Flexmaniacs 2007 Day One
I’m in Washington, DC this week for Fig Leaf Software’s Flexmaniacs 2007 Conference. Turnout appears respectable with around 200 attendees. For the $249 conference fee, one can’t beat the amount of training available — only the recent Salesforce.com developers conference had a better pricetag ($0). Day One at Flexmaniacs 2007 offered more than two dozen topics. My day got off to a fairly good start with “Component Development in the Flex World” hosted by Chafic Kazoun, co-author of “Flex 2 Programming” from O’Reilly. Kazoun provided fairly clear but brisk code samples with plenty of background.
Next was “Memory Management for Flex Developers” by Jun Heider. It was an informative although high level discussion of memory management strategies when developing and deploying Flex apps. Heider provided a nice distillation of the Flash player memory management/garbage collection algorithm, but the session was a bit short on practical ways in code to affect memory management — the strategies really boiled down the usual list of suspects familiar from other development technologies (e.g. clean up after yourself when opening connections, etc.). All in all, however, a useful session.
I ended the morning with “Flex Data Services Push Tech. w/Legacy Systems” presented by Michael Labriola, a brilliant engineer with a fascinating background (he used to be a reverse engineer). At the start he stated that he’d rather cover the breadth of the topic instead of necessarily going for a deep dive, but honestly I don’t think he achieved either. From my chair it seemed most of the audience was lost 15 minutes into the lecture.
Fortunately, the rest of the day really was a delight courtesy of two sessions by Mark Pillar, CEO of Midnight Coders, LLC. Mark covered “Flex without Java” and “Flex and PHP.” Mark’s style is easy and he explained things in a way respectful of the spectrum of experience in the audience — never talking over our head or spoon feeding us either. While he took every opportunity to show off his company’s WebORB product, it was well worth it because what Midnight Coders has put together is fabulous. I had first heard about Midnight Coders and WebORB only a week earlier at a Flex User Group meeting back in Seattle and was delighted to see Mark was presenting. The hype I’d heard from the user group lived up entirely to its billing.
The day ended with a discourse of the “Managing Complexity with Cairngorm” by Jim Robison. Although he’s only been developing in Flex for a little over a year, he has a good command of Cairngorm and tried his best to bring life to a pretty boring topic for the casual Flex developer, but a real necessity for anyone wishing to keep their sanity with large Flex projects
