ActionScript - the Possibilities

Before you dive into the details of ActionScript, let’s first briefly discuss what you can do with it. Presumably, you already have at least some minimal experience with Flash, and you are familiar with the playback of the timeline. The default behavior in Flash is such that when an SWF (the compiled Flash movie format) is opened in a player, the timeline begins to play automatically. In many cases, this is not, in and of itself, problematic. However, when the playhead reaches the end of the timeline, it then loops back to the beginning of the timeline and starts playing it again. Often you want an animation to play only one time and then stop at the end. To prevent the Flash movie from looping the playback, you actually have to give it the instruction to stop. You can do this by placing one line of code on the last frame. That one line of code looks like this:

stop();

With this first command, you can see that ActionScript really can read very much like English. The command (or statement) stop() instructs the Flash movie to stop playback. Of course, you can do many more complex things with ActionScript besides a simple stopping of the playback. Using ActionScript, you can load external data into your movie for the purposes of creating dynamic, user-specific customizations or even e-commerce applications. Using
ActionScript, you can create nonlinear, interactive presentations and animations. The possibilities with ActionScript are practically limitless, and they allow you to create Flash applications with tremendous potential. In fact, there is very little that you can think up that cannot be accomplished with ActionScript.