Hey,

I recently wrote a small utility to reverse engineer the actionscript reference documentation into intrinsic classes, complete with javadoc comments.

Here's the result:
[update]You should get the FD3 compatible intrinsics provided at this thread[/update]

I welcome any comments.

That's great. Your utility will make it easy to keep up to date with any changes/additions to the API. How difficult is it to generate the XML definitions file needed for MXML completion? I tried my best to look at the release notes in 2.01 to update the current completion file, but it's possible I missed a few things.

Here's the current one:
http://flashdevelop.org/downloads/releases/Flex201_MXML_definition.zip

Good job -- but that's exactly how Ben Clinkinbeard created the AS3 intrinsic classes:
http://www.returnundefined.com/fdas3/

He also extracted the comments but the problem is that we are not sure about the legal issues: are we just allowed to redistribute parts of the documentation? We think that Macromedia's (website) EULA doesn't allow it, and I'm not sure Adobe is more friendly.

One idea we had would be to not distribute intrinsics with the javadoc comments but a tool which will read the online documentation and update the intrinsics accordingly. However I'm not sure if it's totally ok.

I never thought my trick was something new, the point here are the Apollo instrinsic classes, which to the best of my knowledge have never yet been completely extracted.

Ben's tool is, apparently, missing in action: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/apol ... essage/900

Also, it seems that besides having javadoc comments, my flex instrinsic coverage is a bit more complete.

Finally, if distribution of the docs ever becomes an issue, I can distribute the utility instead. Because the docs are available for anyone to download, anyone could produce their own classes complete with javadoc comments.

You did an awesome job Brainy, the generated code is great -- I didn't mean to offend you. I just was wondering if you had seen Ben's posts about his work (and our legal discussions).


But anyway I didn't know he lost the sources so that's cool

We will include the AS3 intrinsics in FD3 so it may be usefull to use your updated files. Or maybe it should be a version without comments + your tool.

Oh no worries, no offense taken at all

Have you given up on understanding the bytecode from the SWCs in the SDK?

Of course not - but for the moment my SWC parser doesn't work (it's a port of abcdump.as, included in the swfOp sub-project in the SVN).

Also there are no way to include javadoc comments in SWCs

Hey brainy, you included the mx classes intrinsics while their source is included in the Flex 2 SDK. I suppose you can omit them.

Ah, it is very tempting to include them in FD3...

So is there an easy solution to generating the XML completion file or not?

I'll look into it.

Depending on what you wrote the utility in (plus your feelings of generosity at the moment) are you able to let loose the utility?

Various flex libraries have source code, but don't have intrinsic files to go along with it (one being darron, doug, and mike's flexlib on google). Would be nice to make it complete so to speak, with auto-completion for IDE's.

MTASC seems to be able to do it, but only for as2.

I'll be releasing the tool as soon as I get a chance. In the meanwhile, you could browse through the ones I've released to look for any glitches that could be fixed prior to that

The intrinsic classes for Flex 3/AIR are available at this thread

brainy, for technical reasons the root package.as should be renamed to toplevel.as or it may be missed by the completion.