2008-08-15
ES4 is dead, long live Actionscript
Some days ago the JavaScript standards body announced that they will focus work on ES3.1 with full collaboration of all parties, and target two interoperable implementations by early next year. They also announced to collaborate on the next step beyond ES3.1, which will include syntactic extensions but which will be more modest than ES4 in both semantic and syntactic innovation. Further they said that some of the ES4 proposals have been deemed unsound for the Web, and are off the table for good: packages, namespaces and early binding.
What does that mean?
On the one side we have Adobe that proposed the ECMAScript4 standard [Actionscript 3] and also provided the virtual machine Tamarin. Until today ECMAScript4 was nothing more than a draft proposal.
On the other side we have f.e. Microsoft with it's .NET that never accepted the ES4 proposal.
More companies participating are Google, Opera, Yahoo!, Mozilla, .#*~
Now after a meeting in Oslo the committee, which split 2 years ago, agreed to work together on ES3.1.
Adobe's reply basically looked like this:
ActionScript remains a innovative superset of ECMAScript, and we will not remove functionality. If you're an ActionScript developer, your skills continue to be safe and grow in demand. We will continue to evolve the language to meet customer and developer needs. We do plan to continue to work on ensuring ActionScript is aligned with what standards emerge.
Here're some voices from the Flash and Dojo community:
The future of Actionscript | JavaScript Stalled, AS3 Orphaned - Microsoft to Blame? | Ru Roh! Adobe Screwed By EcmaScript Standards Agreement | ActionScript 3 and ECMAScript 4 | Thoughts on Harmony | Harmony Fallout
So in short: Nothing really changed right now and I hope this will not have too much influence on the future direction of AS3 [ although I think Adobe is moving too fast ]. Unity is more important than features. As a developer I believe that JavaScript developers and ActionScript developers are not much different. Having the same language would be great!
2 Comments
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phew … i already started sweating when i started to read ;) … good update, thx
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