Finally got round to having a more in-depth look at ActionScript 3, having been dedicating most of my time recently to more game design, virtual worlds and 3d development (I’ll try and post a first-look at XNA Game Studio express over the next week or so).

Anyway, I’ve got the Flash 9 Alpha installed at work, and wanted to get a look through whats going on with the new release. Theres a nice overview here on Adobe. Ugh – I still can’t believe Adobe bought macromedia. I still shudder everytime I load a PDF in my browser. Obviously the rendering engine remains unchanged (hence why it used to be called Flash 8.5), but with the new display lists functionality is a godsend and negates the need for some of the hideous workarounds that used to plague Flash development.

The Good

Strict-typing – allows for more robust code and reduced use of dynamic types (which are extremely slow)
AVM2 – The new virtual machine has JIT (just-in-time compiling), allowing for much faster code execution. I’m not sure why its not faster still – it really pales in comparison with Java
Display Lists – Hugely useful, these allow you to add/remove visual objects (MovieClips or the new Sprite class) without deleting them or setting them to invisible, and most importantly allow reparenting of visual objects.
Proper MovieClip object initialisation – When you create a new object that is a subclass of a MovieClip, you no longer need to use attach movie to create it with its associated movieClip – you can just use its standard constructor and use addChild to add to the display list of the appropriate displayObjectContainer. Very tidy.
Binary Data Loading/Sending – If you can be bothered, you can now load any file you see fit. Want to write your own TGA file reader? Go for it. Want to open and expand zip files? No problem

The Bad

No access to shape data (as far as I’m aware) – I wanted to write a few bits of code to access items in the library and create some interesting effects (animation, manipulation). While some of these (particularly shape deformation) are possible with displacement maps, it would be nice to have the opportunity to have the equivalent of vertex shaders.