Tickets are still available, registration here. See you there…

ACP is a rebrand of the “Adobe Community Experts” program to avoid the confusion with the Adobe Certified Experts(ACE) . I’m very glad to be part of it for the second year and I will do my best to deserve it.

Thanks again to Adobe and the Community team!

We are already the 16th January and my latest post is at least 3 month old… shame on me! After Adobe MAX conference things went crazy and I had very little time between my work and family (I have 2 kids, 2 and 6 years old and a family member is currently at the hospital), and as I’m quite active on twitter, I neglected my blogging duties - sorry

2009 was a mixed year for me: almost no time to learn other advanced techniques not related to my project, not enough time to play more with the “fun part” of the Flash Platform (Flash Platform services, 3D engines…), I missed many well known conferences [...] But let’s have a look at some positive facts:

Work

- my current project is still going on in 2010: it’s a multilingual document management, workflow and reporting system built using Flex3/ColdFusion 8/Java/Oracle.
- at least 4 projects at the European Commission are now using Flex – I’m not aware of every projects, only those where I met the team. I know that more people at the Commission have express their interest in the technology too which is a good sign for 2010.
- some big Belgian companies in transportation, telecom or media have now Flex projects ongoing, expect more to follow.
- my Adobe Community Expert status: thanks again to the wonderful team at Adobe!
- the launch of ColdFusion 9 - no, it’s not a dead technology :-)

Conferences

 I attended probably less conferences than in 2008 as I had to pay for my expenses in 2009 (another story) :-(

- Multi-Mania in Kortrijk (Belgium)
- my 1st Scotch on the Rocks in London – and made a “quick greetings” in Brussels
- my 1st Adobe MAX US in Los Angeles
- several Belgium AUG meetings

I love attending conferences, not only for the interesting topics and the well known speakers, but also for the networking part. Again last year I met several friends that I only knew from the internet (twitter, blogs, Community Experts…)… I really enjoyed talking to them!

Gadgets

- finally bought a HTC Hero, after months of hesitation – I’m really enjoying it!
- I have finally a complete HD installation with my brand new AV receiver Denon AVR-1910: I’m now able to enjoy Dolby TrueHD and DTS MA.

Others

- I’ve seen for the 1st time Kylie Minogue in concert at the Hollywood Bowl – What a show!
- the same for Star Wars in Concert at the Nokia Theatre in LA.
- I visited Universal Studios Hollywood – really loved The Simpsons ride.
- my first flight in an Ultralight aircraft.

I’m probably missing some other facts and events…

I won’t talk about my resolutions for 2010 but more about “directions” that I will try to follow:

- definitively more blog posts! That’s why I subscribed to Project52
- be ready for Flex 4, AIR 2 and other products like Flash Catalyst.
- learn mobile development with Slider: Flex mobile framework and Elips Studio 3.
- attend more conferences if I can.
- do more talks: I just need to find some interesting topics not yet covered.

I think that’s all for this post. Again Happy New Year 2010, lots of love and happiness your life and I hope to see you around very soon.

Monday, October 5, 2009

General Session
Preview: Flex for Mobile Devices
Community Matters
Introduction to ColdFusion ORM
What’s Coming in Adobe AIR 2
Meet the Teams

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

General Session
Multitouch Development with Flex
How NOT to Code Flex
ELIPS 3.0: Mobile Flex Builder Toolkit
Sneak Peeks and 2009 MAX Awards
MAX Bash

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Flash for the Digital Home: Flash on TV!
Building Mobile Applications with Adobe AIR
Using Flex Frameworks to Build Data-Driven Applications

I hope to meet many of you there, so drop me a line if you’re coming. See you there…

Anyway I wanted to tell you about Scotch on the Rocks coming to Europe – if you’re not aware already (is it possible?). You don’t know what is Scotch on the Rocks, just read my review of the London event on Inside RIA, no excuse!

Now what makes SOTR09 even greater? The event is completely FREE and they are coming in 6 cities:

• Munich,  October 19th
• Zurich,  October 21st
• Milan, October 23rd
• Amsterdam, October 26th
• Brussels,  October 27th
• London,  October 29th

Registration is required, but be quick because Amsterdam is almost sold out already!

Of course this conference will be focused on ColdFusion 9 as you can expect. You can find a detailed list of the sessions here. I will be at the Brussels venue… see you there!

Peter Elst managed to record a video of my talk (except the last 5 mins I think) – thanks a lot to him! So here is the video and the slides. Hope people enjoyed it even if I think that I could have done better   Next time for sure… 

review: Multi-Mania (2M09) is rocking again!

