I've been a Java programmer for years and my wife is a Flash/Flex developer. As a result, I often get insights into AS3 and Flex, and I have to say that I'm very impressed.

The language features, like custom namespaces (linked to XML style URNs) is very nice. The Flash 9 VM is also very impressive and very fast.

The Flex DOM and runtime are very easy to use, making Swing look like a solution to the wrong problem.

The only major downside, I see, is a lack of threading support in the VM/language.

My language of choice is normally Python, but out of curiosity I started evaluating ActionScript 3, along with the Flex SDK, a couple of weeks ago. I hadn't seen previous versions of ActionScript, so I had no idea what to expect, but on the whole I've been pleasantly surprised, as it's quite an expressive language.

What really does it for me though is the library. It makes it very easy to put together a good looking, responsive user interface. I shall be closely monitoring the ActionScript / Flex world as it looks like it is going places.

So ActionScript 3 has "object-oriented features you're familiar from Java, such as extending classes and implementing interfaces" instead of "prototype-based classes ... In Flex, we hide that because we prefer the other style of object-orientedness: creating classes and extending them in the typical Java-like way."

It seem that there is paradigm-shift intended for the new JavaScript language: from 'Lisp in C's Clothing' (http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.html) to Java - Script.

I have used it a little. Here are my essential stats: Without type declarations, it is nearly as compact as Ruby (half the size of C++). Running in Flash player 9, it is 75 times slower than C++.

Optional type declaration is a neat feature. But I wonder if there was any way that 'null-restriction' could have been worked into it. It should be possible to stop things from being null.

The Flex UI lib is quite easy and simple. But support for long-running work would be beneficial (and probably not implying full multi-threading support). Maybe it is todo. At present it is like old non-pre-emptive Windows -- algorithms must be manually factored into small executional slices. That can be rather awkward. And in direct conflict with the developer's natural inclination to have things easy!

I have to wonder: when type annotations are omitted then Flex uses dynamic type checking, but why doesn't it simply infer the types?

hello,

i would like to know if how is it possible to call java class from AS3? im looking for something like flash remoting in AS2. thanks