Not sure whether to use Haxe of just plain flash

Question

A local sports clothing company has hired me to make them a flash based jersey colour picker sort of thing. They are wanting it so users can check out what particular designs would look like with certain colours.

Now, I'm by no means a great developer (I'm 16, but I know my way around javascript, flash and a bit of AS2) but I've taken notice of Haxe recently and think it might be a good project to write in it and compile to a swf. I'm not sure if I should just use flash, or if I should use Haxe.

Is anybody able to iterate on the strengths and weaknesses of using Haxe or flash please?

Thanks in advance!

---

P.S. I do have a copy of flash (supplied by school), so that doesn't concern me.

Answer 1

Given your access to Flash tools, there's not a lot to choose between them.

Haxe is generally held up to be the better language, and it has some neat optimisation tricks (it's better at generating byte-code than Adobe's own tools) as well as 'inline' and memory access. On the other hand, Haxe is best wielded in a code editor and your problem might best be solved graphically.

I would recommend sticking to Flash, to be honest. Why add risk to a small project?

Answer 2

I personally suggest you use Haxe, due to the lack of alternatives:

Learning AS2 really isn't worth it, because it's quite obsolete.
Learning AS3 isn't really worth it, because AS3 is a rather poor language and has stalled since its release 4 years ago.

Haxe is moving fast, and it is open source, leaving you the chance to one day enhance the language as you please. It has a much stronger and more expressive type system and better support for functional style. It is a much richer language, yet very high level. I think for you at your age this is a very good language to look at, because it promotes a lot of concepts and paradigms, while hiding the intricacies of low level programming languages.

using SWCs you can use graphics created with the Flash IDE within Haxe projects, to avoid drawing everything with code.

greetz
back2dos

Answer 3

AS2 will only get you banner work you should avoid learning it further.
Flash target is in decline so although adobe is probably adapting as3 for Javascript output, using Haxe is sensible because it already has the versatility to target a range of targets and is a better language. I would advise using flashIDE for layout and graphics, if your code is not so good then setup all the button states with _up, _over, and _down labeled frames. If you export as swf then you can use it with haxe code but can see the result ( unlike with a swc ). Textfields especially are worth setting up with the correct format of text in the flashIDE, and only make aspects dynamic if you are sure they need to be.

Short term it maybe easier to get flash work with as3 skill so there are advantages both ways. But the truth is it does not really matter if you use as2, as3 or haxe ( I would advise using flash IDE for the graphics aspect ), but if you want to create a javascript version then haxe seems most sensible.