Practice Pad
Technology, Programming, Music, Percussion, Drums and Stuff

Today was the first annual RIA Dev Shed event. I thought overall it was a success, and a credit to it’s creator, Matt Reinbold, and its sponsors, Adobe, Twelve Horses, Fusion Authority, Vox Pop Design, and Bountiful Wireless.

The conference location at the Franklin Covey building was terrific, and lunch was great. The conference was not without a few hiccups that seemed about right for a first-time showing. The quality and polish of the presenters was a little un-even, and there were some late presenter cancellations that lead to serious headaches for Matt. The wifi situation was also problematic, and they had to co-opt some tech support to get it up and routing to the inter-tubes. The door prizes were terrific, and included the requisite t-shirts for all and a raffle with a big pile of books, “The most powerful wireless router allowed by law” provided by Bountiful Wireless, and a $2100 software pack from Adobe. Overall, I give the event about an 8.5 out of 10. Definitely worth the money and, more importantly, worth the time.

I attended 4 sessions:
ColdFusion-Powered Flex 3 applications by Mike Nimer. I really think this is a breakthrough topic. Flex has been very slow coming into it’s own, mainly because it was wildly over priced for the first two iterations. Now it’s a free open-source technology with a moderately priced professional IDE. It’s an amazingly rapid and robust development language, especially when coupled with ColdFusion 8, which has been enhanced to be the best back-end interface to it. Cool stuff, especially for us CF old-timers.

Adobe Integrated Runtime and Flex with Zach Stepek. This was a good session. Stepek is a geek’s geek, even going so far as to take a shot at Apple in retribution Stevie J’s recent announcement that the iPhone wouldn’t run Flash Player. AIR allows web developers to use their existing skill sets to create, package and deploy applications to the desktop. Very very cool stuff. In the session, we banged together a quick RSS reader application. 60 lines of code. I don’t know another DESKTOP application dev language that you could do that with. Certainly not Java or C++/#.

Adobe Media Server by Louie Penaflor. Pretty cool technology for bi-directional streaming of audio and video. Not immediately applicable to anything I’m doing, but it really put me in mind of some telehealth video-conference stuff that could be amazing at the VA.

Spry framework with Ray “The ColdFusion Jedi” Camden. Ray’s the bomb, and Spry has gotten much more sophisticated since I demo-ed it for the crew at the MBM office. I’ll be using Spry for any AJAX/DHTML stuff I need to do in the future. It’s got the right balance of flexibility vs. ease of use.

Kudus Kudzu Kudos to the organizers and the sponsors/underwriters and presenters for putting on a great day of content, and particularly, to Matt Reinbold for having the vision and the drive to push this one-of-a-kind event into reality.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 4th, 2008 at 7:32 pm and is filed under technology. 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.