Haxe Success Story - Netwars

[Nico Zimmermann]

Hey guys,

i would like to present you a haxe project, we released 6 days ago. It is pretty popular in germany right now.

The website and the webdoc was coded in haxe (js).

http://www.netwars-project.com/webdoc

The project runs best in modern browsers like Crome and Firefox, however - due to the abilities of haxe, it was quite easy for us to make it runnable on IPad, too.

So - although it feels like Flash - it is not... haxe is awesome!

Currently only the Episodes 1, 2, 3 are available.

Greetings, Nico.

[Jason O'Neil]

Hi

Just went through the first episode, very cool!  I found the editing style a little bit too "grunge" for my taste, but I can see why you would do that.

I have to say that's one of the best mixes of video / interactive / infographics / social media that I have seen up until now.  Super smooth on my fairly dated laptop (running Firefox).

Congratulations!  I hope you get a wide audience, it's good for more non-technical people to be thinking about these issues.

Jason

(p.s. the fake terminal showing "ifconfig" output as a form of "hacking" made me laugh!)

--
To post to this group haxe...@googlegroups.com
http://groups.google.com/group/haxelang?hl=en
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Haxe" group.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Nico Zimmermann]

Thanks Jason,

glad that you like it.

Yes, performance was very important, but fortunately with nowadays profiling tools I find it even easier to optimize javascript compared to flash or java.

Also, due to the ability to centralize and reuse performance critical code with haxe - you only have to do the optimization job only once.

I still wonder, if the ifconfig from my laptop is in fact a security issue ?! ;)

Best Nico.

[Robin Burrer]

Hi Nico,

it looks great and runs very smoothly on my mac. Nice integration of video and animations.
However it crashes mobile safari on my ipad (mini non retina) immediately. Also on the iPhone 5s it crashes the browser after a while.
You might want to look into this.

It would be great if you could eleborate on how you developed the site (frameworks etc).

Regards

Robin

[Nico Zimmermann]

Dear Robin,

yes, Safari on iOS is a real issue. It almost certainly crashes after a while due to memory issues. We were not able to fix this, aside from not using certain features (webworker, canvas) on iOS.

We are using the following frameworks:

- Unit testing: https://github.com/massiveinteractive/MassiveUnit

- Animations and most of the css 2d/3d transforms: GSAP http://www.greensock.com/gsap-js/ (https://github.com/PRASS95/TweenMaxHaxeJS)

- Solid Ajax/HTML Dom/CSS operations: JQuery

- Map: https://www.mapbox.com

On our side we developed a haxe code for:

- IOC Container (ala http://www.spicefactory.org/parsley/)

- HTML Navigation framework (to assemble views to screens, leverage push_state, loading, transitions)

- HTML Dom Composite ala Flash Displaylist

- WebAudio and HTML Video Integration

- Framework for webworkers (used for the line-animations)

A real issue at the end of the project was the size of the exported js. When we startet the project, we did not care about creating a modular application. That was a mistake. Our main JS file is gzip compressed 285kb... Also our development environment (FDT) gets slow, when e.g. executing code completion (2-5 seconds).

However, to get around all this from a users perspective, we are packaging all the stuff together using Minify (https://code.google.com/p/minify/). Thus, at the end the user is loading around 1-2mb per episode. Thats not bad, compared to a flash application.

Apart from design, video and storytelling, we worked with 2 developers for about 3 month on the project.

Regards

Nico.

[Simon Krajewski]

Am 21.04.2014 17:07, schrieb Nico Zimmermann:
> Dear Robin,
>
> yes, Safari on iOS is a real issue. It almost certainly crashes after
> a while due to memory issues. We were not able to fix this, aside from
> not using certain features (webworker, canvas) on iOS.
>
> We are using the following frameworks:
>
> - Unit testing: https://github.com/massiveinteractive/MassiveUnit
> - Animations and most of the css 2d/3d transforms:
> GSAP http://www.greensock.com/gsap-js/
> (https://github.com/PRASS95/TweenMaxHaxeJS)
> - Solid Ajax/HTML Dom/CSS operations: JQuery
> - Map: https://www.mapbox.com
>
> On our side we developed a haxe code for:
> - IOC Container (ala http://www.spicefactory.org/parsley/)
> - HTML Navigation framework (to assemble views to screens, leverage
> push_state, loading, transitions)
> - HTML Dom Composite ala Flash Displaylist
> - WebAudio and HTML Video Integration
> - Framework for webworkers (used for the line-animations)
>
> A real issue at the end of the project was the size of the exported
> js. When we startet the project, we did not care about creating a
> modular application. That was a mistake. Our main JS file is gzip
> compressed 285kb... Also our development environment (FDT) gets slow,
> when e.g. executing code completion (2-5 seconds).

You could try using latest Haxe. We recently fixed an issue for TiVo
which was causing compilation times to heavily increase for large
projects that use many libraries and class paths.

Simon

P.S.: Very interesting project!

[Nico Zimmermann]

Dear Simon,

yes, we will try to port our stuff to haxe 3 as soon as possible. However, we still have no "best practice" on how to switch between haxe2 and haxe3 on mac os - including haxelib. To our knowledge all practices involve creating symlinks for directories and files and this doesn't seam very convenient. We are a little scared about that...any suggestions?

Regards

Nico

[Joshua Granick]

Simon, is this fix in the latest development builds only, or did it make it into one of the 3.1.x releases? I'm hitting this issue with some projects. Thank you!

[Simon Krajewski]

Am 21.04.2014 19:42, schrieb Joshua Granick:
> Simon, is this fix in the latest development builds only, or did it
> make it into one of the 3.1.x releases? I'm hitting this issue with
> some projects. Thank you!

Since 3.1.2.

Simon

[Philippe Elsass]

Good to hear that you're still loyal to FDT - it would probably help potential users to know how to best use this IDE.

--
To post to this group haxe...@googlegroups.com
http://groups.google.com/group/haxelang?hl=en

---You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Haxe" group.

[Simon Krajewski]

Ah, I didn't know you were still on Haxe 2. In that case upgrading large
codebases is obviously a bit more work.

Simon

[Nico Zimmermann]

Hey Philippe,

there is really not much to it - FDT for haxe is for free and it compiles the hxml file to the desired binary ;) IDE Support is fairly limited to code highlight and code completion. That's it... I still love it!

[Nico Zimmermann]

It is...

[Philippe Elsass]

Thanks Nico, that's important to clarify the expectations for people looking for a Haxe editor/IDE.

--

To post to this group haxe...@googlegroups.com
http://groups.google.com/group/haxelang?hl=en
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Haxe" group.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--
Philippe

[Justin Donaldson]

This rocks, great job.

[Philippe Elsass]

(fantastic project BTW)

[Confidant]

Looks like a neat project, congrats!
I noticed on Firefox Mac the video would often pause itself, presumably for data to download.

[Nico Zimmermann]

yes, you need at least 100kb/s...

[Samuel Batista]

Spectacular!!! What an awesome use Haxe :D

[Rezmason]

I gotta say, when I checked out your project, I was really impressed. And when I checked the name at the top of this post, I was hardly surprised. :D

Great work, Nico. It's awesome to see you still pushing the envelope.