Keynote today focused on Adobe tool chain around the Flash platform, from design & development time to deployment time.

On the design and development sides, several CS4 products were demonstrated including Dreamweaver support of the OpenAjax Alliance metadata to include 3rd party Ajax toolkits into the IDE, relying on these metadata we saw Dreamweaver running jQuery widgets.

In between design and development, Flash Catalyst was demonstrated, showing how easy it is to round trip between designer tools and Catalyst using FXG format.

Other demonstrations of interest to me included:

• Gumbo Flex Builder reading a project exported from Flash Catalyst and connecting to web-served data and managing them both in sync server and client-side.
• Alchemy project allowing one to compile C code into ActionScript bytecode. The nice thing I learned about this, is that the resulting bytecode is
  made such that it can execute cross-frame, meaning that heavy computations from C code (like codec executions for example) will not block the UI while executing!

If I had to highlight one of the technical session I attended today it would be Deepa Subramaniam’s one, she well summarized Halo component-model patterns, nothing new for me here, but even more interesting she also started introducing some patterns around building custom Spark components. Very interesting for those would want to start exploring that brand new way of defining components for Flex Gumbo release.

Another interesting session was the session by Andrew Mikkelsen about why choosing Flex for Data Visualization. Andrew briefly shown an ILOG Elixir maps components test-sample he made.

Finally the day ended with the now traditional sneak peeks session (where I am sitting in right now). Peaks are today split in several categories, the first one being the client category. In this category Adobe shown among other things a nice project called Durango that allows one to create a mashup AIR application by drag and dropping components from other applications. The result can be saved to a Flex Builder project for you to be able to modify it afterwards. Peaks are still going on with the tools category, maybe more on this tomorrow…

Tags: MAX

Posted by Christophe Jolif in Conferences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.