elimak

My Parisian Summer: Haxe JS, Cocktail & the wonderful time in the capital… next?

Paris…
It’s been 6 weeks of fun and discoveries, and I am already missing my time in this beautiful city among great people!



If you followed my latest posts, you surely noticed that I started to use Haxe a couple of months ago.
My first focus was on the game development, using Haxe NME and awe6. As an experienced AS3 developer, I was quickly comfortable with this way of using Haxe. Nevertheless, I felt that I missed some knowledge and experience on the JavaScript target.
In June 2012, I ran a workshop in Paris on awe6 together with Alex Hoyau who presented an introduction to Haxe. The event was organized and hosted by the core team of Silex-labs.
As I kept in touch with them, they offered me to join their summer dev-camp which aimed to define and prototype the first bricks of their new product: Silex v2 – a HTML5 editor.
Working as freelance since 2 years now, I decided to join the adventure!

In the past 6 weeks, I learned a lot on the JavaScript platform.
After discovering Cocktail, I helped developing a file manager using Haxe JS, Haxe PHP and the SLPlayer of Intermedia (Silex-labs). Beside the main code written in Haxe, I wrote a php script to chunk the uploaded files and a JavaScript web-worker to upload multiple files using multi-threading. I must confess that I was particularly slow as I miss some experience with server-side development. Nevertheless, it was fun and these few weeks allowed me to build some valuable knowledge.

I am more than ever excited to explore Haxe further more, which seems to have infinite potential.
Recently, Massive Interactive released a couple of libraries: MassiveInject, MassiveMVC, MassivePartial and MassiveSignal and they are next on my list. Especially MassiveMVC and MassiveSignal that are ports of the AS3 libraries: RobotLegs & Signals. A combination of tools that I used many time in my AS3 projects.

One extra thing that I also learned this summer, is that, I missed developing games or data-visualizations and I hope that I will be involved in such work again soon.

So what’s next?

I was contacted by a media institute to give an AS3 course and a lecture on data-visualization in Amsterdam, and if this goes through, it will be a nice challenge ahead.

Begin September, I will be attending “Reasons to be creative” and I am really looking forward to meet inspiring people again and to join some of my friends over there.

Mid-September, I will be joining the PICNIC event in Amsterdam and my main goal will be to investigate the trends regarding Gamification, Serious-Games and Data-visualization.

I am currently available for contract work, so if need some help for your data-viz, mobile/web app/game, do not hesitate to contact me.

And… oh yeah, I am living for more than 7 years in the Netherlands now, and I am looking forward to hoist the mainsail for new international adventures. So if you are planning to develop the last generation game or some amazing data-visualizations, with Haxe in the other side of the planet… Guess what? well, I am totally in!