Dear all,

We are pleased to announce the second haXe community meeting, in april 2012, in Paris, France. See the site about the event here.

Read the rest of this entry →

This article is in French, the English version is here.

Suite à un contact avec des anciens du langage Caml (à lire absolument “A brief history of Caml“), Silex Labs explore pour vous un nouveau monde…

Ce jeudi 3 mai, Alex Hoyau présentera Haxe à un public composé de chercheurs de l’INRIA, d’universitaires et de membres de l’IRILL.

l’IRILL est une association particulièrement intéressante pour Silex Labs et pour Haxe. En effet, elle a des points communs avec Silex Labs, notamment le support de communautés open source. Elle participe en particulier à la vie de la communauté OCaml, langage avec lequel le compilateur Haxe est codé, et auquel on doit certaines particularités très appréciées du langage Haxe. De plus, l’IRILL sponsorise le projet Ocsigen, basé lui aussi sur OCaml et qui est dans le même domaine que Haxe. Enfin, l’IRILL participe à l’organisation du OCaml meeting chaque année…

The mission of IRILL, the Center  for  Research and  Innovation  on  Free  Software, is to bring together in one place leading  researchers  and  scientists,   expert   FOSS  developers,  and  FOSS  industry  players  to  tackle  the  three fundamental challenges that FOSS poses today:

• scientific: study, explore and solve the new problems raised by the development, maintenance and wildly varying evolution process of the large mass of code that FOSS gives access to
• educational: adapt curricula for users, system administrators, and developers to prepare them for a computing infrastructure in which FOSS plays a prime role.
• ecomomic: contribute to create a sustainable ecosystem for the FOSS innovations

Cette conférence est donc un premier pas vers une collaboration IRILL / Silex Labs, et une entrée dans le monde d’OCaml qui évolue et auquel participent de talentueux développeurs OCaml qui pourraient jouer un rôle dans le développement et la pérennisation de Haxe.

C’est gratuit et ouvert au public, nous serions ravis d’avoir des supporters

Read the rest of this entry →

Cet article est en Anglais, la traduction en français ici.

After a contact with old timers of the Caml language (a must read “A brief history of Caml“), Silex Labs explores a new world for you …

This Thursday, May 3 Alex Hoyau will be presenting Haxe to a public composed of INRIA researchers, academics and members of the IRILL non profit organization.

IRILL is particularly interesting for Silex Labs and Haxe. Indeed it has a lot in common with Silex Labs, including support for open source communities. And it participates in the life of the community OCaml, which is the language with which the Haxe compiler is coded, and to whom we owe some very popular features of the Haxe language. IRILL is also a sponsors of the project Ocsigen, which is also based on OCaml and which is in the same area as Haxe. And IRILL helps organizing the OCaml rally each year…

The mission of IRILL, the Center  for  Research and  Innovation  on  Free  Software, is to bring together in one place leading  researchers  and  scientists,   expert   FOSS  developers,  and  FOSS  industry  players  to  tackle  the  three fundamental challenges that FOSS poses today:

• scientific: study, explore and solve the new problems raised by the development, maintenance and wildly varying evolution process of the large mass of code that FOSS gives access to
• educational: adapt curricula for users, system administrators, and developers to prepare them for a computing infrastructure in which FOSS plays a prime role.
• ecomomic: contribute to create a sustainable ecosystem for the FOSS innovations

This conference is a first step towards collaboration between IRILL and Silex Labs, and an entry into the world of OCaml, which is evolving and which involves talented OCaml developers, who could play a role in the development and sustainability of Haxe.

It’s free and open to the public, we would be delighted to have the fans

Read the rest of this entry →

This article is about our Silex’s worshops – They take place in Paris so it is in French only.

Read the rest of this entry →

Mathieu Decoene  @Coenego here shares some insights on using Sencha Touch 2 with amfPHP 2

For those who don’t know Sencha Touch: it’s a javascript framework for mobile (based on Sencha
Ext).

It’s always a bit trial and error when new updates are released; new methods, deprecated stuff… I’m
talking about Sencha Touch 2 and amfPHP 2 in this case.

