Tag Archives: cross device development

haXe : Conditional compiling

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A nice and exciting feature about haXe is conditional compilation. That means one can specify which code to compile depending upon the target chosen at the compile time. Hah, that does not make sense ? Ya, I know. Let me explain again.
There is a compiler and while providing argument to it we have to specify which target we are compiling to. Like in case of haXe and NME we can compile it to a lot of different targets. The compiler argument for flash or swf output looks as below

haxelib run nme test app.nmml flash

Now we can compile the code to HTML5 with the following argument

haxelib run nme test app.nmml html5

Thats the beauty of the language. Most of the time its the same code, but then there are times when we need to write different codes for different targets (may be layout, view elements, can be anything). But then one does not need to keep a separate project for all the different cases. The solution is conditional compiling. What it does is depending upon the target type specified to compiler, it picks up the right code from the same file. Whoaa!! Magic :)
How does it do it or how we make it aware of this ?! You asked it. Lets see it.

#if flash
//Code for SWF output
#elseif js
//Code for HTML5/js output
#else
#end

Thats simple. Its one file, completely in itself, but when it comes to compiler it picks up the right code part depending upon the target type.

One thing to remember though, that when specifying HTML5 target, it picks up conditions from “js”, it does not have a “html5″ option. This particular thing took me sometime to figure out. Just thought would point out here saving someone’s time out there.

Happy haxe -ing :)

haXe : adding image to a project

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Well, while its all well and good to create graphics and animations on runtime with code. We must agree that there are situations, when we need to external images in our project. This is done by defining a tag in our .nmml file. The exact thing looks as below.

<assets path="src/assets/" rename="assets/all/" include="*"></assets>

In the tag above we are defining that all the files inside “src/assets” folder will be copied over to our final project under folder “assets/all”. Thats one part of the story. Now in our haXe code, we access the assets with their path as below.

import nme.Assets;//import the Class
var img:Bitmap = new Bitmap (Assets.getBitmapData ("assets/all/home.jpg"));//get the asset

The code above the pretty self explanatory. First we need to import the “nme.Assets” and then use it to get the asset into our project. Things to note, while providing path to access the resource, its the “renamed” path we define in the “XML” while adding the asset.
Happy haXe -ing

haXe : switch-case

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This syntax is slightly different from other languages in general. It requires a “default” case and without that the compiler will throw error compiling it. The second change is, we do not need a “break” at each “case”, the “break” is automatically called on the last statement.
The general syntax is 

switch (result)
		{
			case 'one':
				i = 1;
				//break;
			case 'two':
				i = 2;
			case 'three':
				i = 3;
			case 'four':
				i = 4;
			case 'five':
				i = 5;
			case 'six':
				i = 6;
			case 'seven':
				i = 7;
			default :
				i = 0 ;
		}

Thats not a very huge change, but I think the information will save you sometime in the beginning.
happy haXe -ing.

haXe : doing a regular update and NME

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This came to me as a surprise while trying to write a script, which can run in iOS, HTML5, Flash and Neko. I knew it can be done by cross-compiling through NME to all these target platforms. While this hold good almost in every case but when it comes to regular stage update or the ENTER_FRAME event, it is a problem.
Well, if you are a flash developer and depend on ENTER_FRAME event for a long time, then it may come to you as a surprise like me. The game loop as the gaming engines call it, now has to be worked upon. Fortunately we have a timer function in haXe and that quite fits the game.
Before going ahead in timer, lets see the unreliable nature of ENTER_FRAME for all targets. Firstly I was creating different circles in stage area with an ENTER_FRAME, while that worked well in all platforms, I thought its good to go for all. But then I tried to rely upon the same ENTER_FRAME event with a drag and drop and position change of the elements. Whoa!! That does not work! I stopped relying on the ENTER_FRAME event and changed that with Timer and everything is back in the action again.
The haXe timer code is a little different than Flash timer and the code looks as below.

var timer = new Timer(10); //10 is the time difference in milliseconds between the timer call
timer.run = onEachTimerTick;//its kind of event listener
function onEachTimerTick():Void {}

For me, ENTER_FRAME event only worked for Flash targets and nothing else. So be careful if you want to target other delivery methods.

Happy coding!

NME 3.1 RC4 is released

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Well moving ahead with haXe and NME is as exciting as the new release of NME library. Though this is a minor release to RC4, but looking at the speed of its release cycle, it seems we are just fine learning the new options in NME, where the NME development team is doing their best to give us new features soon.
If you are like me and coding in MAC then there is definitely a point when you think how to install the new libraries into my development environment. Actually its as simple as putting the downloaded library in right folder and setting the current environment to point to the latest version.
It may be required depending upon your machine settings that you may require to configure your machine so as to show all the hidden and system files, which are generally hidden.
All the supporting libraries of haXe, remains inside haXe folder. So just navigate to 

/usr/lib/haxe/lib

And there you will find all the library folders.Now go inside “nme” folder and the current version of the library will be present there. All we have to do is, download a new version of the library and put it in this folder. I have recently downloaded the 3.1RC4 and extracted it into this folder. The main folder name I kept as “3,1,RC4″, keep a note these are comma (3,1,RC4) thats how haXe reads them. So its just a practice. Now there is a file inthis folder with name “.current”(This file is generally hidden). Here the currently active version of the lib is specified. Open this file in a text editor and remove everything else (If there is anything at all there). Then type “3.1.RC4″ as the only text in the file. Just remember when we name our folder as comma separated values, haXe reads them as dot(.) while reading from the “.current” file, so we have to just follow this instruction.
That all to it. If you fire up the Terminal in MAC and type 

haxelib list

then the output will show something like 

nme: 3.0.1 [3.1.RC4]

The version with a square bracket is the currently active version.
So get the latest lib and activate it in development environment and have fun :)

OpenPlug released for FlashBuilder 4.5

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If you are a flash developer, then the easiest way to create a cross device application is to use OpenPlug Studio. The feature list of the tool can be read here in detail. While the standalone version of this free tool is in its alpha version, the FlashBuilder version was out for sometime.
The best part of the new release is, it now supports FlashBuilder 4.5.