O'Reilly Open Source Convention - August 1-5, 2005

Session
MTASC: Opening the Flash Platform
Nicolas Cannasse, CTO, Motion-Twin

Track: Emerging Topics
Date: Thursday, August 4th, 2005
Time: 10:45am - 11:30am
Location: Portland 252
The Flash SWF file formats have been popular for a long time now, with Macromedia Flash Player being installed on most of users browsers. Recently, with introduction of ActionScript2 language--including a Java-like type system--Macromedia is enabling more serious developments, known as Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

A lot of tools are now able to export graphics in SWF file format, but an open source solution for writing the code glue was missing.

This is now fixed with release of MTASC, Motion-Twin ActionScript2 Compiler, which provides a way for the programmer to compile classes and produce SWF bytecode without the need of the Flash IDE and with unmatched speed (MTASC: "no more coffee breaks while compiling").

MTASC can also run under Linux and a lot of other operating systems where the Flash IDE is not available.

This talk focuses on the history of MTASC, issues that were met in making it compatible, future improvments of the compiler, and more generally about ways to open the Flash platform.

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