Programming Flash with haXe for the Chumby (Saturday, March 14, 2009)

For Christmas, I received a Chumby interactive media player. It is basically a cuddly Linux computer, the size of an alarm clock, that serves widgets to its touch screen. With my interest in home automation, I think the Chumby device would make a terrific platform for controlling a home automation system. Widgets for the Chumby are written using Flash, and unlike most of the use of Flash on the Web, it makes a great deal of sense for a device like the Chumby.

So, after a bit of research, and deciding firmly that I did not want to use any proprietary software products from Adobe or painful graphical IDEs, I found haXe, a novel programming language that can be compiled for a number of platforms — including Flash. I've spent the last couple of days learning haXe, and all the painful Flash APIs, and for my first program, I have developed a widget that I can use with the Chumby to control my house. I call it ScraXml. Click on the little question mark in the widget to read all about it.

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