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

The conference, held at the 3LD (3-Legged Dog) Art & Technology Center, will feature tracks for Technology and Inspiration, along with the City track for exploring local landmarks. The Technology track will focus on coding and wiring for application architecture while the Inspiration track will center on design and user experience. The venue, which is a gallery for new media and experimental artwork, is meant to mirror the tone of the conference in the way it joins art and technology.

As part of the Inspiration track, I’ll be giving my talk entitled “Building RIAs with Style,” which I premiered at Flash Camp Chicago in February and have continued to refine since then. The talk starts with an introduction of lower level concepts about web graphics for developers, continues with exploring how some popular RIA frameworks handle styling, and wraps up by comparing two important workflow tools—Adobe Flash Catalyst and Microsoft Expression Blend—to demonstrate how the different platforms operate.

My goal with this talk is to provide rookies with a basis for understanding graphic assets, how to apply styles in RIA development, and the importance of styling as well as provide more advanced tricks of the trade for senior developers.

Check back to hear how it went, but first, watch my interview with Elad Elrom, Flash and the City conference organizer. Elad is a technical writer and senior Flash engineer, and he will also be leading a session entitled “Flex Data Binding Pitfalls: 10 Common Misuse Mistakes.”

Flash and the City is May 14-16 in New York, New York.

Vector Graphics – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics
Raster Graphics – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_graphics

F*CSS

Site – http://fcss.flashartofwar.com
Source – http://github.com/theflashbum/fcss
Quick start – http://fcss.flashartofwar.com/quick-start-guide

Jesse Freeman – @theflashbum
http://flashartofwar.com/

FlexFormatter

http://sourceforge.net/projects/flexformatter/
http://flexformatter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/FlexFormatter/FlexPrettyPrintCommandUpdateSite/ (Eclipse software update URL)

Thanks to Flash Camp Chicago for having me present and to Roundarch for sponsoring my talk… it continues to be a exceptionally well-run conference and one of the highlights in my presenting year.

This example was developed using Flex 4 and Merapi .NET in C#. You’ll need the Flash Builder 4 beta to build the Flex code and Visual Studio 2008 to play with the C# code. However, if you’d like to skip that part, you can download the binary for the C# portion from here and just run it from the command line.

Additional resources:

HTML view of the Flex code
HTML view of the C# code
The Google Code repo

Thanks to Bob and everyone involved with BFlex for having me speak and putting on a great event.

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.

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

What:  Universal Mind, a leading solution provider of Rich Internet
       Applications, today announced two of its team members will 
       lead teaching seminars and one will participate in a panel 
       discussion at the Adobe MAX Conference North America 2008. 
       Rich Internet Applications are an important part of Web 2.0 
       deployments because they provide a better user experience 
       through improved user interfaces and a more consistent 
       online experience, regardless of what operating system is 
       used.

Who:   Universal Mind's Director of Technology Brandon Purcell
       and software architect Adam Flater. Purcell has background
       in expertise in building emerging web applications at 
       Universal Mind and previously at Macromedia/Adobe. During 
       his tenure at Adobe, he supported a wide range of products 
       including ColdFusion, JRun, Flex, Flash Media Server and 
       Flash Lite. Brandon authored several whitepapers and 
       articles on performance and scalability with ColdFusion and 
       JRun and assisted with the launch of the Macromedia website 
       built on ColdFusion. Flater's background is in working with 
       Java and Microsoft technologies, building both web and 
       desktop applications. He has been working in Flex user 
       interface and server development since the beta release of 
       Flex 2.0 in October of 2005. Flater was the lead developer 
       on the ActionScript SDK for eBay's Web Services used in the 
       eBay Desktop application. Flater is also the founder of the 
       Merapi Project, an open source project that bridges Java 
       with Flex on AIR at the desktop.

When:  "360|Max - Merapi" an "unconference" inside of Adobe MAX 
       with Adam Flater
       Monday, November 17 at 12:30 p.m. PT
       "Architecting ColdFusion For Scalability and High 
        Availability"
       led by Brandon Purcell
       Tuesday, Nov. 18 at 3:00 p.m. PT
       "Inside RIA Outlook 2009: What Every Developer Needs to be
       Thinking About" Panel discussion with Adam Flater
       Wednesday, Nov. 19 at 11:00 a.m. PT
       "Intro to Flex Builder 3" teaching session led 
           by Adam Flater
       Wednesday, Nov. 19 at 2:00 p.m. PT

Where: Adobe MAX North America 2008, San Francisco Marriot,
       55 4th Street,
       San Francisco, Calif.

Why:   Sponsored by Adobe, the Adobe Max North America conference 
       gathers together thousands of software designers, 
       developers, partners, executives and Adobe staff for 
       education, inspiration and community involvement.

From: iStockAnalyst

As promised in my session at EclipseWorld [No longer up] today, I’m posting a recap of the session. My session was titled “Building Flex/AIR UIs for Java Using Merapi”. The session gave an overview of Flex, Flex Builder, and Merapi. I also provided some sample application demos using the Merapi framework. You’ll find a link to download the slides from the session at the end of this post. My session was slated as a 100 level talk so I covered a lot of basic, high level concepts regarding Flex and Flex Builder. I’m interested to hear feedback on the talk as I’m typically presenting at Flex centric events and EclipseWorld focuses more on Java development. My hope is that the session was valuable to those seeking an introductory look at Flex and AIR.

Thanks to everyone that attended and for all of the greatquestions throughout the session.

Download links:

Slides

Merapi Examples:

Mac Book Pro Accelerometer
Lego Mindstorm Robotics
Live GPS Visualization*
Sending Growl Notifications*
RFID Enable AIR Applications*

* – Part of Andrew Powell’s Blog infoaccelerator.net

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.