ABSTRACT
Flash actionscripting is moving with exponential speed. AS2 was the new generation of ActionScript introduced with Flash 7 (MX 2004). Just about 2 years later we needed to learn a new version of ActionScript, AS3. Do we? I leave this answer to you. If you know AS2 classes you will be interested in AS3. If you are not familiar with AS2 classes you may want to get a glimpse of AS3, because it seems AS3 allows endless possibilities for developing Flash applications. AS3 is used with the Flex 2 builder and is part of Flash CS3. A main reason to develop in AS3 is the performance increase. AS3 source code is first compiled into byte code and then passed on to a new ActionScript virtual machine called AVM2, which results in about a 10-fold performance increase compared to AS2. However, the performance increase is restricted to AS compiling, which allows working with large datasets. Animations like CPU-intensive tweens of complex MovieClips, which are known to slow down during playing, are not affected. ActionScript is therefore now closer to other programming languages like C or Java. There are other reasons to learn AS3, since AS3 allows applications that were not possible with AS2. Also, Adobe will develop AS3 further, but not AS2.
