There was also an interesting, while mostly under the radar, in-the-middle: using the Flex [0] compiler, you could write and compile pure Flash Player files in AS3, which would be considerably smaller and leaner/more performant than both Flash and Flex. All it needed was a base Application instance at the root. This was not to the least, because this didn't import all the UI classes, meaning, you had to come up with your own elements (like scrollbars, scroll panes, buttons, etc), probably importing them as assets compiled in Flash or Flex. So, on the one hand, these custom GUI elements ideally had the same functionality, accessibility, etc as the generic ones, while, on the other hand, this came with degree of freedom, seldom found anywhere else. Which should make them interesting to review, especially, since this approach was much more abstract than working in Flash.
(NB, these files should be rather difficult to find and you really needed an original Adobe Flash Player to run them, as well as a platform, which still runs Flash Player. So this technology path is probably mostly lost.)
[0] Flex was Flash's "professional" sibling framework based on XML files, resulting in the same player format.
Comments
There was also an interesting, while mostly under the radar, in-the-middle: using the Flex [0] compiler, you could write and compile pure Flash Player files in AS3, which would be considerably smaller and leaner/more performant than both Flash and Flex. All it needed was a base Application instance at the root. This was not to the least, because this didn't import all the UI classes, meaning, you had to come up with your own elements (like scrollbars, scroll panes, buttons, etc), probably importing them as assets compiled in Flash or Flex. So, on the one hand, these custom GUI elements ideally had the same functionality, accessibility, etc as the generic ones, while, on the other hand, this came with degree of freedom, seldom found anywhere else. Which should make them interesting to review, especially, since this approach was much more abstract than working in Flash.
(NB, these files should be rather difficult to find and you really needed an original Adobe Flash Player to run them, as well as a platform, which still runs Flash Player. So this technology path is probably mostly lost.)
[0] Flex was Flash's "professional" sibling framework based on XML files, resulting in the same player format.
I made pretty good money as a freelance flex dev circa 2015, I miss it sometimes.