Flex Pasta

Adobe MAX Day 2

On MAX Day two, I attended one lab and 3 sessions.

1. Deploying Services with LCDS presented by Christopher Conraetes - Class talked about real time data synchronization between clients using remote objects and data management.  Chris really presented well and everything was organized.
2. JPA with LCDS presented by Jeff Vroom.  Learned a lot of information about some of the features of LCDS 2.6.  I am still a little skeptical of some of the advanced data management features.  A lot of things can be done just as well with BlazeDS, so I am not sold on the whole pay for LCDS and get extra features concept.  I would like to see more use of annotations in LCDS rather than having all these pieces of configuration needed to set up each step of remoting.
3. Flex Deep Dive with RJ Owen and Brad Umbaugh.  These guys explained in more detail with regardes to Bindings, SytleManager, SystemManager.  These guys are good presenters.  The advanced bindings section was kind of quickly skimmed over, rather than skipping over the easy stuff and getting right into advanced bindings under the covers.  The StyleManager and SystemManager sections were helpful, especially the demos.  I would have also liked to see more on the FoucsManager.  It is too bad these tracks are only an hour.  I had an understanding of the basics of the different managers in Flex, but I would have loved to have the speakers just right into the source code and explain how it all works a little more.  Tough to do with the time constraints though.
4. Devlivery of a mission critical application for NATO - Peter Martin, Mansour Raad.  I didn’t know exactly what I would get out of this session going into it, but it turned out really great!  The authors had a pretty nifty map and graphing application to show.  I didn’t understandhow they did everything in the application, but I really liked that, because it made me think about how the math was done for rendering the maps.  I came in to the session with no expectations and left with my mind racing on the different problems the developers must have had to solve during this project.