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AS2 looks silly compared to AS3
By roystahl | August 26, 2008
First, lets get clear what this rant is and what it is not.
I have written an entire RIA application in AS2 and then re-written the same application in AS3, so I have seen the good the bad and ugly of both.
When I look at style and performance, I am not interested in getting into benchmarking the two against each other. There are enough differences in my code and dependancies on the web fetches to make such comparisons worthless.
I don’t have time to be be exhaustive. This is just my rant.
From the very start I could see the AS3 had matured and was much more robust than AS2 was. To make AS2 work the way I wanted I had several ugly hacks. I started writting in AS3 wait for some deficiancy or bug to cause me to create the same ugly hacks. As of this point of being 90% done there is only one that really stands out and this is when looking for the parent of text object you need to go up two levels instead of one. There is some invisible object that may need to be there, but it is not documented and doesn’t really make any sense.
The next thing I notices is how much more compact the applicaiton was. Part of this is because Adobe left out components that I needed so I had to write my own windowing and DateChooser (which I now offer for free to anyone that emails me) These are definately smaller than the old Adobe AS2 components, but still I have added more features and code to this version and it is still over 30% smaller.
Speed. Everything is faster!! Drawing on the screen, interacting with the database and saving data are all faster. Adobe claims 4-10x faster code and I think my application is in the 6-8 range. Just a feeling, but it is more than 4x and doesn’t feel like a magnitude overall (although some individual things feel 10x faster.)
And as I put in my last post Browser Wars most people have migrated to Flash 9+. This makes me feel much better about releasing this new software on the world.
Of course all this has meant that I needed to rethink the application and not just recompile it was a serious rethink of the code and structure to make AS3 work, but it is so much cleaner that I can not go back to AS2.
Topics: ActionScript 3 |
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