An open source flash workflow using HaXe (2009)
- 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