One cannot explain where ActionScript derived from without first focusing on Jonathan Gay and his development of Flash. In all reality Flash was inspired by lego’s. Yes lego’s, Jonathan Gay grew up playing with lego’s and he feels that the simple building blocks formed his foundation for understanding the basics of engineering design, design problems and iterative refinement.
You can read more about his Lego experiences at John Gay.
In January 1993, Jonathan Gay, Charlie Jackson, and Michelle Welsh started a small software company called FutureWave Software and created their first product, SmartSketch. A drawing application, SmartSketch was designed to make creating computer graphics as simple as drawing on paper. At first, it didn’t gain enough of a foothold in its market. As the Internet began to thrive, however, FutureWave began to realize the potential for a vector-based web animation tool that might easily challenge Macromedia’s Shockwave technology. In 1995, FutureWave modified SmartSketch by adding frame-by-frame animation features and re-released it as FutureSplash Animator on Macintosh and PC. By that time, the company had added a second programmer Robert Tatsumi, artist Adam Grofcsik, and PR specialist Ralph Mittman. The product was offered to Adobe and used by Microsoft in its early work with the Internet (MSN). In December 1996, Macromedia acquired the vector-based animation software and later released it as Flash, contracting “Future” and “Splash” of the FutureWave name. Macromedia Flash History
ActionScript came to be because of what else, a need. Adobe had Flash but Flash at this time had very limited interactive features. In the beginning programs only had the ability to (play, stop, get URL and goto and play). Yes, these few simple function had the ability to bring the World Wide Web out of the static type ages, but they couldn’t really interact with the user in the way Flash can today. These basic “actions” would eventually grow into ActionScript.
In 1994 Flash 4 was released and with it a scripting language that would radically change the face of the World Wide Web. The 1994 release came with the addition allowing the programer to create “variables, expressions, operators, if statements and loops.”
In 2000, ActionScript 1.0 was official released with Flash 5 and the “actions” were once again enhanced and official became know as ActionScript. ActionScript 1.0 was derived from JavaScript and the ECMA-262 standard. These standards brought support for object model and core data types. For the first time ActionScript could be typed in a text editor. Before, this time you had to work from a series of drop down menus. Variables gain the ability to be declared locally with the simple “var“ tag. ActionScript also gained the ability to pass variables from a user defined function. Next down the evolutionary line came the release of Flash MX, however ActionScript remained relatively the same until 2003.
In September 2003 ActionScript 2.0 was released to the world. ActionScript 2.0 was derived from user requests for a better, and stronger language that had the ability to handle more complex programing. With ActionScript 2.0, programers could limit variables to a specific type by adding a type annotation so that type mismatch errors could be found at compile-time. ActionScript 2.0 also introduced class-based inheritance syntax so that developers could create classes and interfaces, much as they would in class-based languages such as Java and C++. This version conformed partially to the ECMAScript Fourth Edition draft specification.
In June 2006, ActionScript 3.0 debuted and with fundamental restructuring of the language, so much restructuring that ActionScript 3.0 uses an entirely different virtual machine. Flash Player 9 contains two virtual machines, AVM1 for code written in ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0, and AVM2 for content written in ActionScript 3.0. ActionScript 3.0 provides not only a significant enhancement in performance, but also a more robust programming model that lends itself to complex Rich Internet Application development.
