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Flex, [Java|Action]Script

I’ve been playing with Adobe Flex which I’ll probably have something to say about soon.

Flex uses ActionScript which bears a remarkable similarity to JavaScript. It’s not quite the same but it’s close enough that I haven’t stumbled too badly with it working from JavaScript knowledge.  As with any "new" language the learning curve isn’t the language but the environment and libraries.

The experience with Flex and also the Greasemonkey hacking I’ve been doing lately has made me rather fonder of JavaScript than I’ve been in the past.  JavaScript is particularly nice when used in an environment that is safe from worrying about cross-browser API woes — such as a Firefox-only Greasemonkey user script or an environment like Flex. It’s not ideal but it has a lot of what I like in a language, including garbage collection, closures, reasonable typing and widespread deployment.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 10:57 pm and is filed under Programming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

One Response to “Flex, [Java|Action]Script”

  1. Ryan Kennedy Says:
    September 18th, 2007 at 8:39 am

    I’ve been playing a little with Flex and ActionScript over the past couple of months as well. ActionScript isn’t too bad. It is kind of nice having a compiler for it, unlike with JavaScript where you throw it in the browser and wait for it to break at runtime (hopefully in some visible way).

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