Big project. AS2 or AS3?

If you start a new project, AS3 is giving you so much. Check this out: http://livedocs.macromedia.com/labs/as3preview/docs/
It finally became a medium where a programmer can feel at home.

My company, Eye Partner, is using almost exclusively AS3 for its projects. This can sound common if we're talking about Flex 2, since the technology is more than half year old now.

Things change a little in the case of Flash 9. F9 is not out and it won't be several months from now. Yet we have a project cumulating several thousands of work hours based on it. While this might seem overkill to some, we just keep working, cornering bugs, solving instability issues and getting the product done. If Flex would've been an option, we would've taken it, but the level of visual customization required is too great.

Our approach is to have a main core which loads external modules as needed. Modules are swfs that can be written either in F9 or in Fx2. Because yes, programming in Fx it's much more clean and straightforward. It's charted territory after all. Sometimes it's just easier to use F8 for some modules, especially for people who are not yet proficient w/ F9.

Now the interesting part: you can't really use F8 for these modules, right? AS2 and AS3 (more accurately VM1 and VM2) cannot talk to each other. Here is what livedocs say:

ActionScript 3.0 code can load a SWF file written in ActionScript 1.0 or 2.0, but it cannot access the SWF file's variables and functions.

So, what do you have left: LocalConnection, NetConnection. Jeez, what options :)

Turns out that some guy Robert Taylor has figured it out. His solution facilitates communication between F9 and F8 SWF files via ExternalInterface. Check it out: http://osflash.org/flashinterface

We most probably will continue the path we've taken at the start, but surely there are some huge applications out there that simply cannot be rewritten in a month or two. And continuing w/ AS2 for every new module could mean suicide in the long run.