Archive for January, 2008
FlexCamp Chicago
Saturday, January 19th, 2008
Yesterday I attended FlexCamp Chicago. It’s a one day mini conference on Adobe Flex. Most of the speakers were from Digital Primates. They’re the authors of the book “Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source“.
Here’s a breakdown of the presentations (50 min each) that were given and my comments:
• Keynote – Your usual 10,000 ft view of the Flex Platform.
• Building Your First Flex App – Pretty basic guided tutorial, but a good place to start just to get everyone on the same page.
• Taking a Flex App to the Desktop – When was the last time you developed a sophisticated web application and transformed it into a desktop application by changing only one line of code?
• Building Flex Components – Maybe the component market place that was supposed to happen with Java will take off with Flex….we’ll have to wait and see.
• Integrating Flex with ColdFusion – Anyone still use ColdFusion? Adobe does provide tight and useful integration between CF and Flex which does make doing some things on the server side quite easy.
• Integrating Flex with Java – Good presentation but it would have been cool to get deeper into it. Too bad for me most of the audience wasn’t familiar with Java.
My overall impression of the mini conference was quite good, especially when it only costs $20. For that $20, you get the aforementioned book, a nice t-shirt, a continental breakfast, and a sandwich & chips lunch from Corner Bakery. Not a bad deal at all. Only complaints would be that the seats became uncomfortable after a short time, and there was no desk to set your stuff on; like a laptop and such. They did provide adequate breaks though to stretch your legs.
If the topics changed, I would consider going back as especially if I wanted easy access to some Flex experts as they were all more than willing to answer any type of question. Thier enthusiam for Flex was quite high and it rubs off, of course. This is some unbelievable stuff, and my imagination is starting to run wild thinking about all the different possibilities Flex offers. As Flex 3 is about to be released soon, I was wondering if anyone is starting to see more of a demand for Flex based applications in 2008?
