O'Reilly has just added two more chapters to Essential ActionScript 3.0 on Rough Cuts. The new chapters cover text and vector drawing. Here's the list of chapters now available:
Chapter 15, Flash Player Security Restrictions
Chapter 16, The Display API and the Display List
Chapter 17, Events and Display Hierarchies
Chapter 18, Interactivity
Chapter 20, Programmatic Animation
Chapter 21, Drawing with Vectors
Chapter 22, Bitmap Programming
Chapter 23, Text Display and Input
Chapter 24, Loading External Display Assets
>> Visit Essential ActionScript 3.0's Official Rough Cuts Page
O'Reilly has just added three more chapters to Essential ActionScript 3.0 on Rough Cuts. The current list of chapters available is now as follows:
Chapter 15, Flash Player Security Restrictions
Chapter 16, The Display API and the Display List
Chapter 17, Events and Display Hierarchies
Chapter 18, Interactivity
Chapter 20, Programmatic Animation
Chapter 22, Bitmap Programming
Chapter 24, Loading External Display Assets
>> Visit Essential ActionScript 3.0's Official Rough Cuts Page
Yesterday, Adobe officially contributed ActionScript 3.0's virtual machine (AVM2) to the Mozilla Foundation for integration into Mozilla (and, by extension, Firefox and Thunderbird). Within Mozilla, AVM2 will be known as "Tamarin". This means that at some point in the future...
* Mozilla's core JavaScript language will run faster (see initial performance tests)
* Mozilla's core JavaScript language (i.e., the syntax for defining functions, variables, loops, conditions, classes, interfaces, and so on) will be identical to Flash Player's core ActionScript language. ActionScript 3.0 (currently available in Flash Player 9) and JavaScript 2.0 (unreleased) are already both based on the ECMAScript Edition 4 draft specification, but Adobe's contribution means that the core features of both languages will eventually be implemented with same code base.
When is all this happening? According to the roadmap, JavaScript 2 (which will include Tamarin) will be released sometime in 2008. In the meantime, you can get used to the core syntax by playing with ActionScript 3.0.
Key Tamarin information:
>> Tamarin Overview by Frank Hecker
>> Collected Tamarin Links by John Dowdell
>> Official Tamarin project page
>> Brendan Eich's Tamarin announcement (Brendan is the original creator of JavaScript)
Jon Gay and Robert Tatsumi (the creators of Flash) have teamed up with Gary Grossman (the creator of ActionScript) and Peter Santangeli (former vice president of engineering at Macromedia) to create a new start up company named Software As Art. So far, no public information on the new company's products or services is available. Looks like for now, we'll all just have to wait and see what these Flash pioneers get up to.