This month Darron's Diary looks at an Iterator implementation, at ECMAScript 4, and previews his own latest book

A Simple ActionScript 3 Iterator Implementation
I was looking for an Iterator implementation in ActionScript 3 to avoid reinventing the wheel for the umpteenth time but couldn't find one on Google, so I whipped one up quick that you can download here: (www.darronschall.com/downloads/as3_iterator.zip.

This should save someone a full 3 minutes of work in the future....

Usage is pretty simple and straightforward. The download includes the Iterator interface as well as a simple implementation of ArrayIterator for iterating over an array of elements:

import com.darronschall.util.*;

var arr:Array = [1, 2, 3];
var it:Iterator = new ArrayIterator( arr );
while ( it.hasNext() )
{
      trace( it.next() ); // 1, 2, 3
}

var it2:Iterator = new ArrayIterator( null );
trace( it2.hasNext() ); // false

You can use this code without restriction under the MIT License: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License.

The Future of ActionScript
Want to get an idea of what ActionScript might look like in the future? The ECMAScript committee has released a handful of public resources (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/1543) surrounding ECMAScript 4. These resources give a general idea of where the language is headed.

Because ActionScript is based on the ECMAScript standard, anything that happens in ECMAScript will almost certainly happen in ActionScript too. Not to mention, quite a few of the Adobe folks are on the ECMAScript committee...

Read more at http://developer.mozilla.org/es4/ (most of the good stuff is in the proposals section).

ActionScript 3 Cookbook
My first book project is nearing completion, the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook. Sub-titled "Solutions and Examples for Flash Developers," it is a joint venture by Joey Lott, Keith Peters and myself. It looks like it's scheduled to be released on August 1, 2006. I can hardly wait.