The Great Divide
Posted on May 2nd, 2008In my quest to become an Actionscript Guru, I’ve familiarized myself with some of the other tools out there to write Actionscript in other than Flash. Thanks to the free Flex SDK, great tools like FlashDevelop have risen up. On the outside it seems that Actionscript is really starting to open up. Think of the available Open Source code online now compared to a year and a half ago. It all seems so warm and peaceful. But then you hit a wall. Its the wall that’s creating a division in the Actionscript community. Have fun writing your code in Flex using the mx packages. Too bad Flash can’t support it.
Wait back it up. WTF!!! Am I alone is thinking that this is the most ridiculous thing I have ever come across?
Adobe wants to push Actionscript even further then it’s come already, by opening it up to other languages, but they should first go back to the drawing board and create a single package that is universal no matter what IDE you program in. At the moment, we are faced with the divergence of a single development community into two smaller opposing ones. You have your Flex developers on one side and your Flash Developers on the other. Who will win? Well why is there even a dividing point? We shouldn’t be faced with this issue.
The guys I work with are constantly having to spend time developing workarounds so that their software and tools are compatible with both Flex and Flash. Imagine how much time companies would save if Adobe just made this a null point? Sure they know of the issue… Do they plan to fix it? This should be higher on their agenda then expanding the Flash platform beyond Actionscript. Any thoughts?
