I did flash about 9-10 yrs ago. But I haven’t used it since, so when I saw Flash Camp 2010 was being held in downtown Chicago, I thought why not! I like to have at least a passing knowledge of all web tech and I didn’t know what Flex was all about. It was $20 and included lunch and beer at 4pm! It was very interesting, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing more about Flex. While watching the presentations, I was like, whoa… this seems like it does the same thing as GWT. Except, there is documentation! :)

James Ward, from Adobe gave the keynote. He went through the top 10 things he likes about Flex. That was really interesting. He showed how a pdf had an embedded swf that was a report that loaded live data. I asked a question, “Will other readers like Foxit be able to do this?” he said it was part of the PDF standard, so its up to other readers to implement it. But it is possible. He said they are working on a flash plugin for Android. I went up and asked him later in the day “why did it take so long? android has been out 2+ years?” He said they weren’t sure about the hardware and what it would support, and they had to do alot of rewriting to make the binary small enough. Ok so I guess it was a lets wait and see what will happen then we will implement flash. IMHO i still think they are missing the wagon… but what do I know, I’m just a coder!

Jeff Tapper talked about Flex 4 for Flex 3 developers. I didn’t know Flex at all but I still was fascinated by this talk. Kept thinking to the days of pain with GWT… i quick did a search on amazon for flex books..and there is alot.. so I was like, ok I am going to check this out. GWT is often frustrating because of the lack of documentation. Some books were written by Jeff!

Kevin Schmidt talked about accessing remote data in flex. During this talk i looked up flex builder and installed it. He accessed data in three ways so that was interesting.

Ben Schmidke talked about keeping your data grid healthy. He talked about how the datagrid is rendered and how you can optimize it for speed. I think he also showed an optimizer.

Adam Flater talked about Building RIAs with Style. He talked about styling your flex apps with some kinda of css-like syntax. Its not css exactly but looks similar.

Michael Labriola talked about Flex 4 Component Development. He explained why composition is better than inheritance. He showed how to make a circle layout. Custom layouts! ..this was really cool. I am anxious to learn more about Flex.

All in all, it was a good use of time and I won a book! Foundation ActionScript 3.0 for Flash and Flex. Be sure and watch as I do some poking around with flex and see if really I can do the same things as I might use with GWT.