After roughly a year of procrastinating about learning ActionScript 3.0 due to other projects always being on fire and... well... procrastination, it is finally my prime directive at work to learn the sucker. All projects going forward will be using the new version of our in-house authoring tool, which is built to use a brand-spankin' new version of our proprietary engine which uses AS3!

I've been reading about AS3 for a few days now, but just today I got around to how working with XML is handled. Pardon me while I completely nerd out for a minute here and say that working with XML in ActionScript 3.0 is freaking awesome!!!

It's so easy and intuitive and simple that I actually cannot wait until the next project comes along where I have to pull in a large amount of XML data. I used to hate it -- the way ActionScript 2.0 handled XML was cumbersome, ugly, and more trial and error than anything to get up and running. It required buckets and buckets of code to parse all the information out of an XML file and into a workable format. But not anymore -- the need to parse is completely gone. You can just take any old XML object and easily pluck the information you need right out of it with no fuss.