haXe Forum > Review of my experiences with HaXe
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Drakim Feb 03 at 02:34
I'm a new user to HaXe, and I thought I'd share my experience of how using HaXe thus far as been.
I think HaXe scares away newcomers because of weak documentation and lacking examples and tutorials.
I know now for example, that having a loading screen with more than one frame is outside the scope of the HaXe compiler, but I think that there should be a clear tutorial and lots of explanations on what applications you can use (like Sam HaXe) to get a loading screen. This is a pretty essential thing, yet it's something that's really hard to do. This might not be the fault of HaXe or the developers or anything like that, but as it stands, making a simple functional flash app in HaXe is a lot harder than it is in other environments.
Also, I feel that the documentation on HaXe seems to expect you to know how flash internally works already. It feels wrong that a user should have to learn flash though actionscript 3 and adobe flash so that he can finally start learning HaXe. I can google for information, but it's all tried into AS3, and usually a graphical editor, with no real explanation about the underlying mechanics. Attaching MovieClips to the scene? I had no idea what these things ment, and yet every tutorial I found seemed to assume that I should. Is there any sort of place that could explain to a newcomer exactly how the internals of a flash works and how this affects you as a HaXe developer? Like, letting the user know why he can't just issue draw commands, and why you can stack up displayobjects in each other and whatnot.
These are my cents. Disagree if you like, but, for me, getting into HaXe was a hard affair, and I consider myself a decent experienced coder.
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Oleg Sivokon Feb 03 at 04:43
Been almost same new user myself I found that:
- IRC channel is a better place to ask your questions. (I got the same thing you are talking about, that is 2-frames SWF figured out by asking there).
- I think HaXe is much smaller community comparing to that of general Flash and AS3... I don't have any statistics, but my guess would be that Flash / AS users would outscore HaXe users 100 to 1, if not more... Funny enough, I think it is a branding / advertising issue, which isn't really reflecting the capabilities of both languages / platforms / you name it. (Well, I've got many years of AS programming in my backpack, so, I think I can easily speak for the other side at least).
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I also think that HaXe documentation and learning materials are insufficient, but this is kind of what you get when you use this kind of things... I see it from a bit different perspective though. I'm moderating some quite popular forum dedicated to Flash and all related technologies and now we're in process of opening a new forum dedicated to HaXe. There isn't enough materials to even put together some basic FAQ and things like that, yet... So that is for me and few other enthusiastic people who'd write those materials :) It's not going to happen all on it's own :) So, what I'm basically saying, for once it is up to people like you or me to make a research, test, benchmark and whatnot and write the documentation and tutorials :) Not everyone likes it, but I do, so I don't mind :) -
Drakim
Don't assume all the talk of pure open-source actually means that all the people using haXe commercially don't use flash IDE along side and therefore have not had to learn and understand it. I have coder friends who have tried to learn flash IDE and gave up.
But having said that, it would be nice to explore with and without flash IDE haxe flash development tutorials further, suited for people interested in learning haXe flash. I would love more tutorials on non flash haXe as I feel similar to how you may have felt about flash.
If your interested in working on flash haxe tutorials then it is definitely something that interests me and and I would be happy to work with.
So far I have only written a few haXe pages... byexample, compositeflashgraphicswithhaxe and usingas3classes, but I would like to write more, but from a long time flash user it is not always easy to see it from others perspectives, often haXe users have much better code education than me, but I have found some have less understanding of flash and maybe practical interface development.
But the way to improve the situation is to get involved and add your own take either on the site, or on your blog, its always too easy to say what's wrong, you always get more respect for trying to improve what you think is wrong, actions speak louder than words.
;j -
Oleg
Which forum I wrote a starter over at twelvestone, what sort of stuff are you thinking about.
;j
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Drakim Feb 03 at 06:13
Thanks for the replies.
I will definitely help the HaXe community by writing tutorials and whatnot when I feel confident to the task. Because, right now, if somebody asked if I would recommend HaXe, I'm not sure if I could with good faith recommend it unless the person already had tons of experience from other languages. I mean, it's a super awesome language, but I think the person would have trouble learning it and finding help.
It's an especially bad situation since so much flash knowledge is tied into actionscript and the various graphical IDEs. If you ask something about a movieclip, chances are the reply you will get is "you click here, and select that option, and click there".
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Oleg Sivokon Feb 03 at 13:50
Drakim:
I think that some HaXe coders can be found at FlashDevelop forum sometimes, there's also a HaXe forum at actionscript.org, but it has very low traffic, I don't know of any actionscript.org olditimers using HaXe, so, maybe not the best place to ask your questions... I think I saw couple of HaXe-related questions on flashkit.com, but they would drawn in a general forum since there isn't a special HaXe forum there.
There's also mailing list http://lists.motion-twin.com/mailman/listinfo/haxe for HaXe related questions, however, I really don't like mailing lists because it's difficult to follow discussions and it has lots of unrelated tech. junk in between the messages.
I can also see some sort of tendency in people who switched from AS to HaXe to abandon AS forums, I think I knew few board members at kirupa.com, who switched to HaXe and I don't see them there any more :)
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Justin:
It's http://flasher.ru/forum . It's in Russian, but, I think the url itself quite explains it :) I'm usually known as wvxvw at other boards, it's just HaXe forum where your name is used instead of the username to sign posts :)
I think JLM at actionscrip.org would be your username, am I right? :) -
Zjnue Brzavi Feb 03 at 16:22
Here is a nice haXe intro video tutorial from a traditionally actionscript / flex based resource:
http://pv3d.org/2010/01/27/haxe-tutorial/ -
Kris Worytkiewicz Feb 03 at 23:28
Well, HaXe is definitely cool in my opinion. However, I am not sure how much relevant this opinion is, since for me it's more like playtime (professionally I do research in maths and theoretical comp sci). I first tried to learn Flex/Degrafa, but gave up since it is (to me) absolutely hopeless, at least with the free command-line tools: there seems to be no logic whatsoever. Ok, Adobe is supposed to be lazy :-) I'm probably being background-biased, but I downloaded HaXe when noticing that it was implemented in OCaml... So after a week I'm doing some rudimentary graphics, loading pics from ressources, setting framerates and such. I agree that the docs could be better. One rather weak point is in my opinion the module structure (naming conventions for files). In fact I am right now stuck with a (probably totally trivial) problem with this.
Cheers, Kris
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oleg, yep that's me.
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Oleg I don't see a haXe section in the russian forum?
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Oleg Sivokon Feb 04 at 22:50
Yep, that's true :) We're gathering materials right now, but we will open one once we have enough. They are in the closed mod's forum for now.
I've made few short blog posts there though:
http://www.flasher.ru/forum/blog.php?b=148
and
http://www.flasher.ru/forum/blog.php?b=139
But they aren't yet cached by Google, so, I cannot give you a link to the translated version... well, maybe if you view them from Chrome + translator, you will get an idea.
(First link is about 2-frames preloader, second is about E4X <-> HaXe relationship).
And DarkLight (he had originally started the whole thing)
He's working on that too. (Well, I hope he does :D)
http://dl1t.com/blog/?cat=8
Here's something I could get from the translator:
Translated
The main obstacle for opening it has been so far the lack of materials and thus lack of HaXe-related questions. According to forum statistics the word "HaXe" was found ~20 times for the last year, so, it was difficult to convince the administrators it is actually needed :) -
Oleg Sivokon Feb 04 at 22:58
PS. actually another post was cached:
Translated
