360|Flex Atlanta - Day One Impressions
First, about the venue. The CNN Center in downtown Atlanta is an enormous indoor plaza enclosed by towers, steel girders and glass. The Omni Hotel occupies some of those towers. The conference is held in the Atrium, a courtyard that lies between the Omni towers. It occurs to me that I could observe the keynote proceedings from the balcony of my hotel room on the 11th floor of the South Tower. This calls a David Bowie lyric to mind: “I’m up on the 11st floor and I’m watching the cruisers below.” But I join the rest of the conference-goers downstairs instead.
Matt Chotin, Product Manager at Adobe delivers the keynote. “Adobe AIR is out the door!” “Flex 3 is out the door!” Despite abundant forewarning of this moment, the official launch announcement is exciting.
Matt and his Adobe colleagues keep the interest level high, presenting a succession of new and upcoming features. Test framework integration with support for Borland, HP and IBM test frameworks! Open source Blaze/DS! Thermo! Gumbo (Flex 4)! Vellum! Hydra! I cheer loudly at the announcement of Astro, an upcoming 3D perspective effects package (a poor man’s papervision); I am among only about 10 people doing so. I cheer again loudly at the announcement of the type-safe Vector collection type; I am among only about 5 people this time. Where have all the nerds gone?
Hey, the Allurent Desktop Connection is getting another demo! This was shown at last year’s Max, but here it is again. I’m sure that Allurent marketing will be happy to hear about this. The guy to my right, in response to the “Search by Color” feature: “Oh, wow!” Matt apologizes to Joe B. in advance of possible screw-ups as he starts the demo. I wonder how this is possible, because I know that Joe is probably going through Logan Airport security at this moment. I ask Matt about this afterward, and he claims to have sighted Joe in the crowd. Later I spot a Joe B. doppelganger among the conference attendees. Who is this man?
Matt finishes with a very, very silly slide/audio/video show about working at Adobe. It is worth the entire price of the conference to see. Footnote: as a presenter I am attending the conference for free, so this is rather weak praise. But it is a funny show.
The conference sessions are divided into three concurrent tracks. I set off on the Custom Components track, planning to stick with it, and enjoy some great talks about custom component building. In a discussion with Joe B. of my presentation a few days earlier, he mentioned that he had seen in previous conferences a lack of discussion of the practical points of custom component buiding, in particular the Flex component lifecycle functions. As if in rebuttal, the first speaker in the Custom Components track, Axel Jensen, came right out swinging and hit all the major points. The second speaker, Ben Clinkenbeard, co-author of flexmdi, echoed some of Axel’s points and dove deeper. And so on through the day.
Overall, I’m impressed by the increased technical depth of the presentations in this conference, as compared to last year in Seattle. A lot more code is shown and discussed. I take away some interesting code samples: one from Axel on extending class Panel to add custom children to its header, another from Doug Knudsen on the practical use of Event.preventDefault() for filtering text input, and more.
Another, more subtle step in a positive direction is a growing awareness that there are many ways to get things done, but only a few that may be considered “best practices.” Ben C. hits this chord most often. He mentions the lack of a recommended coding pattern for adding default styles to a custom component. And then he says something that really resonates with my Allurent developer soul, to the effect that frameworks, such as Cairngorm, are just conventions - consistent approaches to some problem, not necessarily ideal solutions to all.
Two more days to look forward to….