Recently, the Chicago Flex users group raffled off two tickets to the 360|Flex conference. I was lucky enough to be one of the winners! The conference will be held in Washington DC this year, from September 19^th – 22^nd.

This year Roundarch will be one of the sponsors alongside Adobe, O’Reilly and APress to name a few. As well as sponsoring the event, Roundarch will have a booth set up for the many social events in between the scheduled seminars and workshops. Roundarch rock stars Adam Flater and Jesse Freeman are also scheduled to speak.

I am very excited to have the opportunity to attend this unique community event and there will be a lot to gain from it. This conference provides an exceptional opportunity for Flex novices, and ninjas alike, to learn from community experts and industry leading engineers. With the tremendous line up, attendees will also have the rare opportunity to meet the authors of the great blogs and articles that we as developers come to rely upon.

Some of my top level goals:

- Be a sponge and absorb as much knowledge as possible.

- Heckle Adam and Jesse during their presentations (just kidding)

- Meet Doug McCune, because he is hilarious.

- Represent Roundarch!!!

Stay tuned for my detailed re-cap after the event. For more info on the conference see the links below.

About 360|Flex

Schedule

Speakers

Chicago Flex

Chicago Flex(LinkedIn)

“360|Flex is the first and still the best Adobe Flex developer conference in the world.”

From: Roundarch Blog

We’ve released the first public beta on Google Code as well as opened a Google Group. There is also a repo for Merapi examples.

Here are the important links:

http://merapi.googlecode.com/
http://merapi-examples.googlecode.com/
http://groups.google.com/group/merapi-project

To find out more, keep an eye on our blogs. We’ll be releasing more tutorials and answering questions as they appear.

It’s really great to see the Flex community cranking out cool examples with a technology that you’ve created. This is most definitely the case with the recent “Cocomo ready” Air Wiibot. These guys mashed up Cocmo, Flex, and Merapi to control a Lego Mindstorm robot with a Wiimote. So what’s Cocmo for? They’ve used Cocomo for live video conferencing as well as the ability to control the robot remotely. So, if my friend Jordan happened to have Nathan (our Lego Mindstorm robot) at her house, I could fire up this app at my house and control Nathan remotely using a Wiimote… really cool stuff. Here’s the YouTube video:

MAX Recap

For those of you that missed MAX there was a lot of Merapi action, here’s a quick recap.

First off, Tour De Flex.

Tour De Flex is an application created by Adobe used to explore components in the Flex community. Adobe used Merapi to connect the Eclipse plugin portion of the application to the Tour De Flex AIR application. You can get Tour De Flex at: http://flex.org/tour and read more about the Merapi integration on Holly Schinsky’s blog here: Flex/AIR to Java Communication Using Merapi.

Moving right along… There were a few new demos and a couple of Merapi announcements at the sessions we gave at 360 | MAX. One of the first demos I showed was Outlook integration. Here’s the YouTube video:

The next new demo was Excel integration. If you pay attention to the video on this one you will notice one of the announcements we made at MAX, Merapi is now in the browser! In this demo you will see a Flex browser application interact with Excel:

Thanks again to Universal Mind and Adobe for supporting me at MAX.

Coming up…

FlexCamp Chicago 1/23, FlexCamp OC 1/31, and 360 Flex | Indy 5/18-20 (probably)

I’ll be presenting at each of these conferences (assuming Tom and John let me in again.. they have yet to announce speakers)

There will be some especially interesting announcements at FlexCamp Chicago. Make sure you turn out if possible, otherwise, watch the blogosphere for the recap.

Thanks to everyone who has been using Merapi and giving us feedback on the framework. The creativity, ingenuity, support, and patience from the community has been excellent.

Enjoy the new release!

First of all, at MAX you can follow me on Twitter or BrightKite my handle is “adamflater” on both. By the way, the BrightKite guys were cool enough to setup a placemark for MAX. The placemark is “max2008“. That’s a valid placemark for checking in and posting your notes and photos while at MAX.

Aside from my scheduled events you’ll also find me at the Universal Mind booth throughout the conference. We’ll be demoing all of the apps we’ve been hard at work on in the past year, including our GIS / Data Visualization product: SpatialKey, and the MAX Award Finalist NASDAQ Market Replay. Market Replay is an application that I had the pleasure of working on with the NASDAQ team. Please vote:

The partner booths will be located at: Moscone West, Level 1.

