Macromedia’s ASDoc

Tuesday 15 June 2004  –  Filed under: Flash  –  No Comments

Macromedia recently released a new version of the Remoting Components, which now fully support ActionScript 2. Together with the components, a bunch of AS2 Remoting classes were made public as well. As Macromedia states on their website, these have been documented using “ASDoc”. ASDoc? What’s up with that?

What’s this ASDoc standard that’s being mentioned on the MM website?

A little history to begin with. After the release of Flash MX (the previous Flash version), a small company named Cybersage launched a tool called FlashDoc, a program to generate ActionScript documentation files with. Macromedia acquired Cybersage some time ago, probably because of their excellent Datagrid component series, but, unfortunately, they discontinued the FlashDoc product.

The good news is that a FlashDoc like tool named ASDoc seems to be on its way, but, for now, it remains a mystery. It will most likely be based on JavaDoc. JavaDoc is a renowned standard for documenting Java code. Since ActionScript closely matches the Java syntax, it makes good sense to adopt this standard.

Evidence for this can be found in the source code of the Remoting classes. Those source files contain a lot of JavaDoc-like comment tags, such as @param and @return. I sure hope Macromedia releases their ASDoc tool (and documenting-standard) as soon as possible, as clear documentation will greatly improve communicating existing code libraries to new developers.

Until then we learn more about Macromedia’s ASDoc, there are a number of free and commercial initiatives to help you out:

Commercial products
* VisDoc (US$29, Mac OS X only)
* AS2Doc (commercial, but only trial is available)

Free products
* ActionDoc (mature beta)
* AS2docGenerator (early beta)
* FlashDoc (gModeler based)
* JSFL Command (JSFL based)
* ASDocGen (not yet available)
* BLDocs (not yet available)

If you know of any other ActionScript documentation generators, please let me know so I can add them to this list. Thanks.

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