I concur, this is huge news for the future of Flex! Congrats to making this
possible!
About the vanilla sdk, I have some Jangaroo experience, there you can build
a full AS Button component,
which compiles to JS without the need of a vanilla SDK.
I assume technically you can do the same, if the basic Flash API stuff is
'emulated' for JS and included with the compilation?
-----Original Message-----
From: Nick Tsitlakidis
Sent: Friday, January 25, 2013 6:58 PM
To: dev@flex.apache.org
Subject: Re: [ASJS] AS to HTML5 in action: announcing the ASJS Publisher and
the VanillaSDK JS framework.
Firstly, WELL DONE TO ALL cause this sounds epic! I haven't tried it yet
but it's already in my todo list.
I'll go slightly off topic here and ask you if you can share your vision
about the VanillaSDK Erik. I'm reading the hundreds of emails but its kinda
hard to keep up with you guys. You do a great job and you do it fast.
I plan on investing some time to our beloved project and spending some time
with VanillaSDK made the click for me. That's why I ask.
Also, any hints on what I should read or check to understand how I can
contribute would be really appreciated. Please keep in mind that I never
had any experience with compilers. I'm more of a 'components and apps'
developer.
Again, congratulations guys. I hope I'll be able to join in soon. At least
I'll try. :)
On Fri, Jan 25, 2013 at 5:03 PM, Erik de Bruin <e...@ixsoftware.nl> wrote:
Hi,
I'm proud to announce the availability of a 'proof of concept' for a
Actionscript to HTML5/Javascript work flow. Standing on the shoulders
of giants (Gordon, Mike, Alex et al., I'm looking at you!) I was able
to piece together a working prototype of a full Flash Builder ->
Browser application development tool chain.
The tools are:
- the Flex SDK. Most importantly, the goal is to allow developers to
use the tools they know while giving them the ability to publish their
work to a www-friendly format.
- the FalconJx browser, which can as of today output a pretty descent
approximation of AS in JS, the 'goog' way.
- the ASJS Publisher, an ant script that takes the JS that FalconJx
produces and puts it through the Google Closure Tools to create both
intermediate and release versions of the web native application.
- the VanillaSDK, my attempt at an AS compatible JS framework. I have
plan for a different type of framework, even better integrated with
the current Flex SDK, but more on that later ;-)
With these new tools, you are now able (albeit in a very limited way)
to use the regular Flex SDK for application development in your
favorite development tool. Using the new ASJS Publisher script, you
can compile your project into a highly optimized HTML5 application
that will run in any modern browser. It's that simple... well, almost
:-)
As this is a prototype, there are some (ha!) limitations:
- the VanillaSDK (the Javascript counterpart to the Flex SDK) is very
basic indeed, with only 2 UI components: Button and Label. Both these
components currently support only 1 or 2 properties (position and
label or text). It does show, however, how easy it is to create these
Flex SDK compatible UI elements.
- not all AS language features are fully supported on the JS side yet.
- there isn't (yet) support for MXML, but that's coming soon.
- since this is only a proof of concept, there is almost certainly a
lot that doesn't work -- to be honest, I'd be suprised if anything
works at all :-)
If you want to try this out, please get the latest version of the tool
set from SVN, starting with here:
https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/flex/asjs/branches/develop
Begin with the README you'll find there. After an initially
non-trivial setup (SDK, Falcon, FalconJx and the new tools), the
everyday use is really simple: just one command in a terminal, calling
one ant script with one argument: this will publish your Flash Builder
application to the 'js-intermediate' and 'js-release' directories in
your FB project folder. Simply double click on the HTML files in
either of these will run your application in your default browser, no
Flash plugin needed!
Please let me know if this works for you and what issues you
encounter. Should you feel inspired, feel free to contribute, this
part of the project can use all the help it can get!
Have fun,
EdB
--
Ix Multimedia Software
Jan Luykenstraat 27
3521 VB Utrecht
T. 06-51952295
I. www.ixsoftware.nl
--
Nick Tsitlakidis,
CEO and Software Architect at Perfect Edge LTD.
www.perfectedz.com
