Flash Frameworks Rundown

Despite Flash being a “dead” technology – there sure is a lot of activity going on in the community. This post highlights some of the more prominent, recent releases to a number of these libraries, frameworks, and tools.

Starling 1.4

Starling
Starling is a pure ActionScript 3 library that mimics the conventional Flash display list architecture. In contrast to conventional display objects, however, all content is rendered directly by the GPU — providing a rendering performance unlike anything before.

Feathers 1.1.1

Feathers
Light-weight, skinnable, and extensible UI controls for both mobile and desktop games and applications. Feathers puts it all together in one package — along with blazing fast GPU powered graphics to create a smooth and responsive experience.

Citrus Game Engine 3.1.7

Citrus
The Citrus Engine is a professional-grade, scalable ActionScript 3 game engine built for industry-quality games. It is built upon modern programming practices, allowing you to focus on making your game awesome!

Apache Flex 4.10

The Apache Flex 4.10.0 release contains many improvements that professional software development teams will appreciate. This advances the framework forward. It is truly becoming one of the best cross-platform programming languages used to write applications that are testable and can be compiled to run on multiple technology platforms from a single set of code.

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9 thoughts on “Flash Frameworks Rundown”

  1. Hey Joseph,

    Just wanted to add a post and say: thanks. You are presenting consistent good information and links about AIR, Starling and the like.

    It is a frustrating time for Flash and ActionScript developers. I have worked on many Flash (and now AIR) projects over the past 15-ish years.

    Over the past few years I have been promoting AIR, educating clients, and in some cases have even literally been (for lack of a better term) ‘hazed’ by companies, their tech departments, and on really special occasions; third parties brought in to conference calls with the sole purpose of ‘weighing in on HTML5 vs. Flash/AIR’, where I have to ‘justify my existence’ for supporting the technologies I believe in.

    In the end I have produced results that make clients happy, if a bit dumbfounded as to how and why this unheard of technology called “Adobe AIR” can make such slick, high-performing apps that run impeccably on iOS and Android, using the same code base.

    It hasn’t been an easy ride, but again I say thanks for providing relevant information and links as to why Adobe AIR is truly amazing technology. Adobe’s marketing may not be helping, but AIR can truly produce great cross-platform apps. It seems like more people should know about and understand how good they are.

    1. Thanks for the positive comments. It is very frustrating – the platform is better than ever and is still growing… yet the general web community dismisses it as dead and the messaging from Adobe certainly doesn’t help matters. I really do believe the future of the platform lies in 3rd party innovation through frameworks and projects like theses. Wish Adobe wasn’t so frightened of their own technology. Ah well.

    2. Greg I feel your pain. I also had to undergo the same sort of scrutiny when I pushed AIR. The first time I failed, but I at least talked our VP of engineering out of doing the project in HTML5 (a decision we all recognize as being a terrible one).

      The second time around, I won. And it’s paying off in spades. The amount of money we are saving and the accelerated time to market is proof positive that AIR is hands down the best choice for a very large number of games. Not every game, but a lot of them. Especially the ones that are making the most money.

  2. I hope everyone could stay as positive, good post

    try to see it like that, if before your only option was to publish a SWF game on a portal to have some crumbs of the advertising, now you can self publish your own games on mobile platforms and keep a whole 70% of the profit

    games or apps etc.

    all the framework mentioned can help a lot to do just that

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