fl vs flash

October 14, 2008 4:20 PM

What's the relationship between the ActionScript namespaces fl.* and flash.* ?
posted by iconjack to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Yeah, the naming situation around Flash-related technologies is a mess. I believe flash.* is the Flash Player's intrinsic API, whereas fl.* is a set of components/classes provided by the Flash CS tool (similar to how mx.* is the set of components/classes provided by the Flex framework).
posted by kanuck at 4:50 PM on October 14, 2008

Those aren't namespaces, they're packages. ActionScript namespaces are an entirely different, strange beast that are one of the unique features of the language. The public, private, protected, and internal access specifiers are implemented in Actionscript with namespaces, which are a user-accessible feature.
posted by zixyer at 5:11 PM on October 14, 2008

Response by poster: OK, good point about the definition of namespace.
Do you happen to know the relationship between the two packages?
posted by iconjack at 7:49 PM on October 14, 2008

fl.* is almost certainly implemented using flash.* (I say "almost" because I haven't actually seen the source code, but I don't see many other possibilities). Think of the Flash Player as a runtime environment with an API (exposed to AS via flash.*); pretty much any code that does something interesting when running in the Flash Player is ultimately going to depend on that API (otherwise you're just working with AS/ES primitives).
posted by kanuck at 11:39 AM on October 15, 2008