This event is targeted at folks who are both new to RIA development and Adobe Flex/Actionscript as well as seasoned pros. Day one (January 22) is geared towards a less experienced crowd and will cover higher level theories and practices related to building great online experiences using the Adobe platform. Ben Forta will be giving the opening keynote. Ben is a very fascinating speaker and its really fun to see him do his think in a smaller setting such as this. He's a brilliant dude.
Also on day one, we will be treated to Adobe's Kevin Hoyt, who's an all-around nice guy and clearly one of the word's experts on Flash. He's going to give an overview of the new features in Adobe Flash Player 10, which should be really, really cool. Adobe is really pushing the limits and for a guy like me who's been using Flash for a long time, it amazes me to see how far things have come in 10 years or so.
I'm giving the only non-technical talk on the first day. (go figure!) I was asked to give my spiel on user experience design as it relates to Flex. If you know me, you know that's something I love to do, so I am excited to be able to have the opportunity to share some of my own thinking with the group. The way I see it, anyone who is using one of the various "Rich" application technologies for the Web (Flash, Flex, Silverlight, AJAX, JavaFX, etc) is not only a developer, but a designer also.
Maybe not a "lead" designer, but building RIAs takes an understanding of design on a couple of different levels: Visual Design, Information Design, Interaction Design. They all boil down to "Experience Design". I'm hoping to elaborate on this a bit, and show how "experiences" can be turned into "great experiences" by paying attention to the little details that are so often missed.
If you are going to Flex Camp, I would love to speak with you! I have a furious work schedule while the conference is going on, and will be in and out, but I'd love to connect! (even for post-event follow up).
Ok, enough of me! Back to the event...
Mike Nimer, a good friend and colleague has been doing this stuff forever and knows Flex and Coldfusion as well as anyone. He's going to talk about the integration of the two. For someone like me who generally has to deal with J2EE or .NET application servers, I am always blown away by what you can do with Coldfusion. It really is a neat product, and can enable tons of web functionality in very few lines of code. You'll like Mike's talk. He's groovy.
Here is the complete day 1 schedule
8:00 Registration Opens
8:30 - 9:20 Overview of Flex and the Flash Platform for Newcomers
and the Non-Technical: Michael Epstein
9:30 - 10:20 Keynote: Ben Forta
10:30 - 11:20 Uploading Files in Flex: Kevin Schmidt
11:30 - 12:20 Integrating Flex with Java and PHP: Shashank Tiwari
12:20 - 1:30 Lunch (provided)
1:30 - 2:20 Flex and ColdFusion 101: Mike Nimer
2:30 - 3:20 Getting Started with Adobe AIR: Elad Elrom
3:30 - 4:20 User Experience for Developers: Dave Meeker
4:30 - 5:20 New Features in Flash Player 10: Kevin Hoyt
Now, onto day two... (Where it gets a little crazy!)
James Ward, evangelist at Adobe will be giving the keynote. At Roundarch, we work with James and the other guys on his team around enterprise RIAs and the such, and he's a really nice, smart and dedicated guy. You'll appreciate his kick-off, because he's going to set the tone for a day full of really smart thinking and advanced RIA stuff, along with what I'm most excited for: The Community Showcase.
And then there is Merapi.
I've been involved with a really cool project for a little over a year, most of the folks who'd be reading this blog are already aware of my geek passion, a bit of Software invented by my pal Adam Flater called Merapi. Merapi is a bridge between the Flash player and Java. It's pretty awesome. It takes a while for the cool factor of Merapi to sink in for some people, but once you see the demos and apply them to your current thinking of how "web pages" work, you will scratch you head and think "whoa! I didn't think that was possible!"
Adam and I will give an overview of Merapi, show of some of these samples and make a couple of announcements about the project that will most likely get a lot of people talking. Go Merapi! I love this stuff! (Not to mention, we've got about 1000 RIA developers now using our alpha components to build applications!)
Day two is also going to feature two of my other most favorite community faces. Jeff Tapper will be giving a presentation on testing AIR applications. Jeff's company (along with Mike Nimer, Mike Labriola, and others) is Digital Primates. They work on one of the most massive applications ever built in Flex (if not the largest) and they've mastered a lot of the most complex aspects of Flex and AIR development.
That brings me to Mike Labriola himself, who is really fun to watch talk, is going to show everyone his wizardry in creating Flex components. Good stuff!
I am excited as heck to be alongside such professionals.
Day 2 Full Schedule
8:00 Registration Opens
9:00 - 10:05 Keynote: James Ward
10:15 - 11:20 Flex Component Development: Michael Labriola
11:30 - 12:35 Performance Tuning Flex Applications: Shashank Tiwari
12:35 - 1:30 Lunch (provided)
1:30 - 2:35 Testing Your Flex Applications: Jeff Tapper
2:45 - 3:50 Blowing Up AIR with Merapi: Adam Flater and Dave Meeker
4:00 - 5:00 Community Showcase
For more information on the event, check out the Flex Camp Chicago Web site.
