Creating Interactive Movies > About ActionScript

About ActionScript

Flash uses the ActionScript scripting language to add interactivity to a movie. Similar to JavaScript, ActionScript is an object-oriented programming language. In object-oriented scripting, you organize information by arranging it into groups called classes. You can create multiple instances of a class, called objects, to use in your scripts. You can use ActionScript's predefined classes and create your own.

When you create a class, you define all the properties (characteristics) and methods (behaviors) of each object it creates, just as real-world objects are defined. For example, a person has properties such as gender, height, and hair color and methods such as talk, walk, and throw. In this example, "person" is a class and each individual person is an object, or an instance of that class.

Objects in ActionScript can contain data or they can be graphically represented on the Stage as movie clips.

For more information on these terms and their use, see ActionScript Help.