Today, many software companies are faced with an unforgiving choice. The marketplace requires high performance applications that run on the web and on iOS and Android devices. Many companies initially chose to solve this by using JavaScript (HTML5) on all platforms, but realized the performance wasn’t really there on mobile. This lead to a slew of companies implementing different solutions on different platforms, using three different languages or technologies – reducing productivity and time to market by a factor of three at a stroke. More recently we’ve seen a collection of new approaches that aim for a single development language, combined with sophisticated libraries, that allow a single codebase to cross compile to natively target multiple different devices (web, iOS, Android etc.). Unfortunately, most of these cross-platform solutions have been closed, commercial products – with all of the problems and limitations that closed environments always come with.

At FlowPlay, we needed to find a better solution. We spent more than ten years building Flash-based social games and realized the days for Flash were clearly numbered. We were not satisfied with most of the “mainstream” options that we saw others adopting – either compromising the quality and performance of apps by using non-native solutions or accepting the inherent costs and slowness of supporting multiple codebases. Also, as an industry we have long learned that open source solutions tend to dominate over time and produce faster iteration times, foster stronger communities and are generally superior to their closed platform competitors. So, following an extensive research and evaluation period, we discovered a relatively new open source technology called Haxe.

Unlike most development engines and technologies that support one platform or one coding language really well, the Haxe toolkit would allow us to publish natively across all mainstream platforms from mobile to desktop and console – all with just one codebase. Following 18 months of engineering work, including time spent for our developers to become engrained in Haxe, we officially ported our entire gaming suite to the toolkit, including the transition of over 1.4 million lines of code.

For FlowPlay, our journey to discovering, learning, and implementing Haxe was a transformational one. Which is why we’re excited to introduce our hometown of Seattle to the technology that has changed not only our business, but each of the engineers that have worked so diligently on the transition over the past two years.

This week from May 3rd – 5th, join the team at FlowPlay as we host the inaugural U.S. Haxe Summit at the Hilton Seattle, and explore how developers of all kinds can think more cross-platform. The immersive three-day conference will give attendees an in-depth look at Haxe and the state of cross-platform development through a variety of sessions and technical workshops for both members of the Haxe community and those new to the technology. U.S. Haxe Summit attendees will hear about new and interesting Haxe projects, libraries, and cross-compiling techniques alongside a track dedicated to introductory sessions on how to build games, applications, and frameworks with Haxe. We welcome both attendees who are coming in a personal, individual developer capacity to learn about this open source solution or are attending to evaluate the viability of Haxe for your business.

Computer science students are also encouraged to participate and the first 50 students to use the code HAXESTUDENTPASS will secure a free ticket. If you have any questions about the event, be sure to check it out at summit.Haxe.org or Tweet us at @HaxeSummit.

Tickets are still available if you act fast. Will you join us?