I have a set of ~5 ActionScript 3 classes that are currently used within a flex 4 application. Although their output is used to display graphs etc in my flex app, the classes themselves have no visual components – they are only used to do complex math computations (I originally implemented them in AS3 in order to avoid constant server calls when computations were needed by the flex app).
However, I now want to make the same mathematical computation engine available on my linux server so the computations can be done within PHP. Is there any way at all to access the logic in these classes on the server? I would really like to avoid re-implementing the complex logic in PHP.
Thanks so much for any help you can give!
How many lines of code in your AS3 classes, and what kind of load do you need to handle?
If you’re building anything for more than one-off use then the easiest route is probably porting your ActionScript to JavaScript. There aren’t any automated converters that I know of but JavaScript and AS3 are so similar that unless your five classes have thousands of lines of code you should be able to make short work of it. Once you’ve ported it to JavaScript it’ll be trivial to run in Node.js, directly through the VM of your choice, or even in the user’s browser.
If you only need this to scratch and itch or for limited use you may be able to get away with running AS3 directly in Tamarin or redtamarin. However as far as I know neither of these are currently suitable for production use.
If you are using this in a high-availability, high traffic PHP app, however, I think you’ll experience a lot less pain in the long run just porting your code to PHP. AS3 and PHP are similar enough in syntax that you could probably just do a straight port.
Finally, you can find some further discussion and links in this thread: Is it possible to create a 'command line' swf?