About SamHaXe

Summary

About SamHaXe
“I used to be a spy, until...”	Why exactly SamHaXe?
Tools of the trade	What does Sam HaXe good for?
Features	What does SamHaXe offer?
Used softwares and tools	What is it based on?
Authors	Who are responsible for this?

“I used to be a spy, until...”

Why exactly SamHaXe? Where does that name come from? If you’re familiar with Burn Notice the name Sam Axe might ring a bell. Burn Notice is a series about spies - and what do flash developers and spies have in common? They need assets. Assets are very important.

Tools of the trade

What does Sam HaXe good for?

Basically Sam HaXe is a flash resource assembly tool similar to swfmill (http://swfmill.org). Currently you can import the following types of assets with it:

Image files: Every type supported by ImageMagick or DevIL See the complete list here: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/formats.php, http://openil.sourceforge.net/features.php
Sound files: MP3s, WAVs
TrueType fonts
SWF files: As an animation or as an external library.
Binary files: Arbitrary content with optional zlib compression.

Features

What does SamHaXe offer?

Platform independence

SamHaXe is written in haXe and runs on neko VM so you can compile and use it on serveral platforms. The build system uses the java based Apache Ant which primary objective is to be cross-platform. Finally, SamHaXe is a command line tool so there’s no need for a GUI which is the source of many incompatibilities across different platforms.

Modular import system

The core of SamHaXe is very minimal. Most of the work is carried out by various import modules which are freely replacable. That way you’re not bound to the standard import modules you can use any third party ones or even write your own.

Detailed documentation

We’re cosidering documentation as important as the feaures or even more What good is a tool if you don’t know how to use it, right? So we tried the documentation to be as detailed as possible. No more second guessing about a particular command line switch or XML tag. Everyting is documented.

Open Source with the very permissive MIT license

Our goal with SamHaXe is to provide an easy to use tool which is accessible for users and developers. We don’t want to restrict you by any means so we decided to go with the MIT license which is permissive enough to fit our and - more importantly - Your needs.

Used softwares and tools

What is it based on?

The following softwares and tools are used creating SamHaXe

HaXe language and compiler	(http://haxe.org) SamHaXe is written in haXe
hxformat haXe library	(http://code.google.com/p/hxformat) hxformat is a library capable of reading/writing several file formats. We’re using it for reading/writing SWF files.
Neko virtual machine	(http://nekovm.org) SamHaXe and its modules are running under neko VM.
ImageMagick	(http://www.imagemagick.org) The native part of Image import module uses ImageMagick to load images of different formats.
DevIL	(http://openil.sourceforge.net/) An alternative to ImageMagick.
FreeType 2	(http://www.freetype.org/index2.html) The native part of Font import module uses FreeType to load TrueType fonts.
Apache Ant	(http://ant.apache.org) The build system is based on Apache Ant.
anthx	(http://code.google.com/p/anthx) anthx is a collection of Ant tasks supporting haXe/neko. SamHaXe is bundled with a copy of anthx with some minor modifications.
cpptasks	(http://ant-contrib.sourceforge.net/cpptasks/index.html) cpptasks is a collection of Ant tasks supporting several C/C++ compilers. Used for compiling native modules. SamHaXe is bundled with a copy of cpptasks with some minor modifications.
NaturalDocs	(http://www.naturaldocs.org) Documentation is generated entirely with NaturalDocs.

Authors

Who are responsible for this?

We are

Robin Palotai /Ron/	r.nosp@m.on@mindless.nosp@m.-labs.com
Gábor Szuromi /Gabe/	ga.nosp@m.be@mindless.nosp@m.-labs.com

Special thanks to Niel Drummond for his invaluable contribution to OSX support.