I’ve been working with haXe at work doing some Flash testing. It’s a pretty handy little tool. But something about it brings back some not-fun memories…
There was a time when I was collaborating on an IRC client with a few other people. We had a particularly difficult time getting what we wanted out of the standard Windows control set. So we had to make custom controls. Subclassing wasn’t good enough and Owner-Drawing never worked out as well as we wanted. So we made, 1) a custom Listbox, 2) a custom text control for rendering IRC text, and at one-point, there was 3) a custom menubar. There were going to be others… a custom Tab Control, a custom Toolbar, tooltip, and probably a button and progress bar and a few others that I’m forgetting.
Does that seem ridiculous? It should. Making custom controls is a lot of work. So why does haXe remind me of this? Basically, unless I decide to use Flex or another 3rd party lib, there is no UI api. Everything has to be custom.
Maybe this is why I’ve stayed away from Flash since version 4.0? If I never had to code a custom control again, I’d be a very happy man.