Le 22/02/2012 15:33, ganaraj p r a écrit :
Thanks Nicolas,
I was the one who mentioned you in a post and wanted your inputs on "How we
could go about porting Flex to Haxe?".. I assumed that since you built Haxe
( duh! ) and that since Haxe is inspired by AS3, you would be able to
provide some deep insights into the migration of Flex to Haxe.. If we even
go ahead with it. These are a few questions that come to my mind..
Hi,
1 ) I know Haxe is a budding and growing community. Has anyone attempted to
get Flex onto Haxe? In terms of porting! Have you ever considered doing it
( Since it seems like a logical step to get more traction into the language
itself! ) , starting it ?
I think David Arno have thought about doing it. I guess he had some
issues that I think are currently being resolved.
Not being a Flex user myself, I'm only here to answers questions and
give you advices if at some time you want to do this port. I'll not
myself write code.
2 ) Can you see any pitfalls of porting this huge mammoth (from the top of
your head! )?
a) huge codebase with dependencies, takes a while until something
actually compiles, which need a small team of motivated people to get there
b) find ways to map AS3-specific behaviors into haXe equivalents, but I
guess this can be resolved with discussions. I can help here.
3 ) If we are going to go down the cross compilation route we have
primarily 2 choices. Dart or Haxe. Why should we choose Haxe over Dart? Can
you give us any insights and points to choose Haxe over dart? One of them ,
I can already guess is that Haxe is closer to AS3 than Dart is... Any other
advantages?
a) haXe is ready, been there for years
b) haXe has a Flash target, Dart doesn't
c) haXe targets mobiles (natively), Dart doesn't
d) haXe is a better language than Dart (IMHO, I guess it depends on your
personal tastes).
e) haXe favor syntax conservatism (good for the enterprise) : any
AS3/Java developer can feel comfortable with haXe in a few days.
4 ) Its usually the UI which is going to be platform dependent. The logic
for most of the stuff can easily ported from one Platform to another. Does
Haxe make you UI agnostic?
The language itself does not help with that.
The API does.
For instance the NME api (from http://haxenme.org) implements all the
Flash Graphics api (beginFill etc.) and bitmaps, events, etc on native
platforms such as iOS/Android/Desktop, and JEASH (http://jeash.org) does
it for JS/HTML5.
haXe enable you to write and improve this kind of libraries.
I might be wrong but I believe that the Flex community is much larger than
the community supporting Haxe. So, I personally believe that porting Flex
onto Haxe should turn out to be a hugely beneficial move in terms of Haxe,
strategically.
I agree that it would be good for haXe, but I also definitely think it
would be good for Flex as well. That's what you call a win-win
relationship I guess ;)
Anyways thanks for this mail. Its always great to get inputs
from people like you when we are talking about open source efforts.
You're welcome,
Best,
Nicolas
