FlexJS 360|Flex 2014 Alex Harui Apache Flex PMC Chair May 15, 2014 Agenda • Who • Why • What • Highlights • Demo • When • How Who am I? • Apache Flex Committer and PMC Member • Apache Flex PMC Chair • Adobe Employee • Flex SDK developer for almost 12 years • 30+ years experience Disclaimer • Even though I am a full-time Adobe employee and spend my whole day on Apache Flex, everything I say here is just my opinion, and not an official statement on behalf of Adobe Systems Inc., or the Apache Software Foundation, or even the Apache Flex project itself. Why • Then: • Flash used to be in virtually every browser. • AIR used to run on most computers. • Flex provided excellent developer productivity • IDEs • Code intelligence • Debugger • Write-once run anywhere Why • Now: • There are browsers that don’t run Flash and devices that AIR cannot target • There are large existing MXML and ActionScript code bases • JavaScript still makes it easy to make hard-to-find mistakes • Some of these JS frameworks makes your code not look like code What == FlexJS • Use MXML and ActionScript to create either SWFs that run in Flash/AIR or HTML/JS/CSS files that run in browsers (or anywhere HTML/JS/CSS runs) without Flash. • IE8, 9, 10, Chrome, Firefox, Android, IOS • Mobile Apps via Apache Cordova (PhoneGap) • Adobe Common Extensibility Platform (a.k.a. Creative Suite Extensions) • Bring the advantages of Flex to the JavaScript world Several Approaches • Emulate Flash Player • Emulate current Apache Flex SDK • New framework Emulate Flash Player • Then you wouldn’t have to change any of your code. • But that’s a lot of work • Fidelity/Performance issues • Frame events • Other Flash-isms (embedded fonts, Stage3D) • But some folks have doing this: • See JooFlash, DartFlash, Shumway Emulate Flex SDK • Then you’d have to change code wherever you went straight to Flash APIs • useHandCursor, blendModes, filters • Still some fidelity/performance issues • Weak references, Dictionary, E4x, Embedded Assets • The existing API has class dependencies that might produce bigger resulting JS files. • But might be worth a try..