eXtreme Programming, Flex 3, Apollo, SWX and lots more

Yesterday I visited Adobe Live! in Amsterdam. This year promised to be more interesting than last year because of the CS3 release and because there’d be more to see for developers. As it turned out I was both positively surprised and a bit dissapointed.

First of all the location. Last year Adobe Live! was held in a congress centre in Utrecht (actually Nieuwegein, but that sounds less sexy ;-)) and this year it was in the RAI in Amsterdam, a big convention centre. Last year’s theaters where just that, theaters as you know them. Which means that they’re surrounded by four walls and that they’re soundproof. This year all theaters were open and definitely not soundproof. Imagine hearing three presentations at once and a load of cacophony!

The first sessions I attended was the keynote by Jim Guerard followed by a CS3 introduction by Greg Rewis, Jason Levine and Tim Cole. They showed us some nice new features like new selection tools, 3D in photoshop, improved integration and a lot more.

The next session was about CS3 - Flex workflow by Martijn de Visser and Owen van Dijk. Very interesting, but the background noise was just too much. The part about the Flash - Flex integration was well explained.

Aral Balkan’s presentation in the developer theater was titled “Letter to the CEO” and addressed the shortcomings of the software development process. The core of this session: “Failure is the industry’s standard, the waterfall method is the industry’s standard, so waterfall = failure”. Agile methods like eXtreme Programming are the ones to be used according to Aral Balkan.

Joey Lott talked about ActionScript 3 features. Interesting for the beginner or ActionScript 2.0 programmer.

Next, Mike Downey chatted about Apollo. Introductory talk, not very exciting

A session I was really looking forward to was the Flex 3 sneak preview by Waldo Smeets. Just a little disappointing because there wasn’t that much to see yet. Some new features include refactoring, zooming in design mode, enhanced searching, Apollo support, profiling (nice one!) and enhanced components (datagrid). No release date was given, but I should be released together with Apollo.

“Rediscovering Fun” as Aral Balkan’s next session. This time he talked about his new SWF Data Exchange Format called SWX. With SWX you can load data with the loadMovie() method instead of using third party libraries. What you do need though is Apache webserver and PHP. Cool stuff!!

The last session I attended was about Flash Video, Flash CS3 and Flash Media Server. Unfortunately, I only saw a small part of it.

It has been an interesting day with lots of exciting stuff. I especially liked Aral Balkan’s presentations. Not only because he’s an excellent speaker, he’s actually got something interesting to tell. The only big disappointment about this edition of Adobe Live! was the location.