Hi Fréderic, That’s interesting. What is it about Flex that you want to get away from?
I suppose you can load the JS into a webview, but I think you might need some more glue to have the JS access the Native Extension. But I think that you can write such glue. Not sure how efficient it will be. -Alex From: Fréderic Cox <[email protected]> Reply-To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Date: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 at 11:39 AM To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: Evaluating Apache Royale for the long term Hi Alex, I'm trying to go look into a path to get away from Flex rather than AIR. Most of my apps are desktop based, and the ones that are browser based we are loading into an AIR container (directly loading the SWF) anyway. So I guess I can use royale and then load the resulting JS into a webview in AIR? That way I can still use native extensions? I spent some time trying Apache Royale today but it will take me many more days before I really get used and experienced in it but I'll try to help where I can. Lot's of stuff to learn about it first but it looks really promising. On Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 6:09 PM Alex Harui <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Hi Fréderic, Just so I’m clear, are all of your apps AIR apps and not browser apps? If so, and you want to get away from AIR, then you will have to decide on how to run the resulting JS. Royale has support for Cordova and Node. I haven’t done much with Node, so not sure how much graphical UI you could do there. I think you can also use Chromium Embedded as well. You will need to pick your runtime environment first. I will assume the Browser is not one of your choices, but there may be a way to use it, I don’t know. I’m not sure there is a 100% equivalent to AIR. I think you’ll always have to trade-off some feature or build missing capabilities. Regarding Native Extensions: I believe each runtime environment has a way to call native code. So, your Native Extensions probably can’t be used as-is, but the code that actually does the work can probably be re-used to some extent. For example, if you chose Cordova, you can probably make a Cordova plugin using some of that Native Extension code. I think each runtime environment also has a way to launch other apps and access files. Cordova has a File plugin and we have some examples that use it. A volunteer could make a more Flex-like wrapper for it. AMF works in lots of places but there are probably still bugs. I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t eventually work for your app. TourDeFlex uses modules. It can load modules now. Royale does not support unloading modules because the runtime environments don’t make it easy to remove loaded code. As I get more of TourDeFlex working and other people get their apps working we will get a better idea of how important “stuck code” is. Unloading the instances of objects created by module code will likely be far more important, and that cleanup generally needs to be done whether the code unloads or not. Also, because Royale doesn’t currently support embedding, the size of the loaded module may not be as significant. There hasn’t been a lot of attention paid to Royale outside of the browser, so expect to run into more issues, but we do have intentions of getting it all to work. We expect you and other volunteers to contribute to making it work by contributing code and patches. If you do enough of that, you will probably be granted committer status, and then you have much more control over Royale in the long term. HTH, -Alex From: Fréderic Cox <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Reply-To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Wednesday, September 26, 2018 at 2:31 AM To: "[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Evaluating Apache Royale for the long term Hi guys, Finally you have my full attention :-) I am spending the remainder of this week (at least) to evaluate using Apache Royale for our company's apps. I'm evaluating wether it is a good course to convert our existing flex apps (which currently target Mac OSX, Windows and iOS using Adobe AIR). I have a couple of early questions after installing VSCode and Josh's AS/MXML extension. Our apps are pretty complex, using things like: * Modules (one application uses ModuleLoader quite heavily) * Accessing user's hard disk to manipulate files * AMFPHP for communication with PHP backend * NativeProcess API to convert images using a compiled version of ImageMagick (so accessing .exe files and mac executable scripts) * NativeExtensions Can this all be used with ApacheRoyale? Thanks for the information, I'm going to experiment with the examples and try to convert some parts of apps to see where this is going. Best regards, Fréderic