My Schedule:

Speaker Dinner
When: Sunday, November 16th

I’ll be participating in several sessions at MAX and also attending the annual speaker dinner. I hope to see all the familiar faces as well as meet many of the other great folks in the Adobe community I have yet to become acquainted with.

Adobe AIR++
When: Monday, November 17th, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Where: Moscone West 2000

This is a session I’ll just be attending. Andrew Trice has been doing some cool stuff with Merapi and I definitely want to check it out. I’ll only be able to attend part of the session due to the Merapi session directly following this one. Andrew, we’ll save you the last demo spot at 360 | MAX.

Merapi at 360 | MAX
When: Monday, November 17th, 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm
Where: Moscone West, Level 2

John and Tom, the men behind 360 | Conferences, have always been extremely gracious about letting me speak at their events. This year they are hosting an unconference at MAX. The unconference will feature advanced Flex and AIR topics.

At the last 360 Flex conference in San Jose my friend Jordan and I presented on Merapi. We showed an AIR application controlling a Lego Mindstorm Robot in real time. At both of our 360 | MAX sessions we’re going to have a lot of people from the community present the Merapi applications they’ve been working on. You can count on seeing some pretty cool stuff from: Dave Meeker, Andrew Powell, Andrew Trice, Holly Schinsky, Joe Johnston, and me. We’ll be demoing AIR apps that integrate with GPS, RFID, Eclipse, Oracle, Outlook, Growl, MacBook sensors, and of course Legos.

You won’t want to miss these Merapi events and that’s why we have three of them.

MAX Birds-of-a-Feather (BOFs)
When: Monday, November 17th, 8:30 pm -10:20 pm
Where: Moscone West, Level 2

I’ll be participating in two BOFs on Monday night: AIR Gone Wild and the Intuit Quickbase Platform.

AIR Gone Wild is a BOF hosted by Greg Wilson from Adobe. We’ll be showing more of our Merapi goodness at this BOF. If there’s a question you don’t have the chance to ask in a session this BOF is a great place to come and ask it.

Intuit has a new platform geared towards Flex. It’s called Quickbase and it’s an interesting take on cloud computing. I had the opportunity to work with the platform on one project and I highly recommend checking these guys out.

Merapi at 360 | MAX
When: Tuesday, November 18th, 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Where: Moscone West, Level 2

In our second Merapi session at 360 | MAX we’ll cover anything we didn’t have time for in the previous day as well as demo all the cool stuff from the previous sessions. Conferences tend to be a place where a lot of people crank on cool ideas they have. So, you never know, a new app might pop up between Monday and Tuesday they we’ll demo during this session.

InsideRIA Outlook, 2009: What Every Developer Needs to Be Thinking About
When: Wednesday, November 19th, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Where: Moscone West, Room 2009

Rich Tretola, community manager of InsideRIA.com is hosting this session. This will be a panel format where each of the presenters brings their ideas on the future of RIAs. I’m pretty excited for this one, panel discussion are some of the most valuable aspects of any great conference.

Introduction to Flex Builder 3
When: Wednesday, November 19th, 2:00pm – 3:00 pm
Where: Moscone West, Room 2005

This will be a great session for those of you just getting starting or thinking about jumping into Flex development. I’ll be covering all the basics of the Flex IDE as well as an overview of what Flex is as a whole. In my source code demos I’ll be integrating a Flex app with BrightKite, the site I mentioned earlier in the post, to show you how easy it is to consume data in Flex. I’m looking forward to great questions at this session. It’s always interesting to find out what people need to know about Flex.

All right, well I think that’s enough. Looking forward to seeing everyone at MAX!

-adam

To keep in the open tradition of 360 | Flex I’m posting my survey feedback once again. The Merapi session at 360 Flex | San Jose was really fun and was happy to share the stage with my friend Jordan Synder.

There was one very constructive comment about our examples. The examples that I showed were pretty basic and Jordan’s example was somewhat complex. Showing some deeper examples with medium complexity is a great suggestion for improving this talk and a great take away for me in preparing for my next Merapi session.

Thanks to everyone that came to the session and provided feedback.

Without further delay…

How to make your AIR app blow up with Merapi

Merapi is a framework that enables a bridge between Flex on AIR and Java at the desktop layer. If you need to access a Java api in Flex or a Flex API in Java, this is the right tool for you. This session will cover the basics of using Merapi to build a Java enabled AIR application. Please bring your questions and comments about the framework as well as any applications you want to show off. This will be an interactive session, you’ll be able to code along with the session and try out some Merapi samples.

