ActionScript: The Definitive Guide

Foreword

When I arrived at Macromedia in the summer of 1998 to join the Flash team, a small and dynamic group had already produced an amazing product. Flash 3 had near-universal acceptance as the standard for vector animation on the Web. Its devoted, energetic user base of talented artists produced stunning visual content that appeared on more sites every day.

ActionScript’s beginnings can be traced to a bullet point titled “Enhanced Interactivity” on a Flash 4 feature planning list. Flash 3 offered a basic suite of actions to control Flash’s movie clips and buttons and provide interactivity. However, I recall being impressed by a tic-tac-toe game, which, although a straightforward task in most programming languages, was difficult and time-consuming to implement using Flash 3 actions.

That was before ActionScript came into being. Today, one doesn’t blink when encountering dynamic web sites created solely in Flash 4. And now, sites are appearing that exploit the even more sophisticated ActionScript capabilities of Flash 5.

A key goal of ActionScript was approachability; it was vital that ActionScript be easy to use for non-programmers. Rather than present a blank script-editing window, we created a visual, easily understandable interface in Flash 4 for adding interactivity to Flash movies. The simplicity of Flash 4 ActionScript made it easy to learn and kept the Flash Player small, a vital consideration.

The Flash Player is crafted to download quickly even over low-bandwidth connections. ...