10 Less-Known Yet Powerful ActionScript Libraries / Classes

Flash has popular free libraries / classes to extend the core functionality like Papervision3D, AlivePDF, Flare or Tweener.

There are also less-known ones which are still very powerful & can make the development process of a Flash application easier / faster.

Here is 10 of them that you will find handy (you know more? please share them in the comments).

Playr

A beautiful AS3 music player class.

It has support for playlist management or playing a single file, loops & more.

flXHR

A Flash solution that mimics Ajax (& provides more) by a XMLHttpRequest compatible interface.

It uses a Flash file: flxhr.swf which works like a proxy between requests & supports cross-domain Ajax.

KitchenSync

This ActionScript 3.0 library is focused on sequencing animations and other time-based actions.

It includes a number of features and shortcuts, such as the clone() method, that save effort for developers.

AnimationPackage

An AS3 library for creating powerful, maintainable animations and primitive shapes in an efficient and easy way, resulting in small file sizes.

Flint

A feature-rich Flash library for creating particle based effects like:

• Fire
• Smoke
• Snow, rain..
• Fireworks
• & more..

AsWing

An ActionScript GUI framework and library for making Flash application UIs easily.

ActionScript Page Flip Class

A class to create the famous page flip effect.

All corners can be flipped both vertically & horizontally. There is also a sample, using this class, that can be used with Flex.

ASZip

This ActionScript library enables zipping with Flash.

You mention the files & folders to be zipped in a single file. It uses native gzip (Deflate) compression from the flash.utils.Bytearray.compress() method.

FZip

This AS3 class allows loading, modifying and creating standard ZIP archives.

A great feature is, it parses ZIP archives progressively, allowing access to the files in the ZIP while archive is loading.

AS3Crypto

A cryptography library that supports common algorithms like AES, DES, MD5 & more. A handy library when working with Flash-databases & storing valuable data like passwords.