Flex 3 / AIR Pre-Release Tour Review

Yesterday we had a special meeting for the Adobe, ColdFusion and Flex user groups in Cleveland. The topic was Flex 3 & AIR and the presenter was Kevin Hoyt from Adobe. First off Just a big hats off to JD Schrock, Mick Keily and Brian Meloche for putting the meeting together. Also a big thanks to Dealer Tire for hosting the event.

If you have never heard Kevin Hoyt speak you really need to check him out next time he is in your area. Kevin is Platform Evangelist at Adobe Systems. The Pre-Release tour is all about educating people on the new features of Flex 3 and getting people excited about the release. I have to say that I have never really made a commitment to Flex but I think its finally time. If you have read my blog before you know I am a big fan of ActionScript 3 and have a copy of the bible (essential ActionScript 3). When I looked into Flex 2 during it's beta stage I still had questions with how do I get my data in and how do I style my applications. These and many more questions are starting to get answered.

The first major step of Flex 3 is that it is open source. This is a huge step for Adobe and one I think will help adoption in the end. The new css features and integration with programs like Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator & Fireworks is very impressive. I have always had questions about data retrieval in Flex. This example is great but what If I have 5000 records. I finally understand that this is where LiveCycle Data Services comes into play. If you are ColdFusion 8 user you should know that it already comes bundled. If you are not you have an alternative in BlazeDS. Here are just a couple of things from the meeting that also stick out for me.

• Refactoring
• Profiling
• WSDL Wizard
• AIR Integration
• Advanced Data Grid
• Charts
• LiveCycle / BlazeDS

It turned out to be a great meeting and it was nice to see such a nice turnout. Kevin's presentation was great and I think he ended up answering many of the questions I had going in. On a side note Kevin interviewed me on the cfExt project I started. We sat around for about 30 minutes and just talked about the project. Why I started, who it's for and where it may go. Stay tuned for that and Ill let you know when and where the recording gets posted.