This post is a brief post on what I think were the main highlights from this years WWX2015, hosted at Mozilla Paris and organised by Silex Labs, even though I missed half of the second day :/
10 Years of haXe Haxe
Its already been ten years of Haxe which I've been writing Haxe roundups for the last five! Alot has happened since the first haXe roundup. A quick note that half of the links in the first roundup don't work any more.
TiVo's Activity Library
Todd Kulik from TiVo spoke about their Activity library which “designed to enable a cross-platform mechanism for allowing multiple contexts of execution to co-exist within a single program”.
Todd mentioned that this wasn't a library TiVo needs themselves, but sees the Haxe community needing. I agree, having other libraries built ontop of Activity would simplify cross-platform concurrency.
There was even mention of Activity been merged into the standard library.
Isomorphic Haxe - Ufront
Ufront has been marked as the official web framework for Haxe which was originally created by Franco Ponticelli and Andreas Söderlund, but now in its current form Jason O'Neil leads its development.
And with Jason at the helm, it now powers Haxe.org, the brand new lib.haxe.org, of course the Ufront.net website and afew client projects Jason has worked on, including Jason's startup Today We Learned.
Cppia
Cppia, pronounced sepia, is a new HXCPP target by Hugh Sanderson which is the entire HXCPP library compiled to a single executable allowing you to iterate faster by compiling to instruction assembly which is then interpreted by Cppia.
This means you can run HXCPP code without a cpp compiler. You can also create your own Cppia host, including other libraries like AcadNME which is a NME Cppia host. There's even an Android version of AcadNME available from the Play Store.
Currently Cppia is comparable to Jit Neko in terms of speed, which are both slower than JavaScript engines. But if I understand correctly, the execution speed of Cppia scripts hasn't been optimised, yet. But if speed is an issue then compile you own Cppia host which natively contains the slow piece of code from your script.
Kha
Robert Konrad talked about one of the more, unfortunately, unknown frameworks in Haxe, Kha. Robert covered the history leading up to the creation of Kha, formerly called Kje and a Java framework.
Like most Haxe frameworks, Kha generates IDE project files for you allowing easier debugger integration. But Kha comes with alot of other tools, Krafix and Kraffiti are just a couple.
Krafix allows you to compile GLSL to HLSL, AGAL, Metal and Vulcan's SPIV-R which works with Nicolas Cannasse's hxsl language, which of course is cross-platform.
Kraffiti takes your image assets and convert them to the best performing format for your target.
Robert also had to mentioned ZBlend by Lubos Lenco, which combines the Kha framework and all its tools integrating with Blender to offer a complete game making package.
He also lightly touched on a new feature, powered by macros, that allows you to create multiplayer games with minor changes to your code. Kha at compile time will create a headless nodejs server which has the final say. It can also rewind game time!
Robert finished off demonstrating two new additions to Kha, targeting Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard and generating the source code and running Mampf Monster through Unity3D, gaining Unity's 21 platforms to target.
Robert has published a series of articles detailing the new features in Kha, Kha/make unity, Networked Multiplayer and an article based on his WWX talk.
OpenFL on Consoles
Lars Doucet gave an energetic talk, which he has distilled into an article for easier consumption, speaking about the progress of getting Lime and OpenFL onto consoles.
With the help from Joshua Granick, James Grey, Justo Delgado, Lucas Pope, Puzzl and Lars himself have teamed up with WayForward who have 25 years worth of console knowledge into their wfEngine which gives them access to the WiiU, 3DS, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PS3, PS4 and the PS Vita.
Lars and the team have made the most progress getting Lime and OpenFL working on the WiiU solely because they got the WiiU dev kit first.
Remember this isnt just for games, think of Netflix for example. Lars is currently looking for anyone interested in Haxe, Lime and OpenFL being on consoles to fill out this form to help him gauge interest.
And a few more
Of course there was more than these five topics at WWX2015.
Philippe Elsass talked about the history of FlashDevelop and Haxe, as well as releasing FlashDevelop 5. There's now going to be a HaxeDevelop.
Elliott Stoneham gave his talk of getting GoLang programs transpiled to Haxe, in which he demonstrated transpiling a GoLang nudity detector to Haxe and compiling to JavaScript.
Khaled Garbaya published the article Introducing Duell Tool - A better build tool for Haxe which Sven Otto and Rui Campos spoke about. Khaled's article can explain it better than I can.
And lastly, a talk I wished I hadn't missed, Daniel Glazman spoke about Quaxe, a pure Haxe HTML5 / CSS parser and renderer with native-like UI through Qt bindings. But apparently he ended with concerns about the Haxe Foundation, its roadmap is unknown, its finances are unknown and the foundation itself relatively unknown.
The Haxe Foundation seem to have taken note and have started a Project Management repository to discuss and coordinate the future.
