BFlex '08

On Sunday, September 7th, I attended the all-day *totally free* BFlex training conference at Indiana University in Bloomington. Having attended free conferences in the past, I was really expecting it to be more of a sales pitch and was very pleasantly surprised. All in all, while I had to give up most of my weekend to attend, I found the experience very worthwhile and will plan on attending again next year if at all possible.

The organizers scheduled all-day, hands-on training sessions in three tracks: beginner, intermediate and advanced. The instructors included Adobe Customer Training and Adobe Community Experts, which we were told paid their own way and donated their own time to facilitate the event.

It was a bit tricky for me choosing which track to take since I have mostly concentrated on the design and layout end of Flex (working with mxml, css and skinning). I knew that Beginner would be too easy since I had already taken the Flex 2.0 Developing Rich Client Applications course, but I thought Advanced might be a little over my head, so I opted for the Intermediate track. It was a bit on the easy side for me due to my experience in the tool over the past year and a half, but I felt that the topics were right on. Here were the training topics for the intermediate track:

Managing Data on the Client
We learned how to filter and sort recordsets client-side. This was an easy topic, but also very useful.

Exchanging Data Between Components Using Custom Events
I find the event handling in Flex to be rather tricky (especially for my more design-focused mind), so this topic was an excellent primer for me. Unfortunately we didn't get to it until the end of the day and it was rather rushed. However, the instructor (Matt Boles of Adobe Customer Training) was kind enough to offer to do a web conference with me to dig further into it. We learned how to create, instantiate, and handle a custom event.

Extending Flex Components
I have created a few custom components, but haven't really worked with extending the existing Flex components, so this was a great topic for me. We learned how to modify or add functionality or design attributes to the existing components. The example involved adding a button into the title bar of a panel - something that I have needed to do in my real life projects so extremely useful.

There were a couple of other topics included in the materials that we ran out of time for (bummer!): Providing XML to Controls with E4x and Implementing Drag and Drop Functionality.

One hole that I saw at this conference, and have noticed in the community in general, was the lack of design and layout focused training. The presentation layer in Flex can be very complex and is integral to the user experience. I have learned a lot in this area in the two Flex projects I have worked on in the past year and a half with Johnson & Johnson, but have mostly had to self-train. Maybe the organizers will consider adding some topics on this next year. Specifically, I would like to see topics focusing on design considerations for RIA, mxml layout, and skinning.

One other thing of note that was announced at BFlex was the RIAdventure cruise happening next February. It is a networking cruise to the Bahamas for ColdFusion, Flex and AIR geeks. How cool is that?! It is being sold as a "non-conference", but I am hopeful that they will add some training sessions and speakers so that I can justify the time and expense with my employer.