One of my favorite projects while working for ONEsite was developing the chat component of our interactive media player.  The first version of this player was developed using Actionscript 2, Server-side Actionscript and Macromedia's Flash Communication Server (FCS).  That player was very impressive technically, but we found the license for FCS to be prohibitely expensive.

The second iteration of the player was also developed using Actionscript 2 and Flash but was built upon open chat standards and socket connections instead of the closed source FCS.  The new player offered the same features as the first player but was much easier for us to administer and scale.

The third version of the player was built upon Actionscript 3 (AS3).  It was designed to be a dramatic overhaul of our player--leveraging more and more of our web services to enable increased social functionality during the media streaming.  I really fell in love with AS3 even though at the time the documentation for it was sparse and the community was in its infancy.  AS3 was such a refreshing change of pace from AS2 (especially the changes to the visual layers).  It felt and acted like a *real* programming language.

This week we've begun to deploy Event Driven changes to our PHP architecture.  This essentially allows all of the actions on the social network (of which there are tons!) to have listener events associated with them to enable custom functionality or achieve unique flows.  Our platform is already incredibly extensible and these AS3 inspired enhancements are going to let us achieve another level of customization for our clients.