Flex Pasta

Adobe MAX Day 3

The last and final day featured 5 sessions that I attended.

1. Security in Air, Peleus Uhley, Ethan Malasky - Session covered most of the information I expected, though I am always a fan of examples and more advanced topics.
2. Flex for Large Application, Alex Harui - Very well presented.  Adobe is adding a new feature called the Marshall Plan for Flex 3.2.  Basically, the marshall plan is similar to modules but are really more like sub applications.  The sub applications don’t depend on the parent application for any of the classes it needs.  This means that a sub application could be compiled against one version of the Flex SDK, and another could be compiled against another version and they would all play nice together in the Flash sandbox.  Note that this will only work going forward with applications built in Flex 3.2 or later.  But it is nice they are making this feature before Flex 4 is released.
3. High Performance Web Applications with Adobe Air, Oliver Goldman - Some very cool concepts discussed that not only worked well with AIR, but could be used with any Flex web application.  There were some good tough questions from the audience that Oliver pretty much nailed answers to and even explained the answer well.
4. Data Visualization with Flex, Tom Gonzalez - This session really was split up and well organized to cover the different aspects of charting: reformatting data, styling, drill downs, etc.  Advanced charting in Flex was a bit of a black box to me until I attended this session, so it is one of my picks for favorite session of the week.  One thing with the session that could have been better is to have a lab instead of just a speaking presentation.  I think the way Tom organized the presentation/code was set up perfectly for a lab and would have been much more engaging if I could play around with the code Tom was showing.  In general with the conference, I would like to have seen more labs with advanced topics.
5. Cairngorm: Tips and Tricks from the experts, Eric Garza, Peter Martin - If you have read past entries on my blog, you will quickly note that I am not a big fan of Cairngorm.  This presentation by Eric and Peter on Cairngorm was fine, but it also reinforced my dislike for the Cairngorm Framework.  I personally had long compile times on large projects because Cairngorm requires an enormous amount of classes to do simple tasks.  Cairngorm makes it harder to leverage the benefits modules.   One other take away for this session was the new Cairngorm plugin for Eclipse that Peter Martin had worked on.  If you are using Cairngorm I would recommend looking into this plugin or contributing to its development.  It it is still beta yet functional and could add value to your project.  I saw some other frameworks at the conference which I will be looking more into…such as Matte and Swizz.  Of course my favorite is still the Penne Framework!