ActionScript is an object-oriented programming language created by Macromedia, which was acquired by Adobe Systems in December 2005.^[1]

ActionScript was originally developed for interactivity in Macromedia Flash. Its current implementation is compliant with ECMAScript, a superset of JavaScript that is similar to ExtendScript.

Product history

Actions

• Macromedia Flash Player 2: The first version with scripting support. Actions included gotoAndPlay, gotoAndStop, nextFrame and nextScene for timeline control.
• Macromedia Flash Player 3: Expanded basic scripting support with the ability to load external SWFs (loadMovie).
• Macromedia Flash Player 4: First player with a full scripting implementation (called Actions). The scripting was a flash based syntax and contained support for loops, conditionals, variables and other basic language constructs.

ActionScript 1

Main article: ActionScript 1

• Macromedia Flash Player 5: Included the first version of ActionScript. Used prototype-based programming based on ECMAScript,^[2] and allowed full procedural programming and object-oriented programming. Design based development.
• Macromedia Flash Player 6: Added an event handling model, accessibility controls and support for switch. The first version with support for the AMF and RTMP protocols which allowed for on demand audio/video streaming.

ActionScript 2

Main article: ActionScript 2

• Macromedia Flash Player 7: Additions include CSS styling for text and support for ActionScript 2.0, a programming language based on the ECMAScript 4 Netscape Proposal with class-based inheritance.^[3] However, ActionScript 2.0 can cross compile to ActionScript 1.0 byte-code, so that it can run in Flash Player 6.
• Macromedia Flash Player 8: Further extended ActionScript 1 and 2 by adding new class libraries with APIs for controlling bitmap data at run-time, file uploads and live filters for blur and dropshadow.

ActionScript 3

Main article: ActionScript 3

• Adobe Flash Player 9 (initially called 8.5): Added ActionScript 3.0 with the advent of a new virtual machine, called ActionScript Virtual Machine 2 (AVM2), which coexists with the previous AVM1 needed to support legacy content. Performance increases were a major objective for this release of the player including a new JIT compiler. Support for binary sockets, E4X XML parsing, full-screen mode and Regular Expressions were added. This is the first release of the player to be titled Adobe Flash Player.^[4]
• Adobe Flash Player 10 (code named "Astro"): Added basic 3D manipulation, such as rotating on the X, Y, and Z axis, a 3D drawing API, and texture mapping. Ability to create custom filters using Adobe Pixel Bender. Several visual processing tasks are now offloaded to the GPU which gives a noticeable decrease to rendering time for each frame, resulting in higher frame rates, especially with H.264 video. There is a new sound API which allows for custom creation of audio in flash, something that has never been possible before.^[5] Furthermore, Flash Player 10 supports Peer to Peer (P2P) communication with Real Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP).
• Adobe Flash Player 11: The major addition in this version are advanced (graphic card accelerated) 3D capabilities for Windows Desktop, Mac Desktop, iOS, Android, and other major platforms. Significant compatibility improvements have been added for the iOS platform, and other non-desktop platforms. Other features include H.264 encoding for cameras, Native JSON support, Cubic Bézier Curves, a secure random number generator, LZMA compression for swf files, workers to offload some code execution to other processor threads, graphics card accelerated camera feed rendering, memory intrinsics and performance analysis, and the ActionScript Compiler 2.0, as well as some other minor additions.^[6]

References

See also

• Adobe ExtendScript Toolkit at the Adobe Wiki

External links

• Macromedia Flash Articles: ActionScript at Macromedia DevNet (archived 2003-06-08)
  • Using ActionScript (archived 2001-10-23)
• ActionScript Technology Center at Adobe
  • ActionScript 2.0 Language Reference (archived 2008-12-18)
  • ActionScript 3.0 Reference for the Adobe Flash Platform
  • Flash Player Developer Center
• ActionScript at the Adobe Wiki
• ActionScript at Wikipedia

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Macromedia Flash
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