Some of the more interesting sessions:

Extending Web to the Desktop with AIR
Monday, March 24, 2008
9:00 AM – 10:00 AM US/Pacific

Getting Started with Flash Lite 3 and CS3
Monday, March 24, 2008
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM US/Pacific

Building Rich Internet Applications with Flex 3
Monday, March 24, 2008
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM US/Pacific

Introduction to Adobe Blaze DS
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
9:00 AM – 10:00 AM US/Pacific

Integrating Salesforce.com and Flex
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
11:00 AM – 12:00 PM US/Pacific

Building AIR Applications with Flash CS3
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM US/Pacific

Adobe AIR Local Data Storage Options With Emphasis on Using Embedded SQL Databases
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
9:00 AM – 10:00 AM US/Pacific

Flex and Java – Tying the Knot!
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM US/Pacific

Flex Data Services
Thursday, March 27, 2008
9:00 AM – 10:00 AM US/Pacific

Blood from a Stone: Flash Game Optimization on Low-end mobile devices
Thursday, March 27, 2008
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM US/Pacific

Flex Visual Data & Charting
Thursday, March 27, 2008
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM US/Pacific

AIR Native Drag and Drop
Friday, March 28, 2008
1:00 PM – 2:00 PM US/Pacific

Flex Architecture
Friday, March 28, 2008
4:00 PM – 5:00 PM US/Pacific

When Microsoft released Silverlight the one feature that got a lot of people excited was that you could use the language you were most familiar with to build a RIA. Apparently Adobe has an internal project which allows any C or C++ code to run in the Flash Player or on AIR. This means that any language built on C/C++ will also run which means that Java, Python, and my beloved Ruby could also run. Schwing!

Ted is a Python guy so he talks about IronPython and JPython but of course Ruby has JRuby and IronRuby so I’m sure the behavior would be similar.

Like many organizations Adobe has lots of legacy C/C++ code ranging from PhotoShop filters, to PDF renderers, to readers and writers of every file format in existence, font libraries, to very complex vector renderers, and text layout code. Beyond Adobe there are many open source libraries that could be leveraged as components as well. The big thing for me is that these are not ports of these libraries, they run identical to the original source code down. For example the behavior of Python in Flash Player is identical to C-Python vs the ported behavior under the IronPython and Jython projects. The goal here is to bring lots of these legacy assets, code libraries, and languages into Flash Player and Adobe AIR perfectly so that any developer can leverage them cross-platform to build software. It would not shock me to see some of these components added into the Flash Player component cache so that they essentially are built into the player on first use.

InfoWorld has more.

Company: massify.com
Job Title: Flash/Flex RIA Developer
Description: Flash/Flex RIA Developer

Massify is a community driven site that brings film creatives and
movie buffs together in the pursuit of great film; we’re using the
power of the web to transform the way films are made – and, in the
process, fund innovative projects that people want to see.

As a member of our team, you’ll help the team define and develop the
user experience for full on Flex based applications being deployed
to a huge audience of end users. No banner ads here. We seek a Flex/
Actionscript programmer with strong CS fundamentals. The ideal
candidate is a bright, logical team-player, with excellent
communication skills.

Required Skills:

2+ years of AS2/AS3 experience
Experience building Flex applications
Familiarity with UNIX, comfortable with a command line
Experience integrating flash/flex with HTTP based REST services
Streaming video experience a plus (RTMP, RTP, RTSP)

Bonus Points:

Experience with Red5/Flash Media Server
Component development with Flash/Flex
Proficiency with PHP/HTML/CSS

It’s a good basic overview but there are a couple of things I disagree with;

Why use ColdFusion for all the examples? A shrinking minority still use it but all the ColdFusion guys I know switched to either PHP or Rails over the last two years. I think it’s best to use PHP for comparisons like this as everyone has used it and can easily translate PHP to their favorite language.

Even though Adobe won’t admit it the reason they’re doing the comparison is to show off that Flex does Ajax like things. At the end of the article they break down the pros and cons of each, and if I were an Ajax developer I’m not sure I would be convinced to try Flex. Their pros for Flex are that it’s easier to develop with because of an IDE, which is true but there are Ajax IDEs now (which the author mentions later), the other is performance which ends up a tie because Ajax in a browser can handle large amounts of text better.

If I were writing it my pro Flex arguments would have included;

Consistent results No matter your browser Flash is Flash so Flex is Flex. Except for extremely rare circumstances your app is going to behave as expected.

Class Mapping Flash Remoting can map server side classes. Objects don’t need to be converted into XML first to go over the wire and they arrive as native objects ready to use (no need to parse and convert them back again).

Not only Remoting If you do want to consume XML Flex can do that too, or JSON, or REST services etc. If you already have some kind of service set up Flex could slide in and replace Ajax so you could make use of it’s…

Advanced Multimedia Features Video, Audio, and Vector Animation are things you just cant do with JavaScript, it’s the way content on the Intertubes are moving and a big reason to use Flex.

My pro Ajax arguments would include;

Frameworks The sheer number of Ajax frameworks dwarfs anything Flex has right now.

User Base The Flex community is growing but the JavaScript community is huge, you’re much more likely to find help getting started or solving a problem with Ajax.

I’ve built something similar in Flash/AS2, and without sounding too much like a Adobe marketing rep, I have to say it’s so much easier in Flex/AS3. AS2 doesn’t have ArrayCollections so moving things around in an array was a bit of a headache, but in AS3 you can just remove an item from a list ( myCollection.removeItemAt(x) ) and then place it back anywhere ( myCollection.addItemAt( item, x ) ) and all the other items will shift down the list.

Another big time saver is the DragManager in AS2 you had to manually handle all kinds of dragging functions but with AS3 you just add a couple of events and you’re done. Even the Tile component saves having to layout the images by hand.

Anyways long story short the AS2 version took a couple of days to build and the Flex version took a couple of hours.

• Ted (on Flex) has his AIRchat running on Python Twisted.
• Derek Wischusen has his messages moving atop Rails, Apache ActiveMQ, ActiveMessaging, and STOMP (post 1, post 2)
• Alex McCaw is the creator of Juggernaut which can use Flex or Ajax to push messages on Rails (using a Flash socket)
• Renaun Erickson has an example using Flex and Red 5 the open source Flash server.
• The new Yahoo! Messenger for the web runs on Flex.

Fire up those Flex chat apps and talk amongst yourselves, I’ll give you a topic:

Buzzword is the most wondrous invention since the printing press and will kill off both MS Word and Ajax in one fell swoop, discuss

Apple is holding a series of one day events in August on getting your app to play nice with the iPhone.

Of course if said 2.0 application is Flex you’re out of luck, for now.