About the Language As It Pertains to Flash

Flash and ActionScript 3.0 are great for building web applications and full websites. As of writing this page there are numerous giant corporate entities that make lots of money online using a full flash website. Navigate to www.doritos.com, www.sony.com, any movie website, social networking websites, and most entertainment websites, you will find flash at play all over the place as a content delivery method. Flash really makes an impact in the media presentation department. There is no better tool for delivering video and audio on the web.

Many webmasters still shy away from using Flash and ActionScript 3.0 due to them being under the misconception that the text in their Flash SWF files still does not index in the search engines. It now does and everyone can stop debating. Click here to see a little proof for yourself. Use flash to help your applications or websites shine. Many developers like me enjoy creating hybrid Flash-HTML site to get the best of both worlds. This site is a hybrid, utilizing flash where appropriate and HTML where appropriate.

ActionScript has been around for a long time now. It became really popular with Flash MX. Then Adobe acquired Macromedia(original creators of flash) in 2005. When ActionScript 2.0 entered the picture it offered webmasters part of the animated action by making it more of a web applications tool.ActionScript was originally created to control animations in Flash, and not much more. Now actionscript 3.0 offers a great variety of web based functionality and is more conducive to OOP. It even handles animation better than previous versions.

So now find ourselves working with ActionScript 3.0 without much good reference material organized nicely online. We plan to tackle that project here. We already own the web's best set of custom flash learning source files that offer great insight into the programming language. Now we are going to lay down the groundwork and building blocks of the greatest programming language to be created by man. If Adobe would just add MySQL integration to and from ActionScript directly, we would have the ultimate programming tool for the web with Flash and ActionScript 3.0.

Procedural and Object Oriented Programming in Actionscript 3.0

Some of our lessons here are 100% procedural, and some are Object Oriented Programming(OOP) based using packages and class files. Procedural means that we will show the code that produces returned results directly in the application, and not demonstrate how to bind the data to an Object Oriented Style of programming. OOP usually comes into play after a developer becomes advanced and requires data handling to be more modular. OOP provides better scalabilty, modular code, and many times separates data from presentation in your applications. There are no performance differences between OOP and procedural programming. It is a matter of organization and usability.

For many of our Flash and ActionScript 3.0 lessons, one can just open Flash CS3 or CS4, press F9 to open the scripting panel, and place our code examples directly in the actions panel. For some of the lessons you may have to use external files and the OOP methods of AS3.