Macromedia Flash architect Grossman spoke this morning about the future of actionscript as Macromedia rolls out betas of AS3.0 this week. This looks to be another huge leap in performance similar to what we just experienced in the Flash 8 rollout.
Gary described the changes as "significant" in the way that the language is structured under-the-hood. The Flash Player going forward will feature two Action Script Virtual Machines (AVM1 and AVM2). AVM1 is what we currently have up to and including Flash Player 8. This will insure complete and total backwards compatibility with all versions of Flash content back to v1. AVM2 has been completely created from scratch and is the best way they decided to enable themselves to be completely innovative without having to worry about backwards compatibility. AVM1 will handle that and will be invisible to the user.
Microsoft could take a lesson in that mindset when looking at how they've handled (or rather, not handled) compatibility issues in versions of Windows Media Player.
In other AS3 news, there is a new class known as E4X (translates to Ecmascript for XML). Hard to describe without really seeing the live demo, but basically presents a whole new way to very effeciently access and parse XML data, including tools to search and replace data in nested node trees. Very slick.
AS3.0 will also feature a new UI Component known as a Sprite (hello Director users) that is a cousin of sorts from the movieClip, but without any timeline properties. I'm slowly starting to get a clearer picture of what Macromedia means when they say "Flash Platform". With Flex, for instance, they're talking about a tool to create data-rich applications that run on the Flash player but are seperated from the Flash authoring tools stage and film animation metaphor.
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