Development Workflow with Cocktail and NME by Thomas Fétiveau

by Skial Bainn published on

Silex Labs originally posted the article WWX 2014 Speech: Thomas Fétiveau : Development workflow with Cocktail and NME which links to the YouTube videos, Thomas's slides and a brief synopsis of the talk. Below are the videos and my own overview of the talk.

Overview

Thomas shares his knowledge of using Cocktail, a HTML and CSS rendering engine by SilexLabs the hosts of WWX. He starts off with the development workflow that he uses, starting off by targeting any browser and once everything is working, compile using Cocktail to the Flash player to see if anything needs fixing.

Finally he compiles using Cocktail and NME to target mobile platforms. These three steps appear deceivingly simple, but the Cocktail team have written HTML and CSS parsers which are attempting to be W3C compatible and work on any Haxe target.

Thomas then goes onto show projects he has used Cocktail in, EBuzzing Buzz player, TF1 connect app which targets Adobe AIR, displaying live streams, real time comments, votes and interactions on Twitter and Facebook, the TF1 X player which compiles to HTML5, Flash, native iOS and Android and available as a native app fragment. With each project, Cocktail has been improved with new features and bug fixes.

But it does have its limitations like any library. It currently doesn't have full CSS support, missing some HTML elements. Its best to checkout Cocktails HTML and CSS status page. But it is great for apps that need to target web and native with no compromise on performance and compatibility.

I'm continually impressed by this library and this talk just reinforces that fact for me.

Slides

Demo

Thomas published the source for the demo which appeared in his talk, available from GitHub.