Marking Occurrences

Tokenizing ActionScript 3 for fun and profit

David Zuckerman — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 21:48:49 +0000

Be careful what you wish for. Seriously. Back in university, I thought compilers and programming languages were the coolest things ever. Well, at least in the Computer Science department. And for the last few years, I’ve been working on tooling for ActionScript 3 focusing on, as luck would have it, languages and compilers. While AS3 might [...]

Code Model is going places

David Zuckerman — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 09:24:40 +0000

I posted a while ago that I was working on the next-generation Flash/Flex compiler at Adobe. After taking some time off, traveled a lot and moving half-way across the globe from San Francisco, I’ve started working again. And then I remembered I had a blog! Perhaps the most exciting piece to report is that Code Model: [...]

We shipped. Now what?

David Zuckerman — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 10:26:49 +0000

So the new version of Flash Builder 4 has been officially released. It has a number of great new features and it’s a huge step forward from Flex Builder 3. A new version of the Code Model APIs have also been released. This is a pretty serious step forward in terms of the API. In [...]

Holy Crap! There’s a lot of new stuff in Flash Builder…

David Zuckerman — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 07:14:55 +0000

Seriously, there are so many new features and enhancements in Flash Builder, it would be impossible to mention them all. Instead, to really get a taste of what’s new in Flash Builder, you really need to watch the videos. Since I work on language features (primarily the language model), I was lucky enough to demo [...]

Flex Builder’s wikipedia entry is a little harsh

David Zuckerman — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:09:02 +0000

I was just surfing wikipedia and thought I’d see what the internets have to say about Flex Builder. Turns out, we’ve made someone very, very angry. They don’t feel like Flex Builder provides anything beyond code hinting, and provides “virtually no functionality to write ActionScript/MXML code.” Not exactly an unbiased, accurate view of reality. As [...]

Help us decide where to go with Flex 4

David Zuckerman — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 20:06:56 +0000

Internally on the Flex team, we’ve been talking about how to partition the new Flex 4 features within the existing Flex 3 SDK. Flex 4 introduces new Buttons, CheckBoxes, etc that must live happily with components from Flex 3. And, Flex 4 also introduces new “language” features, like the new states syntax. As an example, [...]

Listen to me rant about ActionScript, part 3

David Zuckerman — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:05:52 +0000

So after a three week vacation, I think I’m finally ready to dive into a few other fun pieces of ActionScript. And really, what better place to start than local variable hoisting. In Java and C++, local variables are scoped per block, starting at the beginning of a function. Each set of curly braces corresponds [...]

Flex Builder Protip: Import missing imports

David Zuckerman — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:18:03 +0000

Let’s say you’ve just pasted in a snippet of code, or loaded a file that is missing imports. When you compile, you get errors and you’re stuck importing each definition by hand. Flex Builder provides a bit of a hidden feature here to help you import your missing types: next to each type that is [...]

Flex Builder Protip: Jump to matching braces

David Zuckerman — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 23:06:05 +0000

A feature forever undocumented in Flex Builder is the ability to jump directly to matching braces. To use it, simply place your cursor to the left on an { or the right of an } and press Ctrl/Cmd+shift+P. For the JDT nerds out there, it’s the same key command. Enjoy!

Listen to me rant about ActionScript, part 2

David Zuckerman — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 06:22:17 +0000

So we all know people build some amazing things using ActionScript: it’s a flexible language that provides some syntactic sugar to make developer’s lives easier. That sugar, however, gives me, umm, toothaches, some of which I talked about already. So now, I’ll rant about some other idiosyncrasies of AS3 that make it an interesting language [...]