What are the best Open Source tools for developing Flash applications? What are the best places to start learning?

Question

As far as tools go, I am aware of haXe, MTASC, and swfmill. Can you offer any success or horror stories related to any of them? Are there any others that I should be investigating?

With respect to learning, the Adobe Developer Connection seems to contain decent reference materials, but the tutorials all assume that the reader is using the "Adobe Flash" product. Are there any tutorials out there targeted at Open Source users?

What are the advantages of Flash 9/ActionScript 3 versus Flash 8/ActionScript 2? Am I correct in thinking that Flash 8 is still more widely deployed than Flash 9, and better supported by the Open Source flash players?

Answer 1

Flash Develop is an awesome IDE: http://www.flashdevelop.org/wikidocs/index.php?title=Main_Page

Answer 2

Tool-wise, FlashDevelop is really good (and free). In fact, the whole osflash.org site is very impressive and thorough.

Answer 3

Another, old tool: Ming. Looks like it is still alive.

Deployment of Flash 7/8/9: see Adobe stats: Adobe Flash Player Version Penetration. Not too sure of what figures mean, though, I suppose they mean that Flash applets targeting Flash 7 have 99% penetration (ie. spawning readers from 7 to 9) while those targeting Flash 9 have 97.7% penetration, still a high figure.

Should I try and start coding for Flash, I think I will directly to at AS 3 (better OO support, better performances).

PS.: I see you mention open source players, instead. I have no idea of their penetration, but I fear it is very low.

Answer 4

"Am I correct in thinking that Flash 8 is still more widely deployed than Flash 9, and better supported by the Open Source flash players?"

There is not much point in worrying about the open source players as very few people use them. No open source player I know of supports Flash 8 - they are all version 6/7 I think. There are official Flash 9 players for Windows/Mac/Linux and various other devices support either older versions or FlashLite. Wii and PS3 for example support Flash player 7.

Answer 5

If you are going to be targeting mobile devices (or the Wii) you will probably want to stick to Flash 7.

Adobe still doesn't have a Flash 9 SDK available to those (embedded/mobile) platforms. The newest SDK is FlashLite 3 which supports Flash 8.

Anything build before or around Oct. '07 would most likely still be using the Flash 7 SDK though.

Of course, if you are only developing for Mac/Win/Linux then none of that really matters.

I've always been of the opinion that if you don't need any of the new features or bug fixes it's generally best to stick with the slightly older but more compatible versions. That applies to pretty much any development.

Answer 6

From a development standpoint - I would avoid actionscript 2 like the plague (unless it's part of your requirements of course...that is, your customer is requiring the plague).

It's old, not being actively developed (i.e. Adobe is not putting any more effort into the AS2 codebase), and most things you learn (like why the hell you have you have to use .createMovieClip() to instantiate an object) are things that will not carry over into your AS3 development.