Sunday, July 27, 2008

360|Flex

This coming August, I'll be heading out to San Jose to attend the 360 Flex conference:
http://www.360conferences.com/360flex/

I'm new to the Flex scene (almost a year now) and came from a background of 14 years of C++ cross-platform application development so it is exciting and different to immerse myself in the new culture. This is the first 360 I will have attended and only the second conference related to Flex (the first being MAX 2007 in Chicago). I'm now fortunate enough to be working for Universal Mind (as a contractor) and when I saw all the people taking vacation to attend 360, I knew I had to attend.

Of particular interest to me are sessions teaching frameworks, component building, design patterns, process (I'm a big process geek - how you do something is very important for maintainability), and low level programming. There are so many sessions that appeal to me at the same time that I'm going to have to make some rough decisions. Here is a list of the appealing sessions (fortunately I work with some of these people so I can pick their brain later):
  • Pre-Conference stuff I cannot attend because my plane doesn't land until 2pm
    • James Huang - The R1-RPC/J Toolkit and the D.eval API
    • Ben Stucki/Ryan Campbell - OpenFlux
  • Adam Flater - How to make your AIR app blow up with Merapi
  • Alex Harui - Versioning Support for Large Applications and Portals
  • Andrew Powell - Implementing BlazeDS
  • Axel Jensen - Project Workflow (trac,svn,ANT,XML...)
  • Ben Clinkinbeard - Concepts and Strategies for Creating Reusable Components
  • Ben Stucki - How to Build a Framework
  • Brad Umbaugh/RJ Owen - Diving Deep with the Flex Component Lifecycle
  • Brian Weisenthal - Architecting real-time and collaborative applications in Flex
  • Chet Haase - Filthy Rich [Flex] Clients
  • Chris Scott - Introduction to the Swiz Framework for Flex
  • Eric Ko - Reflective Programming
  • Jacob Wright - Advanced ActionScript APIs
  • Jeff Houser - How to Build Flex Components
  • Jeff Tapper - Unraveling the hassle with Drag an Drop in AIR
  • Jonathan Branam - Improve your programming by reading the Flex source code
  • Josh Tynjala - Polishing Components for the Unwashed Masses
  • Laura Arguello - Decoupling Flex Applications with Mate Framework
  • H. Paul Robertson - Advanced AIR and SQLite: An optimization conversation
  • Ryan Campbell - PlexiGlass (OpenFlux 3D Components)
  • Samuel Asher Rivello - Creating an MMO from Scratch with Adobe Flex 3… in 59 minutes.
  • Tom Gonzalez - Data Visualization and Dashboards with Flex
  • Troy Gardner - Advanced State management, the Heirarchical State Design Pattern
PS: The 360|Flex team sent me a 1GB flash drive with content from 360|Flex Atlanta and Europe. I could pass it on to a lucky commenter.