An old slide deck from a talk I did for the Pretoria linux user group.

1. HaXe – An open source
flash workflow

2. HaXe
From haxe.org:
The idea behind haXe is to let the developer choose
the best platform to do a given job. In general, this is
not easy to do because every new platform comes with
its own programming language. What haXe provides to
you is :
● a standardized language with many good features
● a standard library (including Date, Xml, Math...) that
works the same on all platforms
● platform-specific libraries : the full APIs for a given
platform are accessible from haXe

3. Haxe
● Based on ECMA script and thus very
similar to ActionScript 3
● Different targets:
– SWF bytecode (Flash)
– ActionScript code (Flash)
– JavaScript
– PHP
– C++
– NekoVM

4. NekoVM
● Lightweight virtual machine
● Can be used for server side scripting
(mod_neko on Apache)
● Can be used to deploy native applications
on the client side (ScreenweaverHx and
hippoHx)
● Recently gained a experimental LLVM
implementation

5. HaXeLib
● Used to manage additional HaXe libraries
(similar to ruby gems)
● Easy installation of libraries
● Large number of libraries available
– Physics
– 3D Graphics
– MVC frameworks
– GUI frameworks
– Animation/Tweening

6. HaxeVideo
● Lightweight server for streaming video
over RTMP.

7. HaXe wrt. Flash
● Target all the different versions of Flash
(you could target Flash 7/8 and use
Gnash instead of Adobe Flash
Player/Plugin)
● More comparable to Flex rather than the
Flash IDE
● Currently optimizes code better that the
Flash and Flex compilers
● Can control PixelBender

8. The toolchain
● Make
● Swfmill
● FFMPEG
● HaXe compiler
● Flash debug player or browser plugin

9. Make
● GNU Make
● Simple bash-like configuration
● Ex.
all: menu.swf lib external
external: buildExternal
make -C external
menu.swf: src/*.hx resource.swf compile.hxml catalogue.xml
haxe compile.hxml
lib:
make -C lib
resource.swf: resource.swfml resources/samusic/*
swfmill simple resource.swfml resource.swf
clean:
rm -f resource.swf menu.swf resource2.swf menu2.swf *~

10. Swfmill
● Used to embed resources inside SWF files
– Images
– Audio
– Fonts
– Binary

11. Swfmill (Ex.)
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" ?>
<movie width="1024" height="768" framerate="24" version="9" >
<background color="#000000"/>
<font id="Comic" name="Comic" import="resources/comic.ttf" />
<font id="Arial" name="Arial" import="resources/arialn.ttf" />
<font id="Courier" name="Courier" import="resources/cour.ttf" />
<frame>
<library>
<clip id="Arrow" import="resources/arrow.png" />
<clip id="ProgressBar">
<clip id="ProgressOuter" import="res/progress_o.png"/>
<clip id="ProgressInner" import="res/progress_i.png"/>
</clip>
<clip id="play" import="resources/play.png" />
</library>
</frame>
</movie>

12. FFMPEG
● Used to encode video files to FLV
● Used H.264 codec
● ffmpeg -i filename.extension filename.flv

13. HaXe Compiler
● Use a text configuration file for compilation
● Ex.
-swf menu.swf
-swf-version 9
-swf-lib resource.swf
-resource catalogue.xml@catalogue
-cp src
-cp lib/src
-main Menu

14. HaXe Code
class Background extends flash.display.Sprite {}
class Comic extends flash.text.Font {}
class Menu
{
public var width(default,default) : Float;
public var height(default,none) : Float;
public static function main()
{
flash.Lib.current.addChild(new Background());
}
}

15. A practical example
Requirements:
A platform independent cover DVD with rich
multimedia content
● Photos
● Videos
● Audio

16. Why Flash?!
● Cross platform – Flash player available for
most platforms
● Familiarity for designers
● Support for Audio and Video codecs