ECMA Snappin'

I remember when AS3 first came out they stated that it was based off of ES4 "proposed" standards. Now I thought to myself "proposed", wow risky. If they were going to put all their eggs in one basket using a "proposed" standard would have me stressin'.

Today the Flash and ECMA communities have been a buzz because of a decision made at the latest Oslo meeting to merge the two groups to focus on ECMA 3.1 development. Creating Harmony.

So the big question running through most ActionScript developers is "Where does that leave AS3". Now, I can't possibly see namespaces and packages going away, which is something that ES 3.1 has removed. I will say that it does leave for an interesting future for Adobe. They have been great at adopting standards and opening their technologies to allow future growth. Now with such a change of events will they reformat their language to follow the new standard or keep going with it's already great leap forward.

I tried rounding up all the articles I read about this here. I am nowhere near a ECMA expert but I found it helpful to read over these sites and hear what the experts have to say. Hopefully it will help you understand it a bit more.


http://drawlogic.com/2008/08/14/es4-is-now-es31-es4-is-no-more-merges-with-es3-spec/

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2008-August/003400.html

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es3.x-discuss/2008-August/000469.html

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2008/08/javascript_stal.html

http://whydoeseverythingsuck.com/2008/08/ru-roh-adobe-screwed-by-ecmascript.html

http://joshblog.net/2008/08/13/how-will-ecmascript-harmony-affect-actionscript-3/