Flex Pasta

Were you at Adobe MAX this year?  Jim Corbett presented on “The Searchable SWF File”.  Google and Adobe came together to create Ichabod, a virtual user that can read a flash movie just as a user would and then index the swf just like an html page.   It appears that the searching of SWF files is still in the early stages, but I thought I would give it a try.  I have a SWF file that has embeded html text in an mx:Text tag.  I want to see if Google can find the inner text and have it appear in search results.

Here is the SWF file:  mx.controls.DataGrid

Now let’s check the results at Google

First, all swf files on this site:

Second, all swf files on this site with a keyword of “DataGrid”:

Third, search the web for mx.controls.DataGrid

Let’s see what happens!

I had a great time at MAX San Francisco.  The weather was great.  There was too much good food…which is a good and bad thing.  The general session topics were outstanding.  I was quickly blown away by these presentations and different research Adobe is doing.  From the new york times awesome flex application to the speech to text video reader, I really enjoyed the innovation.  Overall I thought the conference was a blast!  I have a lot of ideas and things to tinker with after attending the conference!  Thanks to Matt Chotin and the Flex SDK team for giving me the opportunity to attend.

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!

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.

Today I was at Adobe MAX in San Francisco.  I attended 4 sessions.  Here is what they covered and my feedback.

1. Ely Greenfield’s session on the next version(Gumbo) of Flex.  Very well organized and presented.  The next version of Flex is basically a complete rewrite of Flex 3.    It involves seperating the data and functional pieces of the Flex framework from the visual appeareance.  Sounds very interesting, but Flex 3 to Flex 4 won’t be an easy upgrade.  One other note about Flex 4 Gumbo is that two way data binding will be supported by the Flex compiler.
2. The Flex Architecture Faceoff -This was just a debate on the different frameworks such as Cairngorm, Pure MVC, etc and what people did and did not like. Some of the panelists preferred no frameworks! My favorite quote of the session was from Yakov Fain - “I didn’t like Cairngorm until I learned Pure MVC”.   A good middle ground between Cairngorm and no framework could be Penne?
3. Cocomo SDK - Cocomo is a new SDK built by Adobe on top of the Flex SDK for real time collaboration apps with RMTP using cloud computing.  Very cool presentation to show developers how to start using the Cocomo SDK.  This is something I will try out.  I am still a little skeptical since it is only a beta release, and the potential problems with a re-written Flex 4.  I also wonder how upgrades to the Cocomo cloud avoid breaking the clients running on an earlier version.  I see some real world applications for Cocomo, though I would have liked to hear about the pricing model!
4. Filthy Rich Graphics with Chet Haase - Very well organized, fast paced, yet easy to understand.  I learned a lot about how animations, effects, etc works under the covers and the thought process that goes into coming up with great effects.  I think this was the most enjoyable session of the day.  Check out the new Mirror effect in the Flex Gumbo SDK.

At the end of the day I got to meet some members of the Flex SDK team…Matt Chotin, Ryan Frishberg, Joan Laferty.  Nice to put faces to names in the bug database!