HTML5 vs Flash Drawing JavaScript vs ActionScript 3 { William Malone }
As our relationship with HTML5 progresses and grows deeper, I’m excited to see direct comparisons between ‘old and busted’ and ‘the new hotness’ on a one-to-one scale.
William Malone literally holds our hand as he walks us through the replication of an icon in both JavaScript (via canvas) and Flash (via ActionScript 3). I find it really interesting to compare both the differences as well as the similarities found within the common ground known as ECMAScript.
Comments
You mean, ‘been doing this forever’ and ‘oh, just getting around to this’? Just kidding, but really… It’s great to see this sort of comparison. The big trouble when doing more involved work like this in javascript is the loosely typed nature of the language. Actionscript 2 was like this and made it a pain in the ass to troubleshoot. It’s too bad the ECMAScript 4.0 fell through as it would have been nice to see classes in Javascript. ECMAScript 5.0 adds in a ‘strict mode’ but you have to enable it and I’m not sure how supported it is just yet (see http://ejohn.org/blog/ecmascript-5-strict-mode-json-and-more/).
Interesting to compare the two – personally, I’d love to have seen SVG thown into the mix. SVG was the new hotness, then got old and busted, now it may be the newer hotterness. Plus you can control it with JS right?
Of course we’d need to see a browser compatibility grid, render speed comparison, and lastly compare the overall amount of code 🙂