Flex Camp Chicago 2009

Hi Everyone

I just got back from Flex Camp Chicago 2009 and I would first like to thank everyone that worked so hard to make this event happen. It was a very informative camp with a wide range technical perspectives - both from presenters and the people in attendance.

There was so much covered during those two days, so instead of trying to summarize it all I am going to take certain presentations and topics and blog on those over the next few days.

The second day Keynote was from James Ward. He created his 'Top 10 things to like' and Flex. Here is a summary of that list. I am also including some audio clips of each of the 10 topics he discussed. Since some of what he did was actual code, it will be a little hard to follow just the audio but it is still worth the listen.:

#1 Threads with PixelBender
As you may know - the FlashPlayer is single threaded, at least as far as our applications are concerned, and this therefore makes long running calculations very difficult to do. With PixelBender, you have the ability to create very lightweight threads of execution. Now - there are plenty of reasons to not get too excited about this. First, it is not a robust threading model that those of us in the Java world have come to know and love ( or not love ). Second, you have to know how to program with the PixelBender language. What I did find interesting is the number of times threading the Flash Player came up during the conference. There definitely seems to be mounting pressure for a multithreaded environment capability.




#2 Text Layout Framework
This was very cool and I am really looking forward to these new features. You can find all of the details on the Adobe Labs site, but here is a quick summary.
* Flowing text around columns - including selection. True multi-column output is now going to be part of the framework.
* Text alpha for fading, etc. You can fade text in/out with a single font.
* Bidirectional text, vertical text in over 30 writing systems. Now that is 'International'




#3 Openness
Adobe continues to make more of its platform open which allows developers like us to really embrace and build upon the great work at Adobe. Currently AMF, Flex SDK, BlazeDS are all examples of their open source. Adobe recently announced the RTMP spec will be made open allowing for more choices in the streaming media. Last - but not least - check out bugs.adobe.com. If you are find a bug check to see if it is in the bug database, and if not submit. If you do find, please vote for it. This is our communication channel back to Adobe on what we feel is important to get fixed.




#4 Tour de Flex
This one is really awesome! You can take the Tour here but finish reading the top 10 list before you leave.
If you are fan of the component explorer - you are going to love Tour de Flex. It is similar to the component explorer except it is an AIR application, and it has much more content. You can see all of the components, interact with examples, see source code - just like with component explorer, but now the documentation is also integrated in. In addition to this, components offered by the community will also be available through Tour de Flex. There is also a great Eclipse plugin that integrates with Tour de Flex using another very cool new technology called Merapi ( thats my second topic for the blog post ).





#5 Portable RIAS
What does this mean? I can hear you ask. We are all now familiar with running Flex applications via a web browser - but have you ever thought about running a Flex application from a PDF document? For detailed information checkout James Ward's posting on Portable RIAs. James showed a demo of how he took the dashboard application, exported it to PDF and was able to actually run the application from the PDF document. The PDF was also able to update its data from the server. PDF Reader 9 and above comes with the flash player embedded which makes all of this possible.





#6 Flex 4 Gumbo
This is the new version of Flex and the Flex builder. There are a lot of exciting changes coming and the Gumbo SDK is available now from Adobe Labs. There are some great resource links on this page and I highly recommend you check them out.





#7 Rapid Application Development without the Rapids.
In this part of his presentation he talked about the new workflow and wizard capabilities to get applications up and running quickly. He was able to very quickly get a data driven, synchronized application up and running.




#8 AMF
James discussed and showed the Census demo which shows you how much better AMF is to all other protocols to communicate between Flex and the server. He made an interesting comments as part of an answer to a question. James commented that he would always use AMF over all other protocols unless there was a good reason not to. He also showed the group how easy it was to use RemoteObject with a remote server.




#9 RIA Best Practices.
James did not enumerate any particular best practices, but commented on the state of best practices and what RIA developers should consider. These practices are independent of the RIA technology and he is working with people from the Microsoft and JavaFX team. They have a site that you can reach here called RIA Practices.




#10 You
The developer community that maintains the interest level in the technology and all of the developers contributing to the open source movement.




Thanks so much for checking out my blog and come back often as I will be adding additional entries for other Flex Camp Chicago 2009 topics. My next blog entry will talk about Merapi which is a project to allow AIR and Java to communicate with one another. I see some really cool possibilities with this.