Comments on: A$ugar: Syntactic sugar for ActionScript 3

By: Sean Givan

Sean Givan — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 17:28:52 +0000

Well, I’ll say this.. I certainly wouldn’t mind if you released a version of Ouija, even if it didn’t have all the polish and features you were hoping for in v1.0.

By: admin

admin — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 06:50:39 +0000

@John
Thanks for your comment. To tell you the truth, the AS3 port of Ouija has been done for some time. I’ve been playing with it off and on since it’s completion and at the moment I’m trying to build a declarative UI DSL on top of it as well as some features that would allow it to interop with AS3 better. One of the things I’ve been doing lately is embedding scheme code directly into my AS3 by sticking it into a literal XML object using the cdata tag. As far as releasing it I’m still torn, I think about it every once in a while, but wind up deciding to hold off and work on it some more. I also think about releasing the source for the AS2 version, but figure that anyone that wants it bad enough has already decompiled the SWF.

By: John Pallister

John Pallister — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 15:50:11 +0000

Very cool! I agree, after doing a bit of Lisp I now see the value in brevity when you’re sketching out ideas. And it’s great to see you’re overcoming your aversion to AS3…

How’s the port of Ouija to AS3 coming along? Are you still planning to release the source at some stage?

Cheers, John :^P

By: admin

admin — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:34:39 +0000

@NOJ,
I’ve been thinking about working in the tweening stuff but I haven’t yet figured out a good way to work in the syntax. Possibly another prefix for a variable say .$x would invoke the tweening for the variable with the option of additional overloading for transition and timing. I’d be more than happy to hear any ideas anyone has in regards to this.

By: noj

noj — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 06:01:54 +0000

well i use flex builder as my primary coding IDE, and i really love the code completion feature. with proxies the disadvantage is that IDE’s are unable to provide code completion and you end up making silly mistakes that sometimes compile, and if you don’t test your app rigourously you end up creating bugs. The same applies to jquery, because the $ can do everything sometimes you may make an error and it just fails silently.

but the way you use the $ is pretty useful. adding the tweening libraries to it would make my prototyping life way easier.

By: Robert Penner

Robert Penner — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 02:28:31 +0000

Your creativity in creating a simpler DSL is inspiring. I probably would never think of using Proxy like that.

By: admin

admin — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 03:41:40 +0000

@Jim,
First, let me say that I’ve been using this with a very small team and don’t think I’d use it with anything much bigger (although I wouldn’t want to work with a team that is any larger).

Second, I have found that this does provide the most value when I’m rapid prototyping. I guess when writing large apps that have already been planned, the difference between writing 3 lines and writing 10 isn’t really a big deal, but when you are sketching out ideas in code, the less lines it takes you to express a single thought the better off you are.

Lastly, I think this example is just glimpse of what you can do with the Proxy object. I can see someone coming along with something that makes AS3 even more verbose, requiring maybe 20 lines to express something as simple as drawing a square that fires a function when clicked. The key here would be that you would be making it much harder for a crappy programmer to screw up your project since the amount of code they would have to write would be even that much more.

By: jim

jim — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:30:18 +0000

cool, but i really like how AS3 is more verbose and while this “sugar” maybe handy to an independent developer, i don’t see this working in a multi developer environment.