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About two days ago, I was doing some research on getting Edit Plus 2 to fire up mxmlc.exe. I read the docs and in my opinion it was very minimal when it came to do a simple Hello World. What was positive about that experience was that I understand the numerous compiler options and I understand how mxmlc.exe looks for {appName}-config.xml to reading an XML file containing all the compiler options.

Then I came across an excellent tutorial by Senocular who’ve I seen in the past post often on the ActionScript.org forum. It’s about 19 pages which makes for a nice softcopy walkthrough of how to get up and running with the mxmlc FREE compiler. Here’s a quick summary…

Fun with mxmlc.exe

• Drag and Drop your .as files onto mxmlc.exe and it will output a .swf
• Overview of compiler options and their aliases
• .BAT file script to help make .swf’s

Quick AS3 primer from the perspective of an experienced AS2 coder

• Sprite instead of MovieClip.
• Display Objects Hierarchy (no more depths)
• Drawing API (draw on a graphic property rather than on a MovieClip)
• Embed SWF assets and instantiate them like classes
• Event Handling (an intermediate example)
• Package and Class structures
  • “Helper classes” remain outside of a package block but are exclusively available to all classes defined in .as file.
  • “package functions” are defined as a property of a package and are not a property of any class. trace() is a good example of this
• Visibility modifiers: public, private, protected and internal
• override: This keyword lets you customize super class methods. Like you could overwrite the function body for trace() with your own method.
• const/final: Make commit variables and classes respectively as concrete constants
• Data typing: You can use * as a data type to make the type as a Wild Card (useful for making the compiler happy)
• int/uint: New integer data types are optimized.
• “in” keyword: The syntax has changed so that it’s flexible enough to be used in ways outside of a for loop conditional.

I’ve come across all of this information before in the past but this is the first time I’ve seen it in a nice and tidy all-in-one place. Great read!

http://www.senocular.com/?id=1.354

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 29th, 2006 at 3:45 pm and is filed under MXML/AS3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.