On Monday, I headed up to San Fran for one of Adobe’s little community events: an “Adobe Rich Internet Application Developer’s Camp.” I have to say, I really liked their corporate digs. Besides the 2-man behemoth of a company I’m working at now, I’ve worked at Electronic Arts and been to several events hosted by Apple/Google/Yahoo (to name a few). I could probably fill an entire post on the differences (perceived by me anyway) between the corporate cultures of the various mega-corporations, but I’ll keep it to a minimum by saying I liked Adobe’s HQ a lot better than any of the others I’ve been to. And free beer didn’t hurt, either.
The “camp” was geared more towards those considering Flex in their workflow, I guess, so I didn’t get a whole ton out of it. The thing started off with a couple of Flex “Evangelists” giving their thoughts on what an RIA is and how Flex is the coolest thing around. The only thing I really took away from it is that James Ward has a pretty cool tool posted on his site for benchmarking flex performance. The next version of Flash is going to have a flex cache for caching most of the core flex (and MXML) framework, which should reduce the size of flex-compiled swfs by ~200-500k, which was pretty excellent. I’m not sure if the current compiler will be updated or this is something we’ll only get by switching to Flex 3, though.
Some guys from Paypal gave a demo of a merchant tool they were making in AIR, which was pretty cool. Matt Chotin talked about what else was going to be new in Flex 3, most of which I’d already heard. The FABridge is going to be part of the mx core in the next release, and they’re also planning on support deep links within applications (meaning you could bookmark a specific state within an application or send it as a link). Some guys from Yahoo! demonstrated how they built a SEO optimization tool in 3.5 days in Flex, which was also pretty cool.
Finally, one of the guys from Actionscript.com (Satori Canton) got up and spoke for awhile. I think they were going to be presenting something, but for some reason their presentation got screwed up and so he just talked. He seemed nice enough… just kind of cooky. He was dressed in a business suit… but with a Pancho thrown on top. And his fingernails were painted black. And he had a magic wand. None of this is to say he didn’t seem competent–just a little more interesting than your average speaker. Mostly his talk sounded a lot like consultant-speak, with a slight bent towards the poetic. He talked a lot about community love and then ended his talk with the following (I may be paraphrasing a little, but I’m pretty sure I got most of this down exactly):
“You guys (the community) are like a song. I wish I could MP3 all of you and put you on a little thumb drive and carry you with me everywhere I go.”
All in all, it was pretty interesting. I didn’t win any of the raffles, but I did get a bag full of Adobe loot (including a free “Programming Flex 2″ book). There’s a SilVaFUG meeting in San Jose that I might check out.