Some more work seems to be mandatory in that area though. In particular, I’m still having difficulties in handling the assets in an unified manner. I know this is worked on currently, but it still doesn’t work for me.

My overall feeling is that haxe is neat and that this is the hacking frontier I want to be part of currently. Also, do not forget that when you want to produce flash from a linux box, haxe is about the only solution you have. And that’s the only *free* solution…

You can use ‘haxelib search ‘ to look for a given project and ‘haxelib info ‘ to get informations about a specific project. However, this is not very practical. One might prefer to build an UI frontend on top of the haxelib commandline tool. I actually suggested Michel to add it to the haxePlugin for FD3.

Want to contribute ?

I wasn’t too serious about the “hidden agenda” of mtasc

You’re right, I didn’t emphasize how unique haxelib is in the development world.

However my concern is that the haxelib page is a somewhat long list of cryptic project names without any organization. How can I know what the projects do? are they Flash or JS or Neko related? Could there be a list of the projects with their description? And maybe some per-platform filtering so people don’t miss the hard work exposed in this lib.

First a little correction : we didn’t have any hidden agenda when making MTASC. It was just for the sake of “giving back” to the open source community, since we were using already many open source tools. You can read more about it on this post.

Also, while I can agree that haXe is a little rough on the edges, things have been improving greatly in the past months. Of course, we are still lacking in the documentation area, but there are many very good quality libraries available in haXe. Complaining about lack of haxelib categories is a bit unfair : there is nothing equivalent in AS3, no central library repository and no easy way to find libraries (apart Google, which haXe also support )

As you also know, some people such as Michel are doing great work at supporting haXe IDE plugins, for example for FlashDevelop3, and so far the end-users have been very happy with it.

Anyway, I feel comfortable with constructive criticism, especially since I know that all the issues that you talk about are currently being addressed

I am a vb6 (wanting desperately to be an ‘EX’-vb6) developer with a little C and AS experience. Some of my apps (vb) use complete/partial Flash interfaces and I make huge use of third-party components and code-snippets that are widely available – even for some ‘less than common’ functionality. Some are commercial, some are free … some are open-source and some are not. BUT – I can almost ALWAYS find a solution to my client’s need quickly and cost-efficiently without having to ‘re-invent the wheel’ or having to develop any low-level functionality myself. This, ofcourse was the magic of vb.

Now that vb is dying and I (and my clients) am looking to spread my wings into other OS (namely Linux … and perhaps MAC), I have been searching for THE technology to back, learn and implement for my future dev. I have searched high … and I have searched low … and I have ‘re-searched’ (parden the pun).

In my searches I have found some interesting projects (like KBasic), but none have proved to be as flexible, capable, exciting, … and promising as haXe. But alas, your three-point comments of the areas in which haXe is lacking, is absolutely ’spot-on’.

I believe that ONLY haXe can take me (and probably millions of other vb6 developers) where I want to go in the future. But the issues that you raised NEED to be addressed (urgently)… so PLEASE come on Nicolas. Under-the-hood, this vehicle (haXe) is brilliant. Now, if we can simply create some effective/efficient controls (point-and-click, for this day-and-age please) for ‘driving’ this powerfull beast (and perhaps some nice ‘creature comforts’ like WYSIWYG GUI IDE), then haXe will be unstoppable.

Even if some of the ‘niceties’ must come at a price. As nice as it is (and I am always imensely greatful) to find free tools, components, tutorials, etc., I have often been quite happy to pay for very resonably priced tools that have helped me to do my job confidently and efficiently and cost-effectively.

IMHO haXe is THE best software infrastructure for web/desktop, cross-platfom development. The development community at large (that is, those of us (developers) that are not as gifted or super-human as someone like Nicolas) is desparate for a dev platform that has the POWER and FLEXIBILITY of haXe with the ease-of-use of vb6.

Also, over a decade ago, I began to learn vb with a book ‘Learn Visual Basic in 21 days’. The first original project that I tackled, after reading that book for 21 days (mostly between 03h00 and 07h00 in the mornings, while holding down another unrelated job), ended up developing into a control app for a specialized building-management system that managed all the lighting for one of the largest, most prominent buildings in the city that I live in, for almost a decade. Can we have a ‘Learn haXe in 21 days’ please?