The ActionScript 3.0 Migration Cookbook

Good news — looks like Adobe has just officially released a 21-page PDF entitled ”ActionScript 3.0 Migration Cookbook” that is, and I quote:

“...targeted at designers and developers who have some experience scripting content within Adobe Flash CS4 Professional. It does not require an understanding of object-oriented programming.”

It’s currently “in beta” — which is news to me — I guess PDFs can now be classified as “beta”?

Anyway, I’ve checked out the PDF and it there’s even a section called “ActionScript 3 Migration gotchas” — I kid you not. Though it doesn’t cover everything that we’ve covered thus for on pissedoffdesigner.com, it is a good start. I’ll give Adobe the benefit of the doubt for now, after all, it’s still in beta.

Although I understand their effort, I feel there may be a bit of controversy stirred up by the “Top 5 Misperceptions about ActionScript 3” — specifically numbers 1 and 5:

1. ActionScript 3 is difficult to learn ActionScript 3 is no more difficult to learn than any other programming or scripting language. If you are familiar with ActionScript 2, the language semantics are pretty much the same, although you will need to learn new ways of doing some common tasks. Because the ActionScript 3 APIs are more consistent, learning one new concept and API applies to multiple APIs, making it easier to use newly found knowledge to learn new features and functionality.

5. ActionScript 2 development is faster than ActionScript 3 While some tasks can require more code in ActionScript 3 than in ActionScript 2, overall development and maintenance time should be the same or less than in ActionScript 2.0 due to improved debugging and better compile-time error catching. Basically, in some cases there may be more code, but it will be much easier to find errors.

I would agree, with a few caveats:

• AS3 isn’t necessarily easier to learn in all cases — over the long run, and mostly for people totally new to Flash, it probably is, but probably not for those of us making the transition over from AS2. It definitely wasn’t “easy” for me. Adobe argues that “because the ActionScript 3 APIs are more consistent, learning one new concept and API applies to multiple APIs, making it easier to use newly found knowledge to learn new features and functionality” — which, I absolutely agree with, however, what isn’t considered here are old AS2 habits. And those are hard to break. I speak from recent and past experience.

• AS2 development, in my experience, is faster than AS3 development — well, maybe only and particularly for those of us whose habits have been deeply formed to the idiosyncracies of AS2. Thankfully, AS3 is much, much more logical and incredibly consistent — but more verbose. So the time spent typing more (which is negligible) will, at the end of the day, be more than made up for by the previous headeaches created by AS2’s inconsistencies and quirks.

In any case, it’s defintiely worth a download. It’s layed out neatly and logically into separate sections displaying how a particular thing would be done in AS2 vs. AS3. It’s something Adobe should have shipped with the release of AS3, but I am grateful that there is now more complete documentation from the Official Source™.