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360|Flex Camp NJ

I just got back from 360|Flex Camp NJ, put on by the 360|Flex guys and the folks from the NJFlex user group. As expected it was a great time. I think they were hoping for a larger turn out, but between the economy being what it is and the fact that we can still taste 360|Flex San Jose with MAX right around the corner, I don’t think they did too bad.

I didn’t get to go to the training on Friday, but the sessions today were very good. I especially liked seeing Fluint in action, which I can see has come a long way. I think the thing I get most out of the sessions at these things is the quick overview of a technology or library that you know is out there, know vaguely what it does, but just don’t have the time or energy to chase down on your own. That 40 minute session is worth at least a day of futzing around at the keyboard just to give you an idea of whether something is worth pursuing. Back when I first started with flex I was coming from .net and unit testing was a big part of what we were doing. When I looked into the unit testing options available for Flex at the time in comparison to the .net tools I was not impressed. Fluint now looks like a viable toolset, which I probably wouldn’t have looked at anytime soon on my own.

The sessions are always great of course, but my personal favorite aspect of these events is the socialization. After the conference we had a fun time at The Office Beer Bar and Grill which, as you can probably infer from the name, had a really impressive beer selection. As developers tend to do when you get them alone in a room with a pitcher or two, we had a blast comparing projects, workloads, past experiences and the obligatory developer-to-developer lamenting over how clueless and/or ruthless our respective clients and companies can be. I kind of feel bad that I don’t have anything to complain about any longer - it’s not my fault that Nxtbook really knows how to treat their employees. Oh well, I still have a deep well of debilitating scars in my past to pull from when the group wants to ghost story about the feature creep monster or a dastardly dismal deployment.

Tom and John and the rest of the guys that pulled this together did a great job, and I hope we see more of these in the future. It was a perfectly sized snack right in the middle of 360|Flex and MAX - where I look forward to seeing this group again at the 360|MAX Unconference in November.

360|Flex - Let’s not call it goodbye.

Well, 360|Flex San Jose has come to a close. It was a lot of fun - lots of great people, some really decent sessions and, as I pointed out the in the last post, just a great overall vibe of community and optimism surrounding Flex.

…

As I sit in the gazebo of the hotel courtyard, surrounded by beautiful rose bushes and palm trees, a perfectly tempered breeze lightly titillating my scalp with featherlight fingers and the sky as blue as ever, I can’t help but reflect on the great data visualization tools that Tom Gonzalez presented on, or the excellent session on the intellectual hows and whys of data visualization provided by Tony Hillerson and Juan Sanchez. And as I sit here, with several martinis diligently, but ever so gently, working to maintain my relaxed state, I am reminded of the comfort provided by Troy Gardener speaking the gospel of Finite and Hierarchical State Machines… oh, and who could forget RJ Owen and Brad Umbaugh’s walk through of the component lifecycle. Yes, these things I have experienced will remain with me always, forever a testament to the power and purpose of the almighty Flex and our place in it’s world.

And so 360|Flex, let’s not call it goodbye.. only farewell for now - for we shall meet again. I don’t know where or when, but I’m sure you’ll keep in touch.

…

Ehem.. so yeah, it was ok I guess.. if you’re into that sort of thing.

360|Flex - Day 1

Terrific day at 360|Flex today. I attended some good sessions, had a few fun conversations about flex and development in general, and then had some really good beers. Seriously, the organizers have impressive taste in beer.

The keynote was pretty cool, though no earth shattering new news. Justin Everett-Church was showing off Flash player 10, and even though I’ve played with the beta I didn’t realize just how great the hardware accelerated graphics are going to be. I had originally heard that only the 3d and video would be accelerated, but apparently I was misinformed as according to Justin all display objects will be created on the graphics card, which is very good.

Shining through for me though was a reaffirmation of how incredible Flex 4 (Gumbo) is going to be. There’s a whole new paradigm for working with states, which have always been great in concept but, for me at least, incredibly frustrating to use in practice. The new mxml shape and drawing tools are looking really good, and the true separation of component and skin is incredible. We’ve all been talking about skinning as a way to separate functionality from design for some time now, but seeing what can be done in flex 4 is the first time I’ve felt like it’s truly been achieved, which brings me to Thermo. Being billed as a designer tool, Thermo is going to make everyone’s life easier, whether you hand it over to a designer or not.

So, while the keynote didn’t have too much new stuff for us, I got to see some demos I hadn’t before and definitely got re-jazzed about where Flex is headed.

The sessions I attended were pretty good:

Flex and Accessibility
I did not realize how much control you have over this. If you truly want to make your app accessible, then the tools are there.. even if they’re not fully documented.

Encrypting Flex
Some good techniques were covered here for encrypting and decrypting modules or external swfs on the fly.

Introduction to Swiz
I had been curious about this after listening to an interview with Chris Scott on the Flex Show. It looks great. If we weren’t already so invested in PureMVC on the project I’m working on I think I’d switch us over.

Advanced Actionscript APIs
This was a fun one, Jacob Wright is a good presenter and the material was interesting. He covered Metadata tags, The Proxy class and Namespaces, all of which I’ve used in the past, but I picked up a few new tricks in his session today.

One thing I’ve noticed here at the conference is a general feel of prosperity and optimism surrounding Flex. I suppose this is to be expected at a Flex conference, but I talked to a lot of people today and I think it’s really cool that many, when asked what they like best about flex development, replied somewhere in their answer that they couldn’t think of when they’d had this much fun as a developer.. I couldn’t agree more.

California, here I come!

I’m heading off tomorrow morning for 360|Flex in San Jose, CA. It’s going to be a blast. There’s a lot of really great stuff going on for the conference, I’ll be the heart of Silicon Valley- a.k.a nerd heaven, and then Wednesday night my wife will arrive and we’ll head up the north CA coastline to take in some scenic wonders for a few days.

I’ll be posting updates here about the goings on at 360|Flex and all of the cool stuff I see and hear. There’s a pretty good line up of sessions all three days and it sounds like there will be plenty to do after the official speakers have done their thing as well.

I should probably go pack a suitcase or something.. stay tuned for updates from the left coast!