Hello dear people,
I’d like to take the opportunity of my move to openFL / Haxe from ye olde Air / AS3 workflow to ask a few questions of people who have already more experience:
I am basically a one man company and in all the years I always specialized in custom solutions and non-commercial apps for artists, museums etc.
One reason that I never really left the Air “ecosystem” was the pragmatic approach to keep developement time and bureaucracy as small as possible to be able to produce quickly so that the price would also be acceptable for clients.
Most projects never needed a lot of modern bells and whistles that native or more advanced frameworks would provide so Air was in 90% sufficient.
Now after a few days with Haxe / openFL i get the same feeling that I had before with some other frameworks:
There are so many dependencies that it feels hard to keep up with the demands of a constantly changing system in order to have a reliable workflow. ( Android SKD, xCode, npm, haxe, openfl etc. want to be maintained )
I guess that this is no problem for a smaller company with specialists for various fields who are taking care of maintenance but for single freelancers it feels a bit overwhelming, so that a lot of time seems t be going into debugging an environment instead of actual production time.
Any thoughts on that?
Do other freelancers have the same thoughts / issues?
Or does it just simply get better with time?
well the only thing you need to keep up with is Haxe itself other things are just a part of the echo system.
in Haxe echo system you only need to focus on what your needs are , no one wants to deal with every platform which Haxe is providing i mean it depends on the use cases projects etc.
Like i use Haxe for web and desktop apps and for Mobile apps i prefer native languages [Kotlin, Swift](don’t put your all eggs in one basket learned the hard way [Flash]); but only for the apps not for games so if i want to make a game i choose Haxe over any other thing.
and as you know what is happening with Air if not you should check it out they are now asking for $ to use it without a forced splash screen just like Unity3d.
so choose the right tool for the job, obviously you will learn it over time. like i am learning Coconut because i don’t want to write JavaScript and i like React so here it is a perfect alternate for it with in Haxe system, for interactive things i will use Openfl, i hope you get my point.
no one wants to deal with every platform which Haxe is providing i mean it depends on the use cases projects etc.
unfortunately i do very often have the probem when i still do not know if the final hardware will run ios, android, macos or windows when i have to start working, so being able to publish for all systems quickly is very important. this is why i chose Haxe / openFl. Other options did not seem so flexible expecially since, in difference to Air, it poduces native code.
(don’t put your all eggs in one basket learned the hard way [Flash])
well, you are right, but learning and keeping up to date with native developement for all targets … that would be too much for now.
and as you know what is happening with Air if not you should check it out they are now asking for $ to use it without a forced splash screen just like Unity3d.
this is indeed the reason why i finally decided to jump ship. It does not look promising at all, when they are putting a price tag on software and accompany it with statements like “should work” …
A more concrete question:
Do you work with virtual environments to keep target versions and sdks independent?
The things is that i have 4 different SSD hard drives installed in my work station just to manage the platform specific things, such as Haxe and all of it’s projects, examples, libs all are sitting at one place same for other platforms the heaviest one is Android. IOS is an exception. this make updating things so much easier to me.
i make sure nothing should break my windows environment settings, and make sure not everything which i work on will have to depend on windows so if i move one of my hard disk to another machine it should work out of the box, there are some things which doesn’t want to work stand alone or need some things pre installed but other then this, from python to haxe everything is separate.
you can manage it like this in a single drive too just need to organize in a better way.
Here are some links regarding details. i my self heard this on Facebook AS3 group where i guess one of the Harman team member himself introduced this in a post.
learned the hard way [Flash]); but only for the apps not for games so if i want to make a game i choose Haxe over any other thing.