Zach Graves: AS3 YMaps Engine in 24 hours
DIGG IT!
Published
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
at
5:01 PM
.
Zach Graves is one of the best developers I know. He is 19, works for Yahoo, and can code AS3 like few I have ever met. Zach wrote an ActionScript 3 version of the Yahoo! Maps tile engine in 24 hours over Memorial Day weekend. Here are some facts about the engine:
ActionScript YMaps Engine Example
1. 15,477 bytes! It is an AS3 Project and is very small yet contains a majority of the Yahoo Maps API. At 15K it is smaller than the AJAX API.
2. Zach estimated 8 hours per day from Friday to Sunday, 3 days on this. All tile logic was written from scratch in AS3. Yes you read that correctly, 1 developer, 24 hours, and Flex Builder.
The key is that AS3 with a great developer is a deadly combination. This map engine is fast, handles dragging, zooming, map types (Map, Satellite, Hybrid), and is very small. It is great to see this type of prototyping going on with ActionScript. Better still is that there is lots of loading logic that can be implemented to make this much faster. AS3 has support for stopping and HTTP connection in flash.new.URLStream and with the ability to manipulate the bytes of images in memory, there are blitting optimizations that can be added as well. We are really only starting to see what is possible in Flash Player 9 and ActionScript 3, Zach's productive work over Memorial day weekend is proof of great things to come.
Kudos to Zach for great work! I am impressed.
Cheers,
Ted :)