Respondants: 33

What the user Expected? 90.91 %
Slides Useful: 84.85 %
Average Rating: 4.3030
Session Informative? 100.00 %

Was the speaker authoritive?

Answered questions very well and had in-depth knowledge of the subject material

Both speakers spoke well.

Oh man, they knew like everything about this stuff. EVERYTHING.

Seemed very knowledgable, and was confident in what they were presenting.

Adam was very knowledgable about the topic, seeing as he wrote the framework. He was confident in his presentation, and had very interesting content.

he is involved with the beta framework and created working apps

Both Adam and Jordan did a great job with their presentation. Jordan’s usage of Bluetooth via AIR to control the LEGO MindStorm was way cool.

adam and jordan are badass

Both speakers were extremely knowledgable. Jordan; however was somewhat soft spoken and monotone, as if she was not really interested in presenting.

Adam and Jordan really know their framework, and they didn’t have trouble fielding question from the audience. Unfortunately, Merapi is still in its infancey, so a lot of their answers were, “That’s something we’re planning on doing.”

I did not previously know anything about Merapi

Yes

I love how you have the authors of the various projects presenting on their stuff.

he was one of the leads on the project and seemed to have a good grasp of what he wanted to present and the way to do it

He knew what he was doing, explained it well

Both speakers seemed very authoritive with the toolsets.

Was a fun preso. Jordan’s robot rocks!

Loved Ms. Snyder’s application!

Was the Session Informative?

I had never heard of Merapi before

Good demos

It was interesting to see what Merapi was capable of and how it worked.

I learned a whole whole lot of things.

Good examples of what can be done with the project, and a good quick intro on how to get started.

I have a sense of what merapi is and is not

The session was example-heavy, which really helps when showing off a framework.

The session was example-heavy, which really helps when showing off a framework.

very much so

Basic introduction to Merapi, though it is in private beta.

he started with just 4 slides and then jumped into code

yes, but I basically knew all that Adam said, but the lady was all new, that was great

Were the Slides Useful?

There were a few slides to give background info then many examples which really helped

Primarily code.

They were pretty good, but it was really all about teh codez.

There weren’t any slides, just sample code. Which is much better than slides.

There were only a few of them before he jumped in to code examples, which was great. The examples were simple enough to easily understand everything that was happening, but still interesting enough that they kept the audience’s attention.

Not that they weren’t useful, just pretty much non-existant. Not a bad thing, hands on demos rock.

There weren’t many slides, but lots of talk about what the code did, so that was great.

simple and sweet

Yes code snippets were concise and easy to understand

There weren’t many slides because the session was driven by examples, but for what they were, the slides did provide the necessary information: what Merapi is, where to get it, and contact info for the speakers

There weren’t many slides because the session was driven by examples, but for what they were, the slides did provide the necessary information: what Merapi is, where to get it, and contact info for the speakers

good overall

Yes

but it didn’t matter. the code was the best way to describe merapi

cant remember the slides – i do remember the robot

Additional Comments:

The focus on hardware integration was interesting although unexpected. A demo of complex data manipulation using Java would have been a nice addition. There was some delay switching presenters’ computers.

Adam is such a badass that now I’m following him on Twitter. Also, I really liked the guest appearance by Jordan. She has a neat robot and I want to be like her (knowledgeable about robots; not female).

I had never heard of merapi. I walked in thinking it yet another cairngorm clone but walked away with an appreciation of it’s real domain. nice presentation. concise. And thank you for finishing when you were done rather than pull out a load of filler.

Good speakers. Great demos. Bring them back.

Very good. Would like to see solutions to deplyoyment and runtime intigration with java and air

There were no Air Apps that blew up.

Great demo from both presenters on using Merapi to bridge AIR/Java

Adam had several examples that were somewhat low-level, getting no more complicated then pushing random numbers generated in Java to Flex, and Jordan’s examples were much heavier. I would like to have seen something in the middle: perhaps how to leverage Merapi to do something on the OS that you cannot do in AIR. The LEGO Mindstorm demo was fantastic. It really drove the power of the framework home.

Adam had several examples that were somewhat low-level, getting no more complicated then pushing random numbers generated in Java to Flex, and Jordan’s examples were much heavier. I would like to have seen something in the middle: perhaps how to leverage Merapi to do something on the OS that you cannot do in AIR. The LEGO Mindstorm demo was fantastic. It really drove the power of the framework home.

speakers were very knowledgable

The Lego Mindstorm NXT demo was very clever.

