haXe is a new powerful programming language that can generate Javascript code and also compiles to Flash SWF (including latest Flash Player 9). It handles all the browsers differences and has crossplatform APIs such as Xml, Http, Date…

The sweet thing about it, is instead of using 3 languages to write webapps, now you only need one. Instead of Actionscript+Javascript+PHP, you can use haXe+haXe+haXe.

As a replacement for ActionScript: contains several powerful language features, including ‘type inference’, and can compile the same code to flash 6,7,8 or 9. No need to switch syntax when going between versions.

As a replacement for JavaScript: Provides a typed language, to help you make fewer errors, versus javascript’s complete dynamic typing.

As a replacement for PHP(Perl/Python/Ruby/etc): Use the same language on the client and the server. Libraries for file/database/image/etc manipulation. Compiled to bytecode, thus can run much faster than the interpreted languages (some benchmarks show it 20 times faster than PHP).

haXe website | digg story

This is a followup to my previous post

Since I made that post, several people (who have some audio programming experience, unlike me) have taken my technique and greatly improved it.

Here are the links:

• PJ @ E-Phonic’s abstract Realtime Audio Syntesizer
• Andre Michelle’s tb-303 synthesizer
• flashcodersbrighton’s nice reusable class which makes it so anybody can generate their own audio

They are all very exciting, and exactly the sorts of things I was hoping would happen when I published that sound example 3-ish months ago.

So I’ve been ignoring the whole ajax/js/dhtml thing, only doing flash programming. It turns out that the implementation of XmlHttpRequest has a few major shortfalls. Short summary of linked article:

1. There are no persistant connections. This rules out any type of ’server-push’ programming model, forcing clients to poll the server, which either puts more strain on bandwidth and server resources, and/or increases lag time between updates.
2. You can’t turn off HTTP request headers

So in essence, AJAX coders are still stuck with LoadVars. They don’t have anything that offers the functionality of XMLSocket (persistant connections, ability to send whatever data you want).

The one shortfall of XMLSocket (text only data, must be null-terminated), is removed in Flash 9 (formerly known as 8.5), and already I’ve seen a flash-based pop3 example as well as a flash-based vnc viewer/client.

The solution is to modify the implementation of XmlHttpRequest. The above article talks about some possible fixes. This would really be a boon to all the “Web 2.0″ coders who for whatever reason are unable to use Flash.

Please see this update

As far as I know the company formerly known as Macromedia did not add any kind of dynamic sound generation methods to ActionSciprt3 / Flash 8.5. However, they did add two features we can use to hack it:

1. ‘ByteArray’ class which is a low level data class
2. ‘Loader’ class (formerly MovieClipLoader) can load from a ByteArray, as well as the normal loading from a URL.

So the theory is, I generate valid swf into a byteArray that simply contains sound data, then I load that and it plays.

This would involve me understanding the swf binary file format…however that’s a bit of a pain, so I cheated.

1. Create a .fla in Flash 8 & import a sound into frame 1
2. Copy & paste the entire data from the .swf into an array in my AS3 project
3. At runtime, replace the central part of the array with new data (leaving the header and footer of the data intact). Just a bit of trial & error to see how much data needs to be left

Here is a very simple example:
(more…)

This is hilarious. I wonder how long until this gets pulled out. Someone’s head is definately going to roll.

1. Go to JetBlue Routemap
2. Click on any destination airport
3. Hold shift and type PBJ

UPDATE: As I write this, the page no longer has the animation, and only has a static image now. Here is a screenshot to see what you missed.