Actionscript 3 support

Here we can write about ideas for developing AS3 support and gather information that might be useful from around the web.

Code Highlighting

The first step is to build an editor with code coloring and see how we can manage not to mix up AS2 and AS3 support for the .as extension. Perhaps simply detecting the "package {" statement at the beginning of a file would be enough to be sure it is an as3 file ?

AS3 Antlr Grammar

David Holroyd has further developed Martin Schnabel’s original AS3 grammar in his Meta-AS project. We should look at that and see how useful it is. It uses ANTLR3 and is certainly a good reference (island grammars for docs, regex and xml literals). But we might take the grammar out of its context and rewrite some parts to generate custom model classes. I'd be happy to make the ANTLR grammar into a separate project if that would mean you could reuse it directly, and you could probably supply a custom TreeAdapter? implementation to generate ASDT-specific custom model classes without needing to modify the grammar directly -- Dave 2007-07-19

That's true, thank you for the offer. i will contact you when we get to this point. one problem: what if we want some custom code (e.g. for error recovery) in the grammar? we will certainly use metaas, but we might need to fork it at some point -- mb0

Ideas

Extract shared code base into plugins org.asdt.{core,editor,wizards,model,etc.} and language specific classes and implementations into plugins org.asdt.{core,editor,wizards,model,etc.}.{as2,as3}. With a little abstraction madness we could structure the code and avoid code duplication.

We can use one editor and configure it for different file types ticket:39.

When we change to an emf model (ticket:40) we can set up a generic base model or just a set of common interfaces so we can share editor candy without loosing access to the language specific details (ticket:41).

Use the free Flex SDK for AS3, just like we use MTASC for AS2, as Builder. It goes open source end of '07. Use Flex Ant Task to match some building functionality we could have with AS2Ant ;).

AS2 to AS3 Conversion

Spikefin are developing a tool for converting AS2 to AS3. Contact Jordan for more details. Possible integration and collaboration. Project completion planned for end of February.