Cory Petosky's Website

I find the syntax for calling JavaScript functions from ActionScript to be awkward at best. Consider the following JavaScript:

function handleClick(source) {
    // stuff
}
 
var Library = {
    processOrder: function(itemID, quantity) {
        // stuff
    }
}

The standard way of calling these functions is to use ExternalInterface:

ExternalInterface.call("handleClick", "mainPage");
ExternalInterface.call("Library.processOrder", 51829, 3);

I find the following syntax to be preferable:

JS.window.handleClick("mainPage");
JS.window.Library.processOrder(51829, 3);

Source code of the JS class that allows this syntax follows:

I see a lot of constructs in code that are just wordier than they need to be. All of these examples are in ActionScript 3, though most of them apply in other languages as well.

Many of these are also marginally faster than their wordier counterpart.

This post is inspired by Nick’s aversion to bitwise operators all over the place. Despite this glaring personality flaw, he’s still worth hiring.

Many developers, and unfortunately almost every Flash developer, are far too comfortable with their abstract data types like double and int that they forget that, under the hood, everything’s stored as binary numbers. Having just a little knowledge about how things work under the hood makes you write better, faster, cleaner code.