Hi all,
Sorry for the off topic, even if for me its not off topic at all, but a
possible path for future of flex.
Here is a presentation from Joshua Granick announcing openFL the open
flash library project.
http://www.silexlabs.org/142542/the-blog/blog-silex-labs/wwx2013-speech-joshua-granick-openfl-announcement/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AtmdGbQkTQ
Its an interesting thinking about the flash history, and the future for
cross platform strategy.
OpenFL (ex NME) is a project to mimic the flash API on every target
natively without the need of a plugin (or even an embeded VM)
its based on haxe programming language, made entirely to be efficiently
cross platform compiling. with a lot of modern language features.
At the end of his presentation, theres a question about porting flex to
openFL.
Joshua said almost everything i think myself about flash/HTML5/cross
platform which is:
- the plugin/VM way of targeting cross platform was great in the 90s but
is not good solution anymore in the new mobile platform world. Cross
compilation and using native runtime directly is the way now.
- the GPU is the best way to do cross platform efficient display for the
near future (once webGL is supported everywhere). Its the future
standard (and its more consistent standard than others in my opinion)
- haxe language is the evolution of as3 language that Adobe should have
created.
- flash is a zombi technology as a runtime solution. But the api is
still good enough, and the whole ecosystem that was based on those
runtimes like every libraries made in as3 is still relevant but has no
relevant runtime anymore to run on it for the long term.
Theres an orphan community since Adobe has taken the HTML5 path for
everything that is not gaming. (BTW flash game dev can and do switch to
haxe for performances and native cross platform targetting easiness)
The last piece that we need is a as3 - > haxe auto convertion tool to
give second life of actual flash content, and propose a smooth
transition path for the future out of Adobe runtimes.
In one word i would say that what they try to do with haxe/openFL is
what i would have liked Adobe do to give a live of their flash ecosystem
in an HTML5 world (a no plugin / VM word).
This was my humble opinion. Feel free to disagree, but i wanted to share
the joshua's presentation with flex community.
Seb
ps:
to complete, this is the presentation from nicolas Cannasse about haxe
itself:
http://www.silexlabs.org/140469/the-blog/wwx2013-speech-nicolas-cannasse-what-is-haxe/
he defines haxe as a "cross platform toolkit" as a core technology for
cross platform strategy on which openFL is built, on which a future flex
could be built (IMO).
