Mobile, HTML5, Flash: First impressions on Haxe + NME
I will not argue on this post about Flash vs. Html5, I think many people already blogged or discussed the subject during the past months.
As freelance, I clearly noticed a shift from the market and my expectations are that flash developers will become less focused on Actionscript and will add other programming skills such as Javascript/HTML5, Android and iOS.
To get prepared to move forward, I started to dive into Java for Android a couple of months ago.
Unfortunately, I was lacking time and I could not build thorough knowledge.
I was actually, a lot busy with Flash projects until now – mainly for the game industry.
Regarding Javascript, I must confess that I got confused with all the resources that were available and it was difficult to get started. Over the years, I relied on a couple of framework and “best practices” to set up my projects, using low-coupling, and MVC architecture. I could not really find my way with that the Javascript community could offer.
In September 2011, Nicolas Cannasse introduced the plugin for FDT at the conference.
As a long-time user of , I could already enjoy an IDE with a great integration of , but the new thing was the enthusiasm of the Flash community towards haXe development.
I recently found some time to get started with – “an easy-to-use, cross-platform framework” – build with haXe.
I am still very new with mobile and web platforms, but so far, my experiments are promising and fun.
* First of all, NME’s API is very similar to AS3 and the learning curse is quasi null.
* The FD crew are constantly improving the ease for developing/compiling NME with project templates that are intuitive to use.
(I am currently testing the capabilities of my setup with a single project that I compile for Android (native 2.1), Flash and HTML5 at once, using the pre-build and post-build command from FD’s project properties, and its awesome!!)
I am not owning a Mac at the moment, therefore I could not yet try the iOS target, but I will definitely add it to my up-coming experiments.
* One other strong point is the forum and the mailing-list of NME and haXe where people are active and helpful.
Looks like I know better where to head now and I am really excited by the all new possibilities that are yet to explore.
I will try to post some of my experiments in the up-coming weeks/months (depending of the time I will have in my hands)
Stay tuned 
