Adobe Flex Architecture & Frameworks Overview plus Merapi Preview at Chicago Flex / AIR Developers Group

Last week I teamed up with Rhazes Spell to give a talk to the Chicago Flex and Adobe AIR Developers Group. First off, it is great to finally see a user group in Chicago dedicated to Adobe-based RIA technology... It's been a long time in the coming!

I've been involved in the Adobe RIA community for quite some time, and have always been a little dissapointed in my own fair city's lack of organization around an RIA development community (and I suppose by saying that, I am equally at fault!) Granted Chicago isn't a total Flex community virgin... I do recognize the unparalleled efforts of Igor Ilyinsky who's been running the Chicago Cold Fusion and Flex User Group for several years. It probably makes a lot of sense for these guys to gang up and unify in some way, as there is strength in numbers and a solid community of developers should have as much representation as possible.

Anyway, I was asked to give a presentation to the Flex & AIR Group at an event that was hosted at our Roundarch offices. The week leading up to this presentation was pretty jam packed with client obligations and a trip to our New York office, so to get a little help, I asked Rhazes to join me and contribute his thoughts.

Because the Chicago group is quite new, and we anticipated there to be a wide array of folks in the audience, we decided to generalize our presentation and cover some basics on Flex RIA application architecture and an overview of Flex frameworks. After all, when you are new to a technology, getting started on the right foot makes all the difference in the world, and we thought this topic would help the group adopt Flex with fewer introductory frustrations and development dead-ends.

Borrowing some insight from Ali Mills and Luke Bayes's great presentation (and research) on the various Flex frameworks floating around the Internet, Rhazes and I broke things down and gave a "What are frameworks 101" along with an overview of items to consider when defining the architecture your Adobe Flex application(s).

We wrapped up the presentation in about 40 minutes and then I took about 10 minutes to talk about The Merapi Project. It was also great to have some of our friends from Digital Primates at the event, including Louie Penafor who is also on the Merapi team. Louie's created the coolest AIR/Merapi example (I think) to date, which is an AIR application that allows you to acquire images from a scanner using TWAIN. Good stuff, big brain, and a really nice guy at that.
It was also nice to see Mike Nimer, who I consider to be one of the longest-standing members of the Flex community and now one of the primary brains over at Digital Primates.

I gave an overview of Merapi, showed off our pretty nifty MacBook Pro "Gyro" example, also known as "Merapi and Physics". People were interested in the project, and it looks like some of the attendees will come and sign up for the Alpha program for Merapi.

It was great to be able to talk about pretty deep technology with this group, and finish up making the point that all of the bits and bytes would be for nothing if it weren't for the user's that we need to design for.

I can't help but to share my enthusiasm for creative technology and my thoughts around design thinking as it applies to technology and how "we" use technology in our daily lives.

It is the people that make up these local community groups that are going to be the ones that build the applications of the future, and it really is important to help foster the community so that it incubates innovation benefits all of us.

Here is a copy of our presentation slides

View the Video of our Presentation