The Top Ten Open Source Actionscript Tools
Posted on April 5, 2007 by Tuesday Creative
Tech
Everybody loves a good countdown! Flash designers and developers especially love a countdown of the best open-source Actionscript projects. The term “best” is a squishy amalgam of the measures of community support, design and technology, application in the real world and overall usefulness. Visit OSFlash, the de-facto hub for open source flash projects, to see more about these projects and many, many more that are terrific but didn’t make the cut for this countdown.
10. FLVTool2
http://www.inlet-media.de/flvtool2/
The Flash 8 Video Encoder is the only encoder that creates reliable cue-points in flash video files. Sorenson Squeeze (and others) encode smaller files with much higher quality. What do you do? Manipulate your FLV’s metadata after encoding with this simple but effective tool.
9. Xray
http://osflash.org/xray
A “snapshot viewer” of the current state of a Flash application. You can get instant information about every object, every property, with little to no impact on the application itself. While some may find it slightly complicated to setup initially, once you have it running it becomes an indispensable debugging tool.
8. Actionstep
http://www.actionstep.org/
A complete replacement for the buggy, poor quality V2 components in the Flash IDE based on the thoroughly documented NextStep/OpenStep/GNUStep/Cocoa “Application Kit”. If you are developing Flash projects in an entirely open-source environment this is a solid choice for components considering that Adobe’s license does not permit the use of its components without a licensed copy of the Flash IDE.
7. AFLAX
http://www.aflax.org/
Combines Ajax and Flash to give JavaScript access to Adobe’s Flash runtime— including graphics, networking, video and camera support, without ever using the Flash IDE.
6. SWFMill
http://www.swfmill.org/
A command line XML to SWF to XML processor using SWFML, an XML dialect closely modeled after the SWF format. Compile asset libraries with images and fonts or even complete SWFs wtih SWFMill and MTASC.
5. AsUnit
http://www.asunit.org/
The only open source unit test framework that supports AS 2.0 and 3.0 development without binding you to any particular development tools. If your projects are complex enough to merit unit testing, AsUnit with its platform independence, Flash IDE integration and Mozilla XUL UI is the obvious choice.
4. FlashDevelop
http://www.flashdevelop.org/
An AS 2.0 and 3.0 script editor built on .NET (so it is Windows only, sorry!). It’s quick and painless to setup and very easy to use with low overhead as an external editor for the Flash IDE or as a complete open source development environment. With features like seamless SWFMill and MTASC integration, AS 3.0 syntax checking, AS 3.0 & MXML completion, and Flex2 compiler integration, it’s truly a powerful development environment with no hassles.
3. Eclipse
http://www.eclipse.org/
Eclipse is a kind of universal tool platform built with Java— an open extensible IDE for anything at all. I use it as the universal development environment for writing everything, Actionscript, XML, XHTML, Javascript, PHP. It’s open architecture, long development history, massive contributor list and status as a sophisticated, mature product makes it the development environment of choice for countless developers in dozens of languages. In fact, it’s so good Adobe FlexBuilder2 is built directly on top of it.
2. MTASC
http://www.mtasc.org/
Without question, the worlds best Actionscript compiler: immensely extensible, lightning fast and very scriptable. Many of the other projects on this list depend on MTASC for compiling.
1.Fuse
http://www.mosessupposes.com/fuse
The most robust and efficient AS 2.0 tween engine in the world, an animation sequencer with highly compact, legible syntax, very easy yet powerful handling of Flash 8 BitmapFilters and the ability to tween any numeric property of any class, not just MovieClip. Were this list broken down by types of merit, this project would be near the top for technical achievement, application in the real world, and number one for usability and practicality. I honestly don’t know how I ever lived without Fuse. It was also recently announced that Fuse would be rebuilt from the ground up for AS 3.0. Woot!
What does “open source” mean anyway?
Open source is a buzzword that is often misused today. Open source is more than just accessible source code. Open source projects by definition should follow the following guidelines (abridged from http://opensource.org/docs/osd):
- The code should be freely redistributable as part or a larger project. Nobody should be restricted from giving away or selling products built with or on top of it.
- The project must include editable, freely accessible, freely downloadable source code.
- Anyone may create a derivative version of the project and they may redistribute it under freely. If the license does not allow modifications of the original source code it must allow “patch files” to modify it at build time.
- No person, group, field of work can be discriminated against. Literally anyone can use and modify an open source project.
- The software license must be independent of any particular product, technology or development style. It must take an absolutely neutral stance on how it is used.
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