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Project HaXe Unites Popular Web Development Platforms under One Language

 

JavaScriptSearch
Wednesday, July 5, 2006; 04:19 AM

These days every developer needs a very diverse skillset under his belt.  On the server-side one needs to be familiar with PHP, Perl, Python, or Ruby, to name a few; on the client-side Ajax, JavaScript, Flash/ActionScript and DHTML are a must.


The HaXe project website.

The recently announced "Web oriented universal language" project, named HaXe, addresses the issue by offering a way to integrate the aforementioned techniques under one programming language.  The project's website is available at www.haxe.org/.  The website contains code reference, documentation, downloads and links to related projects.

HaXe brings features that are making it easy to deal with a dynamic world such as DHTML or databases, while still bringing you a full-featured type system with a compiler that will detect errors early in the development phase.

What haXe can do is :

  • create Flash SWF files using Flash APIs for Players 6,7,8 and soon 9
  • generate Javascript code using Browser DHTML API, so you can create AJAX web applications
  • generate Bytecode that can be used on the Server side (using an Apache plugin) or packed into standalone executable

Each of these platforms have their own API, but they share the same programming language and the same standard library, so if your classes are pure code (using no platform-specific API) then they can be compiled and used everywhere, depending on your needs.

Also, haXe make it easy to interoperate between these different platforms, by providing common protocol libraries. It is still possible to use haXe on only one platform if you want for example keep your current working code.

For PHP/Java developers

  • you can easily develop websites using haXe. There is no huge framework, just the tools that you might need when developing a website.
  • haXe distribution is provided with a small dev webserver so you can start making websites using haXe in just 5 minutes.
  • haXe can run into Apache by using mod_neko. Virtual Machine performances are around 30 times faster than PHP, and use a lot less memory than JVM. mod_neko is available on Windows, Linux, OSX and BSD systems.

For Flash developers

  • haXe is available for Flash Players 6-7-8. It will support also Flash 8.5 in the near future, bringing you Flash newest feature without needing to learn a new language everytime.
  • haXe is very conservative about Flash API. You can use all the Flash API like you were used to do in ActionScript.
  • porting your code from AS2 to haXe is very easy, and you should notice additional performances when running it.
  • you can write some part of your code in haXe and use it from an old-fashioned AS2 application.
  • haXe have automatic Delegate creation. That means that you don’t need to worry about which context your methods will be executed in.

For JavaScript developers

  • haXe comes with all the DHTML API needed, with some additional classes that are abstracting the browser painful differences.
  • haXe is bringing you a full-featured type system, so you don’t have to test every bit of JavaScript to check if your program is correct or not, saving you hours of Console Debugging.
  • simply run the haXe compiler and it will output a single .js file to include in your website.

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