timwhitlock.info

I’ve spent this morning trying to get ASDoc to generate code documentation for the JASPA APIs, with mixed results.
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Or, “why I haven’t done any Flash work for a year”

I effectively gave up Flash when I came to Public and it’s now a whole year since I did any significant Flash work. In this short time AS3 has really come of age, there are tonnes of serious libraries, from fractals to physics, and PaperVision 3D seems almost omnipresent. The prospect of going back to the ActionScript freelance circuit after a year on the wagon would be quite daunting. Read more…

I’m suspicious of people who don’t enable commenting on their blog – that just makes it a book. But this gripe aside, I like what Joel Spolsky has to say about abstraction in modern programming. Well, it pushes one of my buttons; perhaps “like” has nothing to do with it.

Sadly the people I feel need to appreciate his point the most probably won’t get past the second paragraph. That point, or at least the one I took away from it, is best summarized by this quote:

“[...] as we have higher and higher level programming tools with better and better abstractions, becoming a proficient programmer is getting harder and harder.”

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I was further convinced this week that the world needs JASPA when my Flash developer colleague asked me about closures in JavaScript. He’s been knee-deep in AS3 for almost a year, so JavaScript must seem rather weak now.

Unlike JavaScript and AS2, AS3 supports method closures implicitly; so I made sure they were built into the JAS language. Such a thing is not native to JavaScript so the JASPA compiler automatically generates a call to helper function jaspa.closure whenever an object’s method is referenced.

If you’ve ever used Delegate.create in AS2, then you’ve encountered this issue. If you don’t see the problem, consider this example in JavaScript:
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I’ve been doing a lot of research into the AMF protocol recently. I’ve had the pleasure of reading the AMF0, and AMF3 standards cover-to-cover several times, with a view to understanding them well enough to write my own debugging tools. More about those projects another time.

Not only are the standards fairly brief, but they contain errors. I’ve not managed to find an official errata, so here’s my starter for 10. Read more…