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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 2014 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.
To quote www.haxe.org: “Haxe is an open source toolkit based on a modern, high level, strictly typed programming language, a cross-compiler, a complete cross-platform standard library and ways to access each platform's native capabilities.”
The Haxe language is maintained and developed by the Haxe Foundation (http://haxe.org/foundation/), whose strategic partners are TiVo (http://www.tivo.com/), Prezi (http://prezi.com/) and Motion Twin (http://motion-twin.com/).
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
Our plan is that part of the day would be speaker and panel sessions, the remainder a hands-on bring-your-own-device “learn-Haxe” tutorial, with members of the Haxe community on-hand to help newcomers to learn the language and the ecosystem. For experienced Haxe developers, this extended tutorial session would provide a Haxe project hack-space.
We have four speakers for the event so far:
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David Elahee from Motion Twin (a Haxe Foundation strategic partner) would speak about: “…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...”;
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Juraj (Back2dos) would speak about: “Haxe as a compile-to-js language, adding examples of how macros, abstracts and enums set it apart from Dart & TypeScript.”;
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Clément (clemos) would speak about other aspects of Haxe/JS (in addition to using his local knowledge to help with the organisation); and
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Elliott Stoneham would present “An absolute beginners guide to Haxe and OpenFL”.
In addition, we would expect to recruit further speakers once the developer room was confirmed. We also have members of the core Haxe language development team planning to attend, so we would expect to run an expert-panel session. Finally, there would also be space in the program for lightening talks.
Haxe is an amazing, cross-platform toolkit. 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
On behalf of The Haxe Foundation
to organize a developer room at FOSDEM 2014 for the Haxe community - I think should be 2015