FlashLit.

ActionScript 3.0 Coding Standards

As part of the open source release of the Adobe Flex 3 SDK, Adobe has also posted the ActionScript 3.0 Coding Conventions that the engineers used while developing the framework.

It's been hard to find a good set of AS3 coding standards in the past but this fits the bill. It's pretty thorough even though there are a few sections still marked TBD. It covers naming standards, language usage, file organization, and code formatting.

The standards all seem pretty reasonable too, unlike some other standards documents I've seen elsewhere. I'd say it's about a 95% match with my personal AS3 coding preferences.

Even if you don't agree with all the standards, this is a great starting point for any project team that's embarking on a big Flex, Flash, or ActionScript project. You can just use the Adobe standards as a baseline and tweak as necessary.

Getting ASDoc to recognize Adobe AIR classes

Now that AIR 1.0 is official, some people are having trouble getting the ASDoc utility that ships with Flex Builder 3 to recognize the new AIR classes. Here's a quick way to do it.

Use the -library-path option on the ASDoc command line to include the folder that contains the airframework.swc and airglobal.swc files. For example:

asdoc -source-path . -doc-classes myComponents.MyFileManager  -library-path+=..\frameworks\libs\air

Notice the += after in the -library-path value. That appends the location of the AIR SWC files to the default list, which includes the Flex Framework SWCs.

Of course you will also need to change the path to the \frameworks\libs\air folder relative to the location from which the asdoc utility is running.