> http://www.webdevgeekly.com/r/www.webdevgeekly.com/mp3/geekly6.mp3

I should clarify a few things for anyone listening:

1. I did get a rude email from Douglas Crockford, but not nasty or in any way aggressive. When I very politely asked for his opinion on the project he responded: “I don’t care for ActionScript“; No “hello”, no signature… Call me old fashioned, but I think that’s unnecessarily rude.

2. “I wonder how they’re doing parts of this” (Harmony and ECMA4 gets mentioned)
As any JS evangelist will tell you, Adobe went off and did pretty much their own thing with AS2/3; JAS syntax follows that path as opposed to the current path of ECMAScript. The ‘compiler’ is implemented in pure PHP. You can test the JAS Parser on its own here, or test the full compiler at jaspa.org.uk. Rather than a JavaScript engine, or interpreter like SpiderMonkey that might run in a browser, the JASPA compiler is really a converter which allows you to deploy regular JavaScript to browsers that have no idea how to interpret JAS, or any other super-set of ECMAScript for that matter.

3. Providing libraries that ActionScript developers are used to – e.g. jaspa.net.URLVariables
I do attempt to follow AS conventions where possible. The URLVariables class is a good example, because it is API agnostic. That is to say that it is a rather abstract utility that could be used in DOM scripting, but equally in any other API, such as server side JavaScript for Flash Media Server for example. It is important to note that the JASPA compiler and JAS syntax are not in any may married to these libaries and APIs. It is platform for which anyone is free to develop their own such utilities.

4. Finally to anyone who wants to try out JASPA, please bear in mind that it is a non-commercial project with a single developer who has a full-time job. The “they” is really a “he”. The compiler itself is a beta, and some of the API classes I’ve been putting together are somewhat alpha.

I recently watched the internet film, Zeitgeist. After which I was burning to write my opinions here, but unfortunately that’s not really what my blog is about, so instead I turn my attention to the internet as Information Technology. At least this is what IT stood for when I was at school, but ironically this was a time when I was much more likely to turn to books for information. More to the point, I was likely to go to much greater lengths to find out facts than doing a quick Google.

The author/director of Zeitgeist is quite open that you should not take his word for the ‘facts’ he presents. He urges you to research this material yourself, because “truth is not told, it is realized“. But when I came to do exactly this, it dawned on me quite how shallow my engagement with this material was going to be. My complacency was such that I was willing to accept or refute the existence of Jesus Christ after 5 minutes scanning Wikipedia entries.

Ask yourself – If you need to research something, or validate a fact, how far are you willing to go? If Google, or Wikipedia turn up something that scratches your itch, do you dig deeper? Do you follow the citations and examine those? What if the citation isn’t on the internet? What if you have to actually read a book? an obscure book, maybe a text in a foreign language, even a dead language. What if there is an exclusive community of scholars behind that source that are in the midst of a raging debate over its validity? The fact is that we are armchair researchers, we want an answer and we want it quick. This makes us less critical, more cynical, and even with all this information at our our fingertips perhaps we are more blind than ever.

We know that anyone can publish on the internet and we feel empowered by this. We entrust ourselves to separate the wheat from the chaff – to decide what is authoritative and what is bogus. We think this medium is superior to newspapers and television; that the information available to us is free of political bias, and out of the hands of media moguls. But isn’t this just a little bit too easy? Maybe we are kidding ourselves. As we continue to invest in this superficial method of fact-finding we are also lulling ourselves into a false sense of security? Most alarming when you consider that huge corporations are conglomerating the internet in exactly the same way as they did with offline media.

Back to Zeitgeist – I am not saying I think it is all nonsense; nor am I saying I think it’s right on the money. I think everyone should watch it because it is thought provoking. But it does worry me that a film like this, which is incredibly clever in its ability to win your respect and trust, could be too easily lapped up. All we really want is someone to come along and give us the answers, to open our eyes at the click of a button.