Since we’re talking about mobile apps, Ajax-requests are basically used to receive or send our
data (because we want it to run behind the screens). So, amfPHP is a perfect partner for
communication between Sencha Touch (or any other client framework) and the services.
But some things have changed since boths v1’s… For example: You don’t have to specify your service and
method name any longer in the url-property (to which the request is sent) of the Ajax-request. Now
you have to add both names as a property value together with the other parameters.
Examples of usage:

consider this amfPHP service:

<!--?php class MyService{ function myMethod($data){ // do something with property1 } } ?-->

To call it from Sencha Touch when running it in amfPHP v1, do the following:

var myParams = {
property1: ‘value1’,
property2: ‘value2’
};
Ext.Ajax.request({
method: 'POST',
url: ‘http://www.yoururl.com/amfphp/json.php/MyService.myMethod’,
params: myParams
});

?>

To call it from Sencha Touch when running it in amfPHP v2, do the following:

var myParams = {
serviceName: 'MyService',
methodName: 'myMethod',
parameters: [
{'dataroot': [‘value1’,’value2’]}
]
};

Ext.Ajax.request({
method: 'POST',
url: ‘http://www.yoururl.com/amfphp/?contentType=application/json’,
params: JSON.stringify(myParams);
});

It was awesome! And it’s over. We should do it again

The WWX Haxe conference just finished. Silex Labs is very proud to have organized it, as it gave us the opportunity to bring together wonderful people from all over the world to talk about one of our favourite subjects: Haxe.

The conference was sold out, so it goes to show that Haxe has incredible momentum. There were people from France of course, and also Australia, New Zealand, USA, Brazil, Canada, Hungary, Germany, Netherlands, UK, and Italy. The variety of applications they are working on with Haxe was equally mind blowing:  web, mobile, games, artistic installations, presentation software.

You would have thought it was only about code. You would have been wrong! There were presentations about business, marketing, and art, all with a Haxe twist. And yes, lots and lots of code. Silex Labs and the Haxe community would like to thank the people who put in the time and energy to make such good presentations. Please check them out here and stay tuned because we will release pictures, the videos and the slides soon – Silex Labs on twitter, on facebook and Silex Labs blog.

Of course, a good presentation needs an audience, and we would like to thank the people who attended for listening, supporting the speakers and interacting with them. There were many conversations that sparked great ideas that would never have come to light without the social mix that only happens at a conference.

We also needed to let off steam and get the creative juices flowing, so we had a great Saturday night at the Bistrot Marguerite, who ran a private party for us with drinks and “Verrines de Boeuf Bourguignon”. For geek cred we could play video games projected on the ceiling while we danced.

Silex Labs WWX party, haxe conference 2012

Thank you finally to our sponsors and everyone who helped out. We’re happy and exhausted. See you all next year!

This plugin adds a service called SommeriaSearchService to amfPHP. The idea is to be able to access the API of various search engines through this plugin.

Currently there is only one search engine supported, Twitter. Call the ‘searchTwitter’ method on the ‘SommeriaSearchService’ service, and pass a query, for example ‘amfphp’.

To install, simply download the zip from here, unzip and drop the SommeriaSearch folder in amfPHP’s plugins folder.

The Twitter API is documented here.

More info here:

http://arielsommeria.com/blog/2012/04/12/sommeria-search-plugin-for-amfphp-allows-to-search-twitter/

We are proud to announce that Silex is finally available via Softaculous. Softaculous is an auto-installer for web hosts, and if your host uses it, it means that Silex can be installed with just one click via their admin panel!

They have a page for Silex here: http://www.softaculous.com/softwares/cms/Silex

Thanks to Softaculous, using Silex has become even easier!

They also have a list of partners here, where you can find hosts that use Softaculous.

http://www.softaculous.com/NOC_Partners

This article is about our Silex’s worshops – They take place in Paris so it is in French only.

Read the rest of this entry →

I know this has a few people excited, but this is just a proposal. Before any development gets done, we’d like to get the functionalities right. The idea here is to be able to generate client code from the services. This starts with generating a class for each service that allows you to communicate with said service, minimizing the boilerplate code that you have to write. But it can go one step further: generating a full client project that allows you to consume and test the services.

Beyond simply saving time, this could be used in the following scenarios:
- trying out a new runtime or protocol. For example amfPHP is historically associated with Flash, but it would be totally possible to write an Android client template that would allow you to generate an Android client without any Android programming skills.
- Creating a backoffice for customers. Suppose you did this nice project with a CMS and your customer doesn’t like the backoffice because it is too generic. You can use amfPHP to expose the methods that the customer is interested in, generate a client, maybe skin it a bit and you’re done: a custom backoffice.

The service browser is already a starting point: it analyses available services, and allows you to consume them. It is however only fit for use by the developer, for two reasons:
- it is generated at each view, and therefore isn’t suited for production use.
- it can’t easily be customized.

So this is a proposal to refactor and expand the service browser. Please comment!

Read the rest of this entry →

This article is about our silex workshops. They take place in Paris so it’s in french only

Silicon Sentier, l’association d’entreprises innovantes dans le monde des nouvelles technologies numériques, parle de nos ateliers Silex !

Parce que ça fait toujours plaisir de voir que des acteurs connus dans le monde du numérique parle de nous, voici la petite photo qui va bien et le lien de l’article

http://siliconsentier.org/atelier-silex-un-atelier-gratuit-a-lattention-des-designers-le-1503/