flash as3_history

It was in 1996 that the Flash adventure started when the company Macromedia bought a small company FutureWave the author of a vectorial animation software called Future Splash Animator.

Future Splash Animator launched in April 1996

Originally developed to animate vectorial content on the Internet, Future Splash Animator already integrated Flash basics in terms of animation but at that time didn’t yet have any programming language associated with it. Macromedia renamed it Flash 1.0 in 1996 but it wasn’t until 1999 that the idea of programming officially appeared with the launch of Flash 4.

The documentation of the time didn’t yet talk about ActionScript but simply actions. Thanks to these it was possible to add advanced behavior to buttons and other graphic objects. Numerous designers who were at ease with programming started to develop more advanced behavior and started to exchange scripts via forums and other community platforms. Flash thus experienced an explosion of popularity and quickly became an advanced animation tool capable of producing different types of interactive content such as websites, games and multimedia applications.

It was in 2001 that Actionscript was officially launched in Flash 5. The idea of pointed syntax was integrated into the language in accordance with EMCAScript specifications for the first time. We will come back to this idea in the next chapter called Language and API.

Macromedia then developed their latest version 3.0 of the ActionScript language in order to offer optimal performance using their new creation - Flex. Two years later, Macromedia found themselves being bought by Adobe and Actionscript 3 was integrated into Flash in 2007 with the launch of Flash CS3.

In order to respond to the demands of the community for an ActionScript language that was more structured, Macromedia developed a new version of Actionscript and integrated it in 2003 into Flash MX 2004 under the name Actionscript 2.0. This new version responded to the needs of developers offering a non-procedural object-oriented language as it was in ActionScript 1.0. At the time Macromedia made the choice of a soft launch and propsed a supple ActionScript 2.0 allowing developers and designers to code both Actionscript 1.0 and 2.0 in the same project. This new version of the language didn’t please the purist developers but allowed beginner developers to gently migrate towards an object-oriented development.