You may have heard about Nicolas Cannasse and his revolutionary MTASC Actionscript 2 compiler. For the developers in the Flash crowd, MTASC brings Actionscript to a completely new level of power and flexibility. Unfortunately, Nicolas announced recently that he doesn’t want to make a version of the compiler for AS3. He points out that MTASC provides a missing tool, but the Flex 2 compiler from Macromedia already provides that and promises to build on it. I’d love some strong open source AS3 tools, but I can understand where he’s coming from. He wants to innovate, not recreate.

With that said, Nicolas isn’t leaving the next generation of Flash completely out of his mind. He just opened a site outlining his new haXe programming language. Originally, I was under the impression that this would be an alternative language targeted only towards Flash. However, Nicolas is hoping to make this into a universal web development solution. The new language can be compiled to Flash, converted to Javascript/DHTML, and it can be scripted server-side by generating source code for Neko, another project Nicolas is working on.

I wonder if this will take off? It’s ambitious, that’s for sure. Among the hard-core Flash developers, Nicolas has some recognition. Flash is mainly a design-centric platform, though, and you have to go to the right places to find someone who knows anything or has even heard about MTASC. Certain crowds have a vicious dislike for Flash. Plus, Neko is still young and generally unknown, and there are many good Javascript/AJAX libraries out there already. I’m not against haXe at all. In fact I wish Nicolas a lot of luck, and I hope this gains a decent following. Once a full compiler is released, I plan to give it a try and see what I can do with it. I’m merely saying that there are a lot of obstacles, and I don’t know if this is the sort of thing the web needs.