360 Flex Milan is over

The first edition of the 360 Flex conference in Europe is over. It’s been three interesting days of talking to people, attending sessions and networking. Overall the conference was interesting, although there were less people that I was expecting – but I guess this is because in Europe the conference doesn’t yet have that much popularity.

The sessions were mostly held by non-adobe speakers – there were three sessions held by Adobe guys and the keynote during the first day. The rest were people that used Flex, have done cool things with it, or developed tools to help in working and deploying Flex applications to clients. Some thoughts:

  • the guys from Kaltura are pretty funny. And they have an interesting concept to boot: a wiki-like application for rich content. It uses Flex for the video editing tools – check them out at kaltura.com.
  • the guys at NitroLM came up with a hosted licensing solution for Flex and AIR applications. And they work with Flex 3 – NitroLM homepage
  • there were a lot of other interesting sessions,  like the one Jaco held, but my plane will leave soon, and I need to get off the wireless 🙂

Fun facts at the conference:

  • I spoke too fast and finished my preso 20 minutes earlier 😦 fortunately people were curios enough to stay and ask question and just talk afterwards.
  • The guys at simplified logic burned their Guitar Hero 3 set – plugged their 110V into Europe’s 220. They only sang a last "puff"
  • Koen had a lot of misfortune – his mac crashed twice during the presentation and one of the demo apps would not work no matter what 🙂 So macs are human too.

Next post will have pictures – if I can get them from Mihai’s camera.

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Flex API contest extended

The guys with the Flex 360 conference have extended the deadline for their Flex API contest, so that participants for Europe can sign in as well, The new deadline is 4th of April, the friday before the conference begins. See more information on this here and here.

Also, there’s almost a month to go until the conference. From the Romanian side of Flex I and Mihai Corlan will participate, with two sessions – Mihai with Developing Data-intensive Flex applications and me with a session on Flex and (web) services. I will mostly talk about SOAP services, but won’t ignore REST ones. As part of what I will present  at Flex 360 I’ve started a series of articles on the blog – the first one is already live and presents a sample application that searches videos using web services. So let me know in the comments if I’m off track or not.,

But how do I use that code?

That’s a question I’ve seen quite a few times on the Adobe labs and pre-release forums over the past months. And the question is used in relation with the code being generated by the web service introspection wizard.

Although we’ve tried to make the code as simple and versatile as possible, as in to cover most use-cases, it seems to still need some explaining. It is possibly caused by change. The way in which you used web services has changed substantially, and disruptive changes are not always easily understood. We’ve gone from a full run-time experience to strong-types and ActionScript representations of the service. So I’ve tried to put together a small application that uses a web service and shows how to use this new nifty feature.

The example will stretch over two posts/parts, each covering a way of using the generated code to arrive at the same result, structured like this: Continue reading

Speaking at 360 Flex

306_Flex Italy In April I will be speaking at the 360 Flex conference in Italy. I will be talking about webservices and Flex3.
The conference will take place between 7 and 9 april in Milan, Italy, so if you’re in Europe you can attend.

 

Details on the event can be found on the homepage for the conference, and registration can be done through its eventbrite page.