One of the new ActionScript features included in the Flash Player 10 Public Beta is the inclusion of a Vector class. Essentially, the Vector class is a typed Array, and in addition to ensuring your collection is type safe, can also provide (sometimes significant) performance improvements over using an Array. Using the Vector class is pretty simple, and very similar to using an Array. In fact, the Vector class contains all of the same methods as the Array class.

There are quite a few security changes in the upcoming Flash Player 10, some of which may require changes to content or policy files to ensure that content continues to work. Below are a couple of articles that discuss some of the security changes in Flash Player 10: Understanding the security changes in Flash Player 10 beta http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/fplayer10_security_changes.html Working with policy file changes in Flash Player 9 and Flash Player 10 beta

I have been having a lot of fun hanging out in the Flash Platform Chat room I set up last week. However, it can be a little bit of a hassle to connect to the room depending on which Jabber / XMPP client you are using. I am working on an AIR app for the chat that will make it super simple, but until then you will have to use your own client.

The title pretty much sums it up. Is anyone using ActionScript 2 as the root content of an AIR application? or know or any AIR apps built with ActionScript 2 at the root content? Note that Im not talking about AIR applications that are built in ActionScript 3 that contain AS2, but rather AIR applications that has its main root content as AS2 content. Also, if you are using AS2 content in an AS3 or HTML based AIR application, what are you using it for.

I have set up a permanent test group chat room on the Flash Platform community chat server. This can be used if you need to test your chat client, or if you are building an XMPP / Jabber client and need a remote room to test on. Here is the info: Server : mikechambers.com Port : 5222 Room name: test Server : conference.mikechambers.com You can find more info on the server here.

I posted some code the other day that showed how to use the XIFF AS3 Library to connect to an XMPP server and join a group chat room. Below is an slightly modified example that shows how to login anonymously, and connect to a room. import org.jivesoftware.xiff.conference.Room; import org.jivesoftware.xiff.core.JID; import org.jivesoftware.xiff.core.XMPPSocketConnection; import org.jivesoftware.xiff.events.LoginEvent; import org.jivesoftware.xiff.events.RoomEvent; import org.jivesoftware.xiff.events.XIFFErrorEvent; private var connection:XMPPSocketConnection; private function onCreationComplete():void { connection = new XMPPSocketConnection(); connection.useAnonymousLogin = true; connection.

As you have probably heard by now, the ECMAScript committee has decided to halt work on ECMAScript 4 in favor of an incremental updated to JavaScript (know as ECMAScript 3.1). Im not going to go into the details of what happened (you can find good discussions of it here, here and here), but I did want to make a quick post and discuss how this affects ActionScript 3. It doesn’t.

We have been discussing the need for an AIR specific version of the as3corelib library, which would contain useful APIs for working with Adobe AIR. However, instead of creating a new library, I have added an AIR package to as3corelib which will contain AIR specific APIs. Right now, there is only one class added, a FileTarget for the Flex Log framework, but I expect we will be adding more over time.

If you have been in the Flash community for a while, then you may remember a chat app that I worked on for Macromedia Central, named “Central Dev Chat”. This was a decent chat client, but the thing I liked about it the most, was that it provided an easy way for the community to hang out and chat about the Flash community and development. Since then, I have tried a couple of solutions to bring a persistent chat back (including IRC) but haven’t found anything that is easy enough to use and administer.

As I mentioned earlier, I am starting to build an XMPP chat client for the XMPP / Jabber community server I set up today. I am using the XIFF ActionScript 3 library. While the library seems to be pretty solid, there is not a ton of documentation for it right now. Here is a simple example that shows how to connect to an XMPP / Jabber server, join a room, and send a message to the room.