Another 360|Flex has come and gone and once again I’d say it was a rousing success. The conference returned to its San Jose/eBay campus roots, with the majority of attendees lodging at the Holiday Inn down the road.

First things first, my presentation files. My slides can be found here, the sample app I showed (with view source enabled) is here, and you can even “watch” the presentation (audio + monitor capture) on AMP by following the instructions here.

The room was packed to the gills full of people for my session which was very cool, but I only had 2 or 3 people tell me they liked it so I am interested to see what the feedback from the AIR survey app will be like. Unlike 360Flex Atlanta I had very few questions while going through the material and ended up finishing about 40 minutes early! Luckily we spent about 20 minutes on the dedicated Q&A at the end and so we finished only about 20 minutes early. You are also more than welcome to leave feedback here should you so choose, good or bad.

Good sessions

There were 3 sessions that really stood out for me and that you should definitely check out on AMP once they’re available. The first was Renaun Erickson‘s session on his TestPoint approach to testing your Flex apps. Testing is one of those things everyone knows they should do but a lot of us don’t get around to implementing in the real world. Renaun’s approach is so different that it really eliminates most of the effort involved in testing your app, especially the upfront costs. I won’t try to explain it all here but your test cases are essentially created for you as a byproduct of developing your application as you normally would. Its a very clever, very cool approach and one I fully intend on investigating further. I also got a chance to chat with Renaun for a while on Wednesday afternoon about everything from AS1 to general programming philosophies. Its always nice to meet someone you’ve respected and read material from online for a long time and find out they’re a down to earth, friendly person in the real world.

Another session I wholly recommend was Ben Stucki‘s How to Build a Framework, which is already available on AMP. I especially enjoyed the beginning portion of Ben’s talk where he covered somewhat amorphous, theoretical aspects of development that resonated strongly with me personally. As the session progressed things got more concrete and I picked up a few gems I can directly apply in my code. My favorite was his advice to provide an interface, but to not implement that interface in the base class you provide. I know that doesn’t convey the whole point so go ahead and check out his session on AMP.

Lastly, I really enjoyed Mike Nimer‘s session on dpHibernate. I have started to experiment with Hibernate lately and he gave a good introduction to it before diving into the very cool project he and others have developed to bring lazy loading support to BlazeDS. This is another one absolutely worth checking out on AMP once its available.

Good people

This being my third 360|Flex event, its always great to reunite and catch up with people you only get to see a few times a year. This event had the added bonus for me of meeting several people I’ve been working with on my latest project for Universal Mind. I also finally got to meet my boss and our CEO. Pretty funny considering I started with UM six months ago LOL. I continue to be impressed with the quality of people our company is comprised of, not only in the sense of technical and/or business acumen but in basic quality of character. They’re simply good people who I am proud to consider friends as well as colleagues.

Thanks for another great event, Tom and John. See everyone next time!