Swf Actionscript Replacer Free Bit You

Defining the variable type is done with the colon syntax we saw above.

It assumes you have some programming experience in JavaScript, Java or a similar object oriented and event driven language.

Swf Actionscript Replacer Free Bit You

Flash Player is the free bit you install on your computer that lets you view Flash SWF files.

Flash Professional is the expensive vector animation tool you can use to create Flash content, AIR applications and now iPhone apps too using Adobe Packager.

ActionScript 1 and 2 were a bit weak but ActionScript 3 is a full-featured object oriented programming language which can be compiled straight to SWF files for embedding in web pages.

Adobe Flex is a free, open source SDK which includes an ActionScript compiler and a bunch of libraries.

Using Flex you can create Flash content from code, without needing to think like an animator and you also get a bunch of useful classes and interface widgets.

Just as with Flash Professional, Flex projects can also be packaged up as AIR executables or iPhone apps.

Its not free and its based on Eclipse IDE which makes it bloated, slow and complicated.

Fortunately, for Windows users at least, theres another way.

The installer has an option to download Flex SDK which you will need too.

Youll probably want to tick Create directory for project too.

After a few seconds you should get an empty window with Adobe Flash Player in the title bar.

To write some text on the Flash stage instead, replace the line above with this code.

Strings are objects, functions are objects, all user interface components are objects and your ActionScript application is also an object.

Each class is defined in its own.as3 file using the name of the class as the file name.

In FlashDevelop you set the main class by right clicking on the file in the project view and selecting Always compile.

For example Flex includes two classes called Button, one in the package mx.controls and one in spark.components.

Packages mean they can be referred to unambiguously as mx.controls.Button or spark.components.Button.

In this case our Main class is in the top level package which doesnt have a name.

Confusingly, the term namespace is used to refer to something completely different in ActionScript 3.

One of the great features of FlashDevelop is that code autocompleter will automatically add import statements to import the classes that you use in your file.

Worth noting is that all AS3 projects extend the Sprite object and therefore inherit its properties.

The method checks if the stage property (i.e.

Sprite) has been initialised.

If not it sets an event listener to call the init() method once the stage has been set (no pun intended).

You cant assign a Button to a variable of type String, for instance.