HaXe, my new toy!

After Adobe MAX 2011 everything should not be the same for me and maybe for a lot of flash platform developers around the world, Adobe brings some “directions”  that didn’t find my consent mainly for the way that communicate these news and the impact that had in the market, but we know that Flash Platform is not dead and it will go ahead for many years.
Obviously nothing was the same after that, in fact many developers started to look around for new technologies and frameworks like Backbone.js, Sencha Touch, Ext JS and so on.
Personally I started to checked in last few months many Javascript frameworks because my aim was find something that could replace Flash Platform in the future and I have to spend time in next years to consolidate it and go ahead with Flash Platform too.
Last week a big friend of mine gave me this link: http://www.haxenme.org/ and when I started to read what you can do and how you can do it, I immediately started to go in deep with HaXe in my spare time and trust me that I had a lot of fun!

First of all what is HaXe?
HaXe is an open source multiplatform programming language, it allows to write once and deploy everywhere (in the right meaning of therm “everywhere”).
In fact with HaXe we can write in a programming language similar to Actionscript 3 (strictly typed, OOP, …) but more powerful (it has enum, generics, dynamic type, …), with HaXe we can target our projects for Flash, C++, Neko, HTML5, Node.JS, PHP, iOS, Android… if we work with multiplatform APIs we can write once and deploy our project for multiple targets.
So for many developers that come from Javascript, Actionscript, Java and so on, will be so easy to start deal with HaXe.
Another interesting thing of HaXe is that we can work with the library present in the SWF files and integrate movieclip in our project, we can create also SWF file without Flash Professional with SWFMill that is used for the generation of asset libraries containing images (PNG and JPEG), fonts (TTF) or other SWF movies.
That’s so interesting because it means that designers that usually prepare assets for developers don’t need to change own daily workflow!
If you need to extend your target platform we can add new features with external libraries, it’s so important because we can really cover everything with this feature; we can find a lot of ready to use libraries directly on the lib HaXe website.
With HaXe you can communicate between different languages like JS and Flash in both direction, you can easily find many frameworks and library porting in HaXe, for example javascript like JQuery, Sencha Touch, Node.JS and so on.

What about the IDE to work with HaXe (so important for a developer!)!?
On Mac you can use TextMate or FDT on Win FDT or FlashDevelop this one seems the best one but I didn’t try it. For more specs I suggest to take a look at HaXe site section, maybe you can find your favorite IDE in the list.

Finally I made an easy sample to understand better the powerful of HaXe NME, this sample loads an external XML file and an external SWF library with a movieclip inside exported for Actionscript, so I added a drag&drop feature to the list. Then I tried to compile it for iOS, Mac OS X Lion, C++ and SWF with the same basecode and everything work so well and smooth!

You can download source files here, to compile it take a look at HaXeNME section and you can find everything you need to try this sample and start to play with HaXeNME!

If you want to deal with HaXe, I suggest two books, the first one is really a good start to work with this fantastic language:
. HaXe 2 beginner’s guide
. Professional HaXe and Neko

Last but not least, next April in Paris there will be World Wide HaXe conference, I’ll be there to learn more about the future of this amazing platform if you are planning to be there it will be a pleasure for me catch up for a beer!

I hope soon to publish more experiments and informations about HaXe because it is a thrilling programming language!!!
So stay tuned!