Woooohooo!! See, Macromedia didnt forget about the Flash Developers. Flash Player 8 was mostly a release that was aimed towards Flash Designers with all the new expressiveness features, the BitmapData API is probably the biggest new feature for developers in Flash Player 8. People have wondered for a while where E4X and Actionscript 3 dissapeared to.
Well…. Macromedia revealed some great news today (as you have probably ready by now). A public preview of Flash Player 8.5 which includes Actionscript 3 is expected to be available on October 17th (11 days from now) to coincide with the Macromedia MAX Developers Conference.
The engineers at Macromedia have re-written the Actionscript Virtual Machine (AVM) from the ground up for Flash Player 8.5 with speed of actionscript execution in mind, the player is now highly optimized and the language itself now includes alot of functionality that developers have been crying out for:
- Performance, performance, performance!
- Regular Expressions - Pattern Matching
- E4X - Native XML Datatype
- Binary Sockets - Make Flash talk many protocols
- Runtime Error Reporting
- Updated Event Model
- Much much more….
Flash Player 8.5, contains both the old AVM and the new AVM for backwards compatibility purposes.
Expect more news in the near future. In the meantime, try to stay calm and read up on E4X and Regular Expressions.