ActionScript is the “language” you use to develop Flash stuff. It sucks, but by using fluby it sucks a bit less.

With that quote from Bomber Studios, I want to give you a quick heads up on fluby. It’s a fairly simple command which leverages Rake (Ruby’s make), swfmill and MTASC to help create and build AS2 projects. Fluby can even create your skeleton class files just how you want them, by means of the CLI.

For people with a history in Ruby, it should fit nicely into your work flow. For others it may simply be a simplified alternative to the Flash IDE or similar.

Have a look at the doc over at bomberstudios.com as it covers everything pretty good. Basically, make sure to have swfmill and MTASC on your path. Then create your project and compile it once by running:

fluby MyProject
cd MyProject
rake

That should give you codebase to start with and a SWF output in the deploy folder. Fluby will even open up the output in a browser window for you!

The above example is of course rather pointless. However, have a look at the docs and you’ll soon start realizing the possibilities. It would be cool to use this to create a service providing on-demand compiled SWF files (or generated source code) with a bunch of attributes specified on-the-fly by the user…