A milestone for the open source command line ActionScript 2.0 compiler has been reached. Nicolas Cannasse of Motion-Twin announced yesterday that that MTASC 1.0 has officially been released. It includes compilation support for Macromedia's V2 Components.
You can find more information and the download link on the project page.
MTASC is a way to compile ActionScript class files to a .swf file without the need for the Flash Authoring Environment. The speed of compilation is amazingly fast, usually around 0 seconds.
It's definitely worth a look. MTASC runs cross platform, so you Linux developers can compile ActionScript 2 to .swf on your native machine.
3 Comments
It's very promissing and I don't try it yet but I think that in order to use macromedia v2 components you must to create a fla with the components with the MM authoring tool (as you can see in the MTASC docs)...it seems that we need Flash MX 2004 yet but it's a great beggining.
Posted by: Carlos Rovira | January 27, 2005 12:06 PM
Yup, to use the v2 components, you'll actually need Flash to get them into the .swf at first. However, after that you can use MTASC and repa the benefits of it's fast compile times.
Additionally, this is great for team environments. You can have a designer create necessary graphics and ship the .swf off to a coder who can use MTASC to inject the classes into it. The coder then, doesn't need to use Flash at all.
Posted by: darron | January 27, 2005 12:52 PM
Seems to be great! It's just a pity that it doesn't support with() syntax! What do all AS-Coders have against with()??
Posted by: sascha | January 27, 2005 3:12 PM