[OSM-talk] Contributing to PL2 (was: Re: Thoughts on OSM design, and looking forward and back)

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemeD.net
Thu Mar 11 11:56:05 GMT 2010


Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> Is it worse or better than the PL1 codebase ?:)

Do you want a serious answer to that? :)

The codebase is a lot more "proper": there's packages and  
private/protected variables and all of that. You could probably write  
unit tests for it if you like that sort of thing. Basically, AS3 is a  
much more rigorously structured language and P2 is a much more  
rigorously structured codebase.

P2 also has the advantage that there is no live mode. It's difficult  
to overestimate how much this simplifies the code.

P2 itself is a Flex app (the Adobe UI framework) so you can just throw  
in dialogues, menus and all of that, whereas in AS1 there's no  
framework so all of P1's UI code is custom-written.

I think the main disadvantage of AS3 over AS1 is its verbosity: some  
things that take one line to do in AS1 take three or four in AS3.  
Loaders and event listeners are the main examples. AS3's display list  
is IMO harder to work with: I always liked the way that you could just  
traverse the movieclip hierarchy in AS1. Oh, and Flex is nowhere near  
as fast as Ming!

cheers
Richard





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