Flashmech

That’s basically my concern after reading this article by Hank Williams that The EcmaScript language standards body has killed the draft 4.0 version two days back.

What will Adobe do now with its (suddenly proprietary) ActionScript? If AS3 is now no longer base on an open standard, and if Adobe wants to adopt another standard, will it mean that AS4 will be completely different?

If indeed it’s going to be different, how many developers is Adobe going to risk alienating, or worse, losing? The number of products that Adobe owns revolving around the language is also massive, and that only means a total rewrite for them. But that’s just the centre of the ripple.

There are countless web and desktop applications that are using the Flash Platform out there, namely Flash, Flex and AIR. While I’m pretty assured that if Adobe moves on to another standard, that a new AVM3 will take care of the next generation AS4, businesses with these applications as their core is going to suffer.

The reason? Well we’ve seen how AS2 wasn’t able to leverage some of the latest advantages of the additions to AS3. If businesses with big enterprise applications don’t move on to AS4, they are in the risk of losing those advantages, whatever they might be. However, if they do, it only means a total rewrite of their applications, spending additional resources because of this.

I should really stop being a paranoid. I really want to trust Adobe to make a wise decision. Read the article and contemplate what’s going and what’s not going to be.