Category Archives: General

General

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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General

JASPA.DOM is now an open source project on SourceForge

I’ve decided to set up an open source project for the jaspa.dom package; it is to be found on SourceForge.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/jaspa-dom. It’s my first attempt at anything like this, so I’m bumbling around a bit, but the downloads are there and the CVS repository is also up and running. Any developers who are serious about helping develop this API should put a request to join the project on SourceForge.

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General

JAS is the language that the JASPA compiler converts to regular JavaScript; it is very similar to ActionScript 3.

The acronym JAS derives from JavaScript/ActionScript, but officially it means “JavaScript; Advanced Syntax”. This is partly due to potential trademark problems, and partly to make the distinction that it IS a separate language. The JASPA compiler contains absolutely no Adobe technology, or source code whatsoever.

The JAS syntax is designed to be as close to AS3 (ActionScript) as possible. When I say “as possible”, I mean that ideally I’d have made them identical, but for reasons too time-consuming to describe, certain things are in, certain things are out, and certain things behave a bit more like AS2. Ultimately JAS is an extension to the ECMAScript (ES3) standard, proving the kind of OOP enhancements that ActionScript programmers will find very familiar.

I shall digress and describe the similarities and differences between JAS and both ActionScript languages, feature-by-feature.

[ UPDATE: See http://jaspa.org.uk/wiki/JAS_language ]

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General

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. Continue reading…