Monday, June 11, 2012

A sneak peek: Concurrency with ActionScript Workers

This week we just shipped Flash Player 11.3/AIR 3.3 with lots of cool features for mobile and desktop. But, we are already finalizing the last details on a brand new feature coming very soon, ActionScript Workers. Planned for the next Flash Player/AIR release, I am super excited about this feature. Here's why. The concept of concurrency is kind of the holy grail for most ActionScript developers who are working on complex projects. How many times, have you had issues with the UI locking and having to distribute computations to frames like crazy? How many times did you have to optimize your algorithms like crazy to minimize the cost of execution and reduce the risk of UI locking? Yeah, you have been there. Concurrency has always been popular in the Jira(290 votes), I remember having conversations over there with many developers following the status of this feature, I am sure some of you may think, well, better late than never. Again, the focus we have now on gaming or video, allows us to focus, so deliver valuable features like those much quicker. See all the features we introduced between Flash Player 11 and 11.3, most of the biggest requests from ActionScript developers are getting delivered and we will not stop there :) We started working on this feature last year, at that time, we were debating over how we would introduce concurrency to ActionScript developers, through a simple and safe way. We decided to go with a workers approach, cause it is a design most developers are today familiar with, which also can be API based rather than language based. We knew that we would not introduce a new keyword (for now) to leverage concurrency, so really workers made a lot of sense. How does it work? [...]
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