The state of JavaScript support in Director 11

Question

Hi! I asked this question in several places without any
meaningful feedback, maybe someone around here will shed some more
light on this ;) Ok, here it goes:
It looks that Lingo is the most natural choice for many
Director developers. Even though I have nothing against Lingo, I
prefer using JavaScript to it due to my personal reasons. And I
wonder what's the state of JavaScript support in the new Director?
To be honest, I've always had a feeling that JavaScript
script was added into Director MX in the last minute just before
the release ;) Awkward getPropRef(..), absence of some important
methods available in
Lingo(e.g member(0).model("foo")), fatal errors on the every
tiny typo when working with 3d stuff, etc.
Has anything changed in the new Director? And if no, does it
really make sense to use JavaScript in Director at all?
Can someone around tell me of any serious game(like Maid
Marian) using JavaScript instead of Lingo? How fast JavaScript
virtual machine compared to Lingo? I also have a very strong
suspicion that JavaScript can be a cause of memory leaks when used
improperly, especially in case of closures, any tips on this?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I prefer JavaScript to Lingo as well, mainly because I
learned scripting/programming in
C++/Java/C#/ActionScript/JavaScript. I’ve been using
JavaScript syntax exclusively since MX 2004, and while there are
things you have to work around, like not being able to access
models by name, I’ve had great success with it.
I prefer JavaScript syntax OOP in Director to Lingo Parent
scripts. There are some buggy things to deal with; for instance
I’ve had issues with “static” members
mysteriously becoming undefined, but nothing I’ve not been
able to work around. I use a getMemberByName(memberName,
memberType, w3dMember) function to get around the
“can’t get model/texture/shader etc. by name”
issue. Try/catch has been a huge help. I’ve got nothing
against Lingo, and hope future versions of Director continue to
support it because so many long time users like it. However, as I
said, I’ve not used it for years.
I was lucky enough to get a Director 11 Beta 1.0 CD-ROM
because an associate recommended me for it to Adobe. I wasn’t
a true Beta tester per se, and wasn’t asked to abide by any
NDA. In fact, my inquiries into what my
responsibilities/restrictions were to be went unanswered.
That being said, I’m afraid I can’t offer much to
this discussion; I installed the Beta on my laptop (Vista) the day
I got it but had vacation for two weeks a week after that. The Beta
version was essentially a 30 day trial and while I told myself
“I’ll check it out while on vacation” my wife had
other ideas. I did see that there was a JavaScript dictionary that
mirrored the Lingo dictionary in the script editor, but that there
was no color hinting for JavaScript syntax. In fact that was
pointed out in the documentation. I can’t say if this is
still true in the final version. Everything I tried (author time
and runtime) worked well in Vista, whereas I’ve had a few
problems with MX 2004 and Vista.
I’m unaware of any tweaks to the SpiderMonkey engine or
its implementation in Director, and don’t feel my limited use
of the Beta qualifies me as a reliable source of info on the
matter, especially since I wasn’t able to really run it
through the ringer. I can say that during my limited
experimentation I didn’t run into any issues and that
everything ran smooth… no “a fatal error has
occurred” messages like I too often get now.
On the whole I’m feeling very positive about not only
this release but Director’s immediate future. I’m
getting the durn thing the first week it’s out.