gain by utilizing a bunch of prebuilt classes now from various sources that allow you shorten the dev time plus not to mention the awesome XML management that's easy as pie now.
- +1 for agreeing with me. :P
I agree with you too, let's make love. E4X is badass btw.tommyo
- +1 for agreeing with me. :P
- SteveJobs0
acescence, windows gdi, apple's quickdraw and quartz, directx, and other wrapper libraries for those api's, etc.
adobe had a good oportunity to streamline the drawing api, but you have a hodgepodge of non-homogeneous ideas lumped together, as they try to take the best of the vector world and collide it with the raster world. bitmaps, bitmapdata, shapes, movieclips, sprites... fucking cluster-fucking-fuck.
- tommyo0
SteveJobs,
Yup unfortunately the casual nature of AS2 is kind of gone now when you switch to the class package system. It was the casualty of how Boz puts it 'a unified platform.' It's kind of funny how there seem to be two different sets of people concerning AS2/AS3 migration - the people who wanted to just dabble in AS2 and the people who welcomed AS3 as a next step. I was definitely of the latter, but I can totally see why the people of the former group would be pretty pissed and view this as almost an attack on their lively hood. If I weren't 'into' Actionscript, and was forced to learn a new process that by all accounts relies on using even more code I'd be pretty mad too. Although it seems like it's not all that hard to continue with the way most casual AS2 guys used to do things, i.e. code in the timeline and assets on the stage. The problem I see here is that most people who write tutorials on AS3 have switched to just using the Document Class system and writing class packages. Leaving a lot of the casual users out in the cold regarding learning AS3.
Maybe someone should do more AS3 tutorials with the casual users in mind? Cause it seems to me, even though I rely on the class package system so I'm not positive, that a transition from AS2 to AS3 could be a lot less frustrating for the people who don't want to learn all of the ecapsulation/OOP sort of ideology could be a lot less painless then it must seem.
- Boz0
I recommend everyone who is "afraid" or annoyed by AS3 and the whole difficulty of switching to get an e-book from O'Reilly:
"The ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide: For Developers and Designers Using Flash CS4 Professional"
This is a terrific book that is using plain english terms and explanations on classes, coding OOP style in proper manner and how to clearly understand what you are exactly doing that's different from AS2 and very quickly in the book you will realize the clear benefits of AS3. Sure, there are things that are more work but so many things are better organized now. And trust me when I tell you that I was one of those old school AS guys who hated AS3 and the whole forced method of coding they have.
- CyBrain0
How does that compare to O'Reilly's Action Script 3 Cookbook By Joey Lott, Darron Schall, Keith Peters?
- Boz0
Cookbook is not as good.. it's more of a technical piece of those who are more comfortable with the switch. This one is dead on for people to smoothly transition to AS3 without a lot of headache..just read through the book and slowly apply their examples and it all becomes super clear. The XML handling is especially great because it shows you how much easier it is to work with XML in AS3 then in previous AS versions.
- SteveJobs0
first off. fuck books. when i got into programming nearly over a decade ago i had a huge ridiculously high stack of books. i learned more and have found my time better spent by just doing than sitting down and learning by reading a 400 page tome. fuuuck that. when i read it's for leisure, not "to learn nothin'".
and tommyo, yes you are right. my approach has been to build wrapper libraries that simplify the language. it's up to me to maintain and support them, which should be the job of adobe, but i'm competent enough to get it done. it's just the fact that i don't want or need the hassle. i don't work in the timeline or stage, i do everything programmatically, so my libraries have to be pretty comprehensive and extensible. but this is why i paid for the technology to begin with, to have adobe's coders to pound this shit out for me.
meh, whatever. i really don't care that much. just hate bandwagon technology.
- PonyBoy0
silverlight!
- boobs0
I like both. Believe it or not, there are still some clients who want the AS2 so people can view the Flash with the older players. Then there are others who want the AS3 for various reasons.
So I've been bouncing back and forth from one to the other, depending on the job, and it is, at times, confusing for our old pal boobs. Lots of jiggling and juggling, you know?