MadMode

I vaguely recall discovering haxe quite a while ago. While its site is very shiny, overblown claims like this made it look more like proprietary marketing glitz than maturity in an open source project:

If you could only learn one programming language, Haxe would be it. It's universal. It's powerful. It's easy-to-use.

But I'm doing some maintenance on a PHP customization and I'd really like the computer to help me get it right. Brian McKenna is a developer I follow for his work integrating functional programming with Javascript, so when I saw him tweeting about haxe, I wanted to take another look.

I'll leave the rest of the PHP story for another episode, but in short, haxe seems to have lots of the goodies from scala (type inference, sum and product types, pattern matching etc. on top of a Java-like OOP language) without the slow compiles and general Java bloat.

Haxe is "a web language" but its roots are in the flash game development world. NME is the current media engine library with support for deployment to "Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Flash and even HTML5". It was launched in 2007 and these days its functionality and performance compete with Adobe Air.

Out of curiosity, I tried the android target from the Getting Started docs:

nme setup android
nme create ActuateExample
nme test android

I didn't win right away; I went to #nme on freenode and reported:

<DanC_> harrumph. downloaded gigabytes of android SDK stuff only to get:
 ActuateExample$ nme test android
 Uncaught exception - C Stack Overflow
 Error :

But a minute later, I was making progress:

<DanC_> build works... wild... ndk...
 this looks easier than scala for android

And fifteen minutes later:

<DanC_> ok... I'm blown away. `ant debug install` and there it is, running on my phone.
 1.77MB

The setup step downloaded the whole android SDK and NDK. The build step produces C++ code and an ant build.xml file. Plug in the phone, run ant, and there it is, on the phone, with animated balls bouncing around.

The other examples were hit-and-miss:

<DanC_> gen/android/widget/Toast.hx:151: characters 6-24 : native.#JNI has no field callMember
 that was from 19-AndroidJNI
 NyanCat doesn't work in html5
 $ nme test neko
 Sys_error("null/temp_8224482.neko: No such file or directory")
 this works: SimpleOpenGLView$ nme test neko -64
 blank screen again, black this time: SimpleOpenGLView$ nme test linux -64
 works: SimpleOpenGLView$ nme test html5

Then I got adventurous and tried to upgrade to haxe 3 and nme 4 to run spinehx and got all out of whack:

<DanC_> spinehx$ nme test html5
 Error: : unknown option `--js-modern'.

So things are still rough around the edges, but it looks like there's plenty of mature functionality in the middle. This looks like the most promising approach I've seen for game development for android and HTML5.

I'm curious to know how well it supports the overall android API, with notifications and intents and such. I'm also tempted to try it out for REST style apps with AngularJS, like finquick.