James Echmalian

The 360|Flex conference is to be held in Seattle this year from Aug. 13 to 15. My esteemed colleague at Allurent, Joe Berkovitz, attended this conference last year in San Jose and found it a good setting to share ideas with other Flex developers. Having been working with Flex for almost two years, I’m really looking forward to some of the same. This will be my first Flex technical conference.

The topic I’ll be presenting is Practical Patterns in Flex. The abstract goes something like this.

The Allurent Product Development Team’s application of the Model-View-Controller super-pattern to the development of a suite of rich applications in Flex 2.0 has led to the discovery of a number of smaller, tactical patterns that support the MVC approach. We present patterns that we feel are of interest to user interface developers across a wide range of application domains, and that lend themselves to novel expression in MXML/ActionScript. We assume that the audience is already familiar with the principles and benefits of MVC. For each pattern, we describe the problem it solves, explain our solution, and present supporting Flex code samples.

That’s somewhat terse, but it’s an abstract, after all. There are a couple of strong reasons for attending this talk. One is that the pattern approach to sharing ideas about software development really works. Over the course of a programming career, you may change jobs several times, and are bound to change programming domains more frequently. One day you’re working on a business application, the next you’re writing games, and so on. Regardless of domain switches, software starts to look the same after a while, and it’s because a few key design patterns are used over and over. Learning to identify and express these patterns makes us better programmers, regardless of the domain we happen to be working in. The way in which patterns are expressed depends largely on the programming language. Find a wikipedia page about some design pattern (here’s one) and you’ll often see code samples in a variety of languages. You’ll see similarities of course, but also some variation, as the programmer for each makes use of the special features (and quirks) of the language. Flex is based on ActionScript, but Flex programming is not just ActionScript programming, but a mixture of ActionScript, MXML and an event-based runtime system. This talk is about recognizing that certain patterns come up again and again in Flex programming, that some of them are unique to Flex, and even those that are familiar are often expressed in new, interesting ways in Flex. If you build Flex applications and like to think in terms of patterns, then you’ll like this talk.

See you in Seattle.

This site has existed for quite a few years, a long time in Internet terms. I’m fortunate to have one of the few rememberable three-letter domain names, having registered ech.net back in 1997. While an independent software contractor, I used this site to exchange information related to my business, but since rejoining the ranks of the permanent workforce, I’ve found less use for it.

I’ve never been interested in blogging. Until recently, I had considered creating a single-entry blog that read “I don’t blog.” as a weak joke. When I find something interesting, I’d rather be doing it than writing about it. But last week an abstract of mine was accepted at a technical conference, and presenters are generally expected to have published something about themselves on line. So blogging is forced upon me. I’ll start by writing about the conference (360|Flex), the topic I’ll be presenting (programming patterns) the company I’m working for (Allurent), the technology I’m working with (Adobe Flex) and other random stuff. Stay tuned. I won’t promise to post often, only never to be boring.