Chapter 3: Procedural JavaScrip

One area where Animate is very different from programming in Flash is the scripting language. Flash used a language based on ECMAScript called ActionScript. As browsers don't natively support ActionScript and HTML Canvas projects need scripting, the language you use to program Animate games has changed from ActionScript to JavaScript. Both languages are based off of ECMAScript so ActionScript programmers will have little problems adapting but there are differences between the two languages.

JavaScript is the scripting language that is used by browsers to allow more complex pages. People often confuse Java with JavaScript but they are not the same thing. The name came about when Java was starting to be added to browsers to allow more complex content. Netscape was working on their own scripting language and there was a decision – sources vary on the details – where the scripting language was altered to be more Java-like so Java programmers would also be able to do simpler scripting using JavaScript.

Programming is interesting as it borrows aspects from science, engineering, and art. As a result, there are many ways of accomplishing the same thing. This has resulted in many different methodologies on how to write a program. In the early days, we had procedural programming in which programs are written with one main block of code that may call subroutines. Object oriented programming adds the concept of classes and inheritance, which we will cover in a later chapter.

The core concepts behind procedural programming happen to be the core concepts needed for other types of programming so it makes sense to learn programming from a procedural methodology before going into other methodologies. This chapter will cover the procedural aspects of the language starting with the surprisingly controversial topic of “Comments Controversy”.

The “Variables and Math” section covers the concept of variables and how they are used in mathematical operations. JavaScript is a dynamic programming language which means that variables can change their type.

The main reason for writing a script is to handle situations which have different outcomes based on the current state of the game. JavaScript handles conditional states using an if statement which we will cover in “The If Statement”.  For complex forms of the if statement, we have an easier to read form known as the “switch”

Expanding upon conditional execution is looping. In the “Looping” section we will examine the evil goto statement, the while statement, the do statement, and the for statement. These statements go together with manipulating blocks of variables which we call “Arrays”.

 We will then conclude this chapter with a very brief look at objects in the section surprisingly named “Objects.” This is entering the territory of object oriented programming but is necessary to cover before we start creating our first game in the next chapter.