[SUBMISSION MADE ON SUNDAY 14TH SEPTEMBER]
Dear FOSDEM 2015 organizers,
In response to https://fosdem.org/2015/news/2014-07-01-call-for-participation/ we would like to organize a developer room at FOSDEM 2015 for the Haxe community, which is a small but very active group of open-source developers mostly building cross-platform interactive applications for games, entertainment and business communications.
The Haxe project (www.haxe.org) exists to enable collaboration across project and domain boundaries, it is a programming language and open source toolkit that is the secret to beating platform lock-in.
Need your code to run on iOS? Sure. What about Android: yes, we have that. The boss has a blackberry - how do we even.... oh wait, Haxe can do that too. Need a website to run on PHP servers? No worries. Now NodeJS? We can do that too. Wait, Google App Engine? Well, we have a Java target.
Even in a browser, Haxe has watched the transition from Flash to HTML5, and is keeping up with the very best compile-to-JS languages. There was even an experimental Dart target. In an industry where dominant platforms and languages change every few years, Haxe has outlived the transition from AS2 to AS3, from AS3 to JS, from AS3 to Mobile, from PHP to NodeJS, and from WxWidgets to Node-Webkit. And it will survive the next wave of platforms too.
If you let us have a dev room, we will teach open source programmers how to use this (coincidentally also very cool) language, with its mature compiler, to write code that will outlast the current fad platforms... and we'll also have some fun as a community along the way too!
The Haxe language is maintained and developed by the Haxe Foundation (http://haxe.org/foundation/), whose strategic partners are TiVo (http://www.tivo.com/), deploying over 1M Haxe LOC onto over 1M set-top-boxes; Prezi (http://prezi.com/), reaching "over 40 million people and 80% of Fortune 500 companies"; and Motion Twin (http://motion-twin.com/), with 15M registered users.
Haxe is a popular language in the games industry. It was used to write the indie game of the year ("Papers, Please" by Lucas Pope http://dukope.com/) and hundreds of other games, including many by Nickelodeon, Disney and Lego. For recent fun examples see: http://haxe.io/ld/30/
The 2014 annual worldwide Haxe conference was held during May in Paris, very successfully organized by Silex Labs (http://www.silexlabs.org/). The sessions provided by the community were of high quality, as you can see from the videos at: http://www.silexlabs.org/tag/wwx2014/. Around 50 Haxe hackers attended that dedicated conference, and while a development room at FOSDEM 2015 would probably attract fewer Haxe enthusiasts than that, we are hoping it might attract a number of non-enthusiasts, curious to learn about the language by attending a free tutorial.
The main Haxe discussion group has over 1700 subscribers, so that is where our community discussion of this application has occurred see https://groups.google.com/d/topic/haxelang/9SQP3oThY7k/discussion, with more expressions of interest over at Google+: https://plus.google.com/108357772809637107387/posts/D8ANrxG5H3p
Most people will never have heard of Haxe, so the day would begin with them in mind. The running order for the event might be:
-
Introduction and welcome, including a "gee-wiz" tour and an overview of the history, status and ecosystem of the language [speaker TBA]
-
An absolute beginners hands-on bring-your-own-device “learn-Haxe” introductory tutorial, with members of the Haxe community on-hand to help newcomers to learn the language and the ecosystem [tutor TBA]
-
How Motion Twin deploys “…our full Haxe stack and how we make use of it to develop games fast (or painlessly...) with targets ranging from stage3d to small mobile phones...” [David Elahee]
-
Haxe as a compile-to-js language, adding examples of how macros, abstracts and enums set it apart from Dart & TypeScript [Juraj (Back2dos)]
-
War stories of writing in Haxe targeting JS [Clément (clemos), who will also ues his local knowledge to help with the organisation of the event]
-
Why Massive Interactive has bet on Haxe for web and embedded devices development, choosing it initially for it's cross-targets compilation capabilities, and still big fans of it for our large JS-only projects [Philippe Elsass]
-
Lighting talks
-
Expert panel [including members of the core Haxe language development team, who are planning to attend]
In addition, we would expect to recruit further speakers once the developer room was confirmed.
Haxe is an amazing, cross-platform toolkit, generating code natively in JavaScript, ActionScript3, PHP, C++, Java, C# and Python. For example, using the Haxe library from http://www.openfl.org/, you can: “Build games and applications for almost every platform imaginable -- Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Firefox OS, Tizen, Flash and even HTML5. Bring your creative vision to life, on desktops, tablets, phones, even consoles. Publish to Steam, Amazon, OUYA... practically anywhere.”
Yet very few people in the general open-source community have ever even heard of Haxe. Please help us fix that, by letting us meet-up and spread the word at FOSDEM 2015.
Regards,
Elliott Stoneham
An unpaid enthusiast, on behalf of The Haxe Foundation.
to organize a developer room at FOSDEM 2014 for the Haxe community - I think should be 2015