> It is indeed FUD. If it was meant to be FUD, I wouldn't have call it this name ;)
> Reality is that what we have done with AS3 is lock > into an ECMA standard. We have co-written AS3 along with other members > of the technical committee, including Microsoft, Mozilla, etc. So, for > better or for worse the evolution of AS is now defined by the ECMA > committee. You will see another version of it when Firefox releases a > browser with "JavaScript 2" next year. That is the same thing now as > AS3. You can look at what is still planned for the standard (which > should be approved in a year) and you will be able to see a bunch of > features that will make it into the next versions of AS. So you have > both a roadmap for AS as well as knowledge that the evolution is now > pretty controlled. We made a big leap with AS3, but we did that to meet > the standard, not to create a new proprietary language. I don't see how a hundreds of pages ECMA specifications answer to the developer concerns. As long as there is only one closed source AS3 compiler, I don't see the value of having a formal specification, except maybe for the language evolution that will not be defined by Adobe only. But that raises other concerns, like the inability in the future to add features that would please Flash users. It's like everything has been decided from the beginning with no freedom to adapt to users wishes. I didn't meant to oppose AS3 and haXe from the beginning, but some people are expressing concerns with haXe adoption so I'm trying to answer them. While I understand their concerns, I don't find them very rational. For example, let's compare several real-world cases : A bug in the compiler : With AS3 you would have to report it, then wait several months until the next Flex minor or major update (in that case you will have to pay the upgrade). With haXe bugs are fixed almost as soon as reported and new version available on a regular basis. Watch MTASC process as an example. Long-term : I'm sure haXe is here to stay. You want to know why ? Then read this post (http://ncannasse.free.fr/?p=64). You will learn that my company NEVER used MTASC. We did MTASC for the community. That means also that I couldn't work so much on it on my daily work time. This is not the case with haXe. All our projects from now are based on haXe and we have now several people developing haXe-based websites everyday. This is a big difference, in particular since it allows me to develop haXe as part of my daily work. Our websites are all very long-term projects, so we will need to maintain them for several years. More importantly, we don't need to make any money from haXe in order to develop it further. Adobes comes with AS3 and Flex2. Theses are new products, targeting a different public that traditional Flash users. What if they can't reach the number of users necessary to sustain the project further ? We if they change their strategy depending on the market ? I'm not saying that it will happen, I'm just saying that users should be as much concerned by that than they are by haXe now. Especialy since in a few years there was already 3 versions of the AS language, everytime with huge changes. And you know, haXe is Open Source. That's a huge difference. Whatever happen in the future, the haXe sources will still be available to the community. This creates a very strong security for the users, since if they need it, they can always hire someone that can will reuse theses sources to develop the language further. It's also an Open process of language design, were people are welcome to submit ideas and proposals, some being integrated quite quickly in the language. Again, this has nothing to do with AS3 or Adobe in particular, but I'm comparing here an open source software model with a closed source one. Nicolas _______________________________________________ osflash mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org
