I’m a very investigative programmer in that i’m always looking for packages that will make my life easier, my application more vibrant or more exciting, or my ideas come alive. Below is a list of incredible packages developed by the community and are free for usage (but be sure to check the licences individually for any fine print).

RSS/Atom

as3syndicationlib – an excellent package for reading all RSS/Atom specifications, or using the generic parser.

Tweening

TweenLite, TweenFilterLite, TweenMax (not MaxTween, Neil :P ) – amazing trio!

Caurina’s Tweener – probably the simplest Tweening engine i’ve come across

gTween – looks promising, haven’t tried it yet, though.

3D

Sandy3D – by far, the best documented and well-designed 3D engine i’ve come across.

Papervision – apparently the 3D package, but there are very few tutorials. If anybody knows of some, let me know.

Alternativa – built by a bunch of crazy Russian coders… Ridiculously impressive, difficult to use.

Utilities

as3corelib – A collection of handy utilities for encryption (SHA1, MD5), encoding (JPG, PNG), and a myriad of other useful bells and whistles.

Cryptology

as3crypto – An incredible package for encrypting and decrypting your data using everything from MD2, LZW and RSA.

Database Interaction

asSQL – A package for connecting to a MySQL database directly from ActionScript 3.0!

Frameworks

PureMVC – my personal favourite… Brilliant framework!

Cairngorm – a good (albeit difficult and clunky) framework developed by Adobe

Mate – a tag-based framework… Looks good, haven’t tried it yet

Components

flexlib – great collection of components for usage in Flex

Site-related APIs

Facebook

Amazon

Yahoo!

Google

Physics

APE

Remoting/Webservices

as3httpclientlib

amfphp – the godsend.

WebOrb – fantastic effort by themidnightcoders… ports for many languages

External Resources

bulk-loader

Metadata

metaphile – a package for reading and writing metadata of common filetypes

Hope this is useful!

—–
Danny