Great example of hardware / air integration.

AIR controlled cars woot!

Dude, the Mindstorm stuff was HOT, HOT, HOT!

it would have been nice if the developers of merapi had more of the projects future planned and deployment issues decided upon but overall it was a good introduction to what merapi is and where it fits in a developer’s toolkit

exciting stuff

Great examples!

as a java developer this is a solid tool to work with AIR

So, pick up your copy or subscription at Flex-Authority.com and find out more about the Merapi Project direct from Dave and me via Leif.

Yesterday at 360 Flex I presented a session on Merapi and moderated a panel discussion on open source technology. At the Merapi session we discussed the focus of the project and show a lot of sample applications. Including a few demos that showed the ease of use when developing with Merapi.

Here’s some sample code that shows how to do a simple echo of a string from a Flex UI to Java and back again:

Flex Source:

Java Source:

This simple application is an example of how easy it is to communicate from AIR to Java (and vice-versa) at the desktop.

I also walked through a bit of the source involved with creating the gyroscope demo shown in the video below:

Jordan is a friend of mine that has a keen interest in messing with hardware, amoung other things. So, we were hanging out one night at my place and she saw that I had a Lego Mindstorm robotics kit. I proceeded to tell her bout my plans to integrate Merapi with some of the Legos APIs… long story short, she took the Mindstorm home with her and did all the work. Here’s a video of the robot that Jordan presented in the same talk:

I submitted this talk for the Adobe MAX conference when they were asking for proposals, but unfortunately it was not selected. I will be at MAX though and would be happy to talk with anyone who is interested in Merapi at the Universal Mind booth. If there’s enough interested in having a birds-of-a-feather-session on Merapi, I’d be happy to accommodate that as well.

The feedback from the folks here at 360 Flex and those of you digging into Merapi has been great. Keep the comments coming and we’ll keep on adding features and stability to the framework.

[ Update: More view of "Nathan" the 360 Flex Robot ]

When we started the series Scott had no experience as a programmer. His academic background is in Psychology and he is a music and yoga teacher. He literally began this project at a point of learning Flex from scratch. My academic background is in Computer Science and Sociology. One of the things that interested me in the very small amount of study I did in the Sociology of Eduction is the idea that students often make the best teachers. So, my role in this project was/is as mentor and technical editor as Scott chronicles his experiences learning the ins and outs of becoming a Flex developer.

The insight that I’ve gained on how a person learns to be a programmer has been invaluable. I hope this project has resulted in a novel resource for the novice to learn how to really use all of the powerful capabilities offered by the Flex platform.

So, we’re starting to talk about planning where to go next. John Wilker and Tom Ortega were gracious enough to accept both Scott and myself as presenters at 360 Flex | San Jose. We will be presenting the LFFS series. After that we’re open to what comes next and I’d love to hear some feedback on what would be most valuable to those of you out there learning Flex.

Here are some ideas to think about:

•  A full length book in the LFFS style
•  A series of pocket-guide books
•  Continuing the series as is
•  Creating a featured site for LFFS that includes addt’l writers
•  A focus on LFFS sessions at Adobe community events

Don’t think of this as a comprehensive list of choices or that any choices are mutually exclusive. We’d love to hear what will be the most valuable resource for you. Feel free to comment on this post or e-mail me at adamflater at gmail dot com.

thanks
-adam

Thanks to Rich for making me a two time Inside RIA guest blogger.

Thanks to everyone that gave feedback. I’ll be giving a 2.0 version of this talk at Flex Maniacs in May and feedback from attendees is really helpful to know what to polish.

If you were at my talk and didn’t have to time to give feedback, feel free to comment here or send me an e-mail off-line. I’d love to hear about how to make this talk more usefull.

thanks
-adam

Advanced Skinning and Component Development

Respondants: 7
What the user Expected? 71.43 %
Slides Useful: 71.43 %
Average Rating: 4.4286
Session Informative? 71.43 %

Was the speaker authoritive?

Very good presentation, had materials available for us to download

Knows his stuff. Great talk, good pace.

Was the Session Informative?

Hadn’t really done skinning – very cool functionality

Useful step-by-step demos!

Were the Slides Useful?

Great reference slides.

Love the slides and the examples on how to skin in Flash. I will definately be using them in the future.

Additional Comments:

well done