Actionscript is a very powerful language made by macromedia. Learning actionscript can be tricky until you get your mind thinking the same way actionscript does. Actionscript is evolving at a very fast rate into a top programming language. With the release of ActionScript 3.0 excepted in the next few months its important to get use to good 2.0 practices.

So what are correct 2.0 practices?

Correct 2.0 practices would include strict data typing all variables, function return values and values excepted. Strict data typing can also be used in classes which is another great 2.0 practice. OOP is Object Orientated Programming; OOP is like an advanced external function. Languages such as Java are purely OOP all programming done is Java uses classes. The advantages to classes are they can be re-used time and time again. They can be extended with additional classes, They can be shared and there great for organization. Once you start programming things over 1000 lines of code things can get very complicated and some times impossible because you simply dont know what goes next. This is where classes come in classes with organize your entire site into manageable sections. An example of using classes would be a members system. You could create a members class in that class could contain a signup function that registers the users checked for blank values and further validation. You could then have a login function which checked the users name and password against the database and returned a value of true if the username and password supplied match that of the database. OOP really is the future of programming without OOP you will struggle with medium to large sized projects. Another huge advantage to OOP is when working in a team you can simple work on a class each and modify or extend another persons class. Where as without OOP would have to look through maybe 10,000 lines of code to find 5 lines of code that needed modifying. Good 2.0 practices would also be using movieclips instead of buttons. Movieclips have far more functionality than buttons ever could actionscript 2.0 can do just about anything to movieclips change the color, size, shape, movement, the list goes on and on. Buttons really are the past the future is movieclips.

How to define strict data typing

For example to define a variable as a number we would use:

var - to signal what we are defining is a variable.

thename - anything you like to define the specific variable.

:number - the data type this could be a number, Boolean or string.

= - to define what will be inside the variable.

4 - the value that sites inside the variable.

; - just to end the line of code

So in full

var thename:Number = 4;

String and boolean would look as follows.

var thestring:String = hello;

var theboolean:Boolean = true;

If you wanted to make something happen when a user clicked a movie clip the correct 2.0 code to use would be:

nameofthemovieclip.onPress = function ():Void {

//what you would like to happen in here.

}

We define the function as void so that actionscript does not except a retuned value.

If we were to put expected values inside the function we would use:

myfunc = function (mynumber:Number):Void{

//code goes here

}

So remember to always use correct 2.0 practices and your code will shine.