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1 This excerpt is protected by copyright law. It is your responsibility to obtain permissions necessary for any proposed use of this material. Please direct your inquiries to Adobe Developer Library, a copublishing partnership between O Reilly Media Inc.,and Adobe Systems, Inc., is the authoritative resource for developers using Adobetechnologies. These comprehensive resources offer learning solutions to help devel-opers create cutting-edge interactive web applications that can reach virtually any-one on any top-quality books and innovative online resources covering the latest tools forrich-Internet application development, theAdobe Developer Librarydelivers experttraining straight from the source.

2 Topics include actionscript , Adobe Flex , AdobeFlash , and Adobe Acrobat .Get the latest news about books, online resources, and more ..xiPart IGetting Started 1 Chapter 1 actionscript Overview ..3 What Is actionscript Flash Platform ..7 Procedural Versus Object-Oriented Programming ..8 The Document Class ..9 Legacy Code Compatibility ..11 Chapter 2 Core Language Fundamentals ..13 Miscellaneous Basics ..15 Variables and Data Types ..16 Conditionals ..17 Loops ..20 Arrays ..23 Functions ..24 Custom Objects ..26this ..27 Absolute versus Relative Addresses ..27 ContentsContentsviPart IIGraphics and Interaction 29 Chapter 3 Properties, Methods, and Events ..31 Inherited Attributes.

3 32 Properties ..32 Events ..34 Methods ..39 Event Propagation ..41 Frame and Timer Events ..43 Removing Event Listeners ..46 Chapter 4 The Display List ..49 The Sum of Its Parts ..50 Adding and Removing Children ..58 Managing Object Names, Positions, and Data Types ..63 Changing the Display List Hierarchy ..65A Dynamic Navigation Bar ..68 Chapter 5 Timeline Control ..71 Playhead Movement ..71 Frame Labels ..74 Frame Rate ..81A Simple Site or Application Structure ..82 Chapter 6 OOP ..87 Classes ..89 Inheritance ..93 Composition ..99 Encapsulation ..103 Polymorphism ..106 Navigation Bar Revisited ..111 ContentsviiChapter 7 Motion ..115 Basic Movement ..116 Geometry and Trigonometry.

4 119 Physics ..125 Programmatic Tweening ..130 Timeline Animation Recreations ..131 Particle Systems ..137 Chapter 8 Drawing with Vectors ..141 The Graphics Class ..142 The Geometry Package ..149 The Motion Package ..1589-Slice Scaling ..159 Applied Examples ..161 Chapter 9 Drawing with Pixels ..167 Bitmap Caching ..168 The BitmapData Class ..170 Blend Modes ..177 Bitmap Filters ..180 Color Effects ..188 Image Encoding and Saving ..192 ContentsviiiPart IIIText 195 Chapter 10 Text ..197 Creating Text Fields ..198 Setting Text Field Characteristics ..198 Selecting Text ..200 Formatting Text ..202 Formatting with HTML and CSS ..206 Triggering actionscript from HTML Links ..209 Parsing Text Fields.

5 210 Loading HTML and CSS ..214 Part IVSound and Video 219 Chapter 11 Sound ..221 actionscript Sound Architecture ..222 Internal and External Sounds ..223 Playing, Stopping, and Pausing Streaming Sounds ..228 Changing Sound Volume and Pan ..229 Reading ID3 Metadata from MP3 Sounds ..231 Visualizing Sound Data ..234 Working with Microphone Sound ..236 Waveform Visualization ..239 Chapter 12 Video ..254 Full-screen Video ..258 Captions ..260 Coding Your Own Video Playback ..272 ContentsixPart VInput/Output 277 Chapter 13 Loading Assets ..279 Loading Sound and Video ..280 Loading Text ..281 Loading Display Objects ..285 Communicating Across actionscript Virtual Machines ..289 Taking a Brief Look at Security.

6 291 Chapter 14 XML and E4X ..297 Understanding XML Structure ..298 Creating an XML Object ..302 Reading XML ..303 Writing XML ..310 Deleting XML Elements ..313 Loading External XML Documents ..314 Communicating with XML Servers ..315An XML-Based Navigation System ..319 Part VIProgramming Design and Resources 331 Chapter 15 Programming Design and Resources ..333 Programming Design Methodologies ..333 Object-Oriented Design Patterns ..339 Resources ..345 Index ..3513In ThIs ChapTerWhat Is actionscript Flash PlatformProcedural Versus Object-oriented ProgrammingThe Document ClassLegacy Code CompatibilityWhat s Next?While you likely know what actionscript is and are eager to begin working with the new version, a brief overview of its development will give you some insight into its use particularly related to Flash Player and how it handles different versions of actionscript .

7 This brief introductory chapter will give you a quick look at where actionscript fits into your workflow, and will cover:What Is actionscript It s to be expected that a new version of actionscript will bring with it new features. However, this version has been written anew from the ground up and is even handled separately from previous versions of actionscript at runtime. This intentional splin-tering of Flash Player affords significant performance increases, but also brings with it limitations as to how multiple versions of actionscript Flash Platform. At the time of this writing, actionscript is the internal programming language of Flex and AIR (the Adobe Integrated Runtime application).

8 Differences in compiling and environment-specific attributes prevent every file written in actionscript from working in every aspect of the Flash Platform, but the fundamentals indeed the bulk of the language is the same Versus Object-Oriented Programming. A great deal of attention has been focused on the object-oriented programming (OOP) capabilities of actionscript , and the power and robustness of the lan-guage really shine in this area. However, you ll be happy to learn that a move to actionscript doesn t mean that you must become an expert at OOP. It is still possible to use a structured collection of functions, which characterize procedural programming, to author actionscript projects.

9 In addition, using Flash CS3, it is still possible to code in the timeline, rather than coding exclusively with external classes. If you prefer object-oriented programming, enhancements to actionscript s OOP infrastructure make it more robust and bring it more in line with the fea-tures of other important, OOP-based languages (such as Java) and make moving between such languages a bit overviewChapTer 1part I, Getting started4 What Is actionscript The Document Class. Object-oriented programming is not for everyone, but for those starting on this journey, Flash CS3 offers a simpler entrance to an OOP application by way of the Document class. An attribute of the Properties Inspector, you need only specify which external class is your starting point, and no timeline script is Code Compatibility.

10 Because actionscript cannot co-mingle with previous versions of the language in the same file, developing proj-ects that support older code is a challenge. We ll briefly introduce the issues involved, and discuss them in greater depth in a later Is actionscript the new version of Flash s internal scripting language contains much that will be familiar to users of prior versions, it s probably best to think of actionscript as entirely new, for a few simple reasons. First, a few things are quite different, such as the event model and the way assets are displayed. Second, subtle changes run throughout the language and require some atten-tion until they become second nature.