An Architect's View

Something new this year at MXDU, they are running one-day hands-on training sessions for AU$495 which is excellent value. Macromedia's own James Talbot is running the Get Ready for Blackstone! training day where you get to build applications with the new features in Blackstone.

I just got news today that I will be going to MXDU to speak about Mach II and Fusebox. The speaker and topic lists are really shaping now and it looks like it will be an awesome conference! Geoff Bowers is giving a very interesting talk on event gateways and there looks to be a lot of Blackstone-specific content this year which is very exciting.

Daemonite: MXDU2005: Venue booked, dates confirmed, call for papers! That says it all really. MXDU 2004 was awesome. I expect MXDU 2005 will be even better. Go on... you know you want to... |

Guy Watson has put his MXDU and FlashForward presentations online. I missed his talk in Sydney and didn't get to FlashForward in the end so it's great see his slides on JSFL and read his notes (both online as FlashPaper - nice touch!). He talks about how you can automate tasks in Flash and how you can script access to the timeline and the panels and so on. It really opens your eyes to the power of the new extensibility API. He's also started publishing things to the new JSFL Extensions category on the Macromedia Flash Exchange.

I've just posted the remainder of my photos from MXDU. Sorry if they're a bit bigger than you'd like! Browse every day here!
Thanx to Andrew Muller and Ben Bishop for providing me with all the names!

Checked out of my room and now I'm banished to the business center for an hour or so before Mike Chambers and I grab a cab to the airport and fly home to Australia.
The bloggers' dinner was a good event - great food at Chinta Ria - and then lots of drinking afterward (Brandon Hall and I didn't get back to our rooms until around 5:30am, chatting about all sorts of things including software design of course!). I'll be posting pictures from that when I get back on a high-speed connection. The BBQ at Daemon was also excellent - again, pictures coming soon.
Big shout out to Geoff Bowers & his wife Julie for being great hosts on Thursday night and to the larger Daemon crew for a wonderful conference.

The final session of MXDU - the speaker panel - saw a large number of folks on stage facing a grilling from various audience members. Some interesting questions were asked as well as some of the "standard" concerns being aired (e.g., "Is Director dead?", "Is Flash Remoting dead?", "Is HomeSite+ dead?" - No on all of these - the response was something like "Macromedia continues to make releases and enhancements to these techologies and is committed to providing the best tools for developers.")
Quite a few questions about the Flashosphere and direction - "Flash is going in six directions at once... can we have a roadmap?" was one question. Mike answered that so I won't attempt to paraphrase (I'm sure he'll be happy to blog the answers to these questions).
Some interesting questions about Flex and its position in the marketplace - "Won't it eat into the existing Flash developer market?". My sense is that there's a whole sector of developers (often called enterprise developers, i.e., folks who write Java and other text-based languages without visual tools) who will never master the Flash authoring environment but will 'grok' Flex immediately - for them, Flex represents a way into the RIA space. The existing Flash developer space will be effectively untouched by Flex (except perhaps to increase demand for their skills to create components for the new enterprise Flex / RIA space!). That's my feeling anyway.
One question was right up my street: "As we build more complex apps with components, it gets harder and harder to debug - what about some tools for this?" This is one of those 'moving to enterprise development' growing pains and it isn't really about components per se. My answer was that you need to start adopting other enterprise development practices such as building test harnesses for components, either as you build the components or - even better - before you build the components. Enterprise software requires enterprise testing.
Another related question was about the compile times for complex Flash applications. Mike talked about using command-line compilers and build systems and I said this is another 'moving to enterprise development' situation where we're building complex enough applications that we're beginning to hit the same compile time stuff that many Java / C++ enterprise developers have been used to for years: edit, compile-wait-link-wait, test. It's pretty much a natural consequence of building complex software and one that many scripting languages manage to hide from us by being very lazy about compiling code (on demand).
And that was it. MXDU 2004 is over. And what a great conference it's been! Incredibly passionate developers building astonishing applications with the latest versions of the Macromedia MX products. I'm looking forward to next year's MXDU already (if I get invited to speak again).
Tonight is the bloggers' dinner. Tomorrow is the partner conference. More later!

I missed the first twenty minutes but for the remainder of the hour Tim valiantly deflected a number of questions while still providing as much of a sneak peak of what really is coming in Blackstone as he could. His catch phrase quickly became "That's a bit too specific an implementation question for me to answer at this point"... People seemed pretty excited about the Flash-based forms and the reporting / printable output features.

Talked about many of the ways that projects can get into difficulty including a number of bad process practices that people easily fall into. Then he started talking about ways in which you can manage this.
His recommendation: develop code locally - use version control - deploy to shared QA server. Daemon favor CVS so he demo'd TortoiseCVS and WinCVS and explained why he likes CVS. Despite a few technical difficulties, he showed a number of ways that CVS helps you manage your codebase, with a variety of tools and different views onto the code.
We use CVS at Macromedia (for our dynamic website code) and it really does make life easier. Look at Bonsai and Tinderbox as well (look them up on Google).

Another amusing Nectarine Flash cartoon intro (I forgot to mention that yesterday). "All your base are belong to us..." Anyways, today it was the Tim and Ben show. Tim asked who is running CFMX 6.1 and lots of hands went up (I noticed yesterday in my talk just how many folks have upgraded - very encouraging!).
Tim outline the "Blackstone" (CFMX '7') themes: application building, enterprise citizenship and new frontiers. For application building, they want to do for applications what did for databases. Most applications are focused on data management, form-based and / or reporting. Tim showed rich (Flash-based) forms with data binding and validation (and tabbed navigation and accordion panes - which got applause) and easy PDF generation with the new tag which got more applause. He talked about enterprise citizenship with source-less deployment etc and for the new frontiers, he hinted at event-based programming. More to come in the Blackstone technology preview this afternoon.
Then Tim gave a history of Rich Internet Applications, positioned Flex and talked about its high-level architecture. Then Ben Elmore stepped up to demo Flex and show us how to build an application with it. He demo'd an e-commerce application - very intuitive user experience - then emphasized the importance of application design and architecture before showing how to build a good portion of the e-commerce application from scratch with really only a handful of lines of MXML.
Finally, Tim came back on and demo'd a financial dashboard built with Flex - very sweet!