I forget to mention in my review the Award Show at the end of the day, and Live Music from SX who just won the Road To Fame (video below) – congrats to them!

review: Scotch On The Road is waking up the European ColdFusion community!

It was my first SOTR so I was happy to finally meet IRL Andy Allan and Leanne (I already met Kev McCabe last year at MAX Europe). We had also a great Pre-Scotch at O’Neills listening live to the Bible Code Sundays. Stay tuned for SOTR in Brussels, Munich and Amsterdam around the end of October this year!

Those are definitively 2 conferences not to miss in Europe!

So the clear distinction between Flex and Flash was very useful at the beginning to introduce the product and demonstrate the power of the Flash Platform. Hopefully for us, things evolved in the last 2-3 years, and Flash now is clearly seen as a mature product for enterprise development. Anyway I want to point out few things that could require some attention :

- The answer is definitively “YES”: the term Flex should not disappear in few years. I know that Flex is “just a framework” but the distinction between an application built using the Flash Professional IDE (Timeline/AS3) and Flash Builder (Flex/AS3) should remain. The knowledge required to use both products is different even if at the end both produce a Flash app. I can easily see that from time to time the term Flex will disappear behind the product Flash Builder. By the way, should we say that we are creating a Flex app. or a Flash app. using the Flex framework?

- Second point, confusion can arise from recruiters: what kind of profile recruiters should look for? Direct consequence of my previous point, clients will search for developers able to use Flash Builder or Flash Professional. So recruiters will look for Flash Platform developers... Isn’t it too vague? It will really depend on how precise will be clients requests (you know what I mean). Naming itself to be easily found will be a bit harder: Flash Platform developer, Flex developer, ActionScript developer, Flash Designer… Maybe it’s just me and things will go smoother

- Last point, the naming Flash Builder vs Flash Professional. I strongly agree with Peter Elst’s post, the epithet “builder” sounds so cheap compared to “Professional”! Flash Professional should be renamed something like Flash Designer as it’s mainly used for animation and interface design.

To makes things clear, I’m not saying that the rebranding is a bad move, but it will require some time and maybe need some guidance from Adobe.

UPDATE : A must read from Lee Brimelow, Flash Builder rebrand FAQ

About Dollhouse (courtesy of watchdollhouseweek.com)

Created by Joss Whedon (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”,”Firefly”,”Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along”…) and starring Eliza Dushku (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”,”Tru calling”, …).

Echo is an “Active”, part of a highly illegal and underground group of individuals who have had their personalities wiped clean so they can be imprinted with any number of new personas. Actives know no other life than the specific engagements they are in  at that time, confined between missions to a secret facility known as the Dollhouse. After each scenario, Echo returns to the mysterious Dollhouse where her thoughts, feelings, experiences and knowledge are erased, and enters the next scenario with no memory of before. Or does she?

As we are approaching the end of Season One, it’s the right moment to rewatch – or watch for the first time – past episodes (season finale “Omega”, airing 5/8).

Not convinced by the plot? Then you should read this from “intriguing” to “freakin’ brilliant.” Don’t forget Aalso that episodes of Dollhouse are available at any time via Hulu, FOX On Demand, iTunes, and Amazon

If you like, don’t like or if you have any questions, leave a comment here, or tweet (see @watchdollhouse for updates) and add #watchdollhouse hashtag when talking about the show.

To close this blog post, here is GrindHouse promo of Terminator – The Sarah Connor Chroniclas/DollHouse that I really like

Both presentations started with a quick demo of BlazeDS data push and LCDS built-in conflict management: even if I’ve already seen this demo several times, it’s always nice to see the reaction of the audience. Will BlazeDS replace LCDS Express in Centaur ? No words on that yet…

Second part focused on Centaur and Bolt: I really loved the introduction tag line

” Advancing rapid application development
and turning developers into heroes. ”

Now let’s see what has been shown.

ColdFusion Exposed Services Layer (ESL)

This is a feature for non ColdFusion developers: you will be able to access, using your own language (PHP, .NET,…) and via SOAP or AMF,  integrated CF services without writing any CFML code! Those services includes Query Service, Mail, Generation and Manipulation of PDF files, Imaging, Charting etc…  Those ESL will be also available for Flex/AIR developers via CF-ESL.

For me It sounds pretty interesting to use the same services across different applications/languages instead of having to buy 3rd party extensions (when available),  no?

Local/Remote Database Synchronization (CF/AIR)

Centaur will be able to handle data synchronisation between an AIR SQLite DB and a ColdFusion datasource. It will make easier the development of Offline AIR apps using a ColdFusion backend. W00t!

CFScript Enhancements

Here you will find Explicit local scope for private function variables, implicit getters/setters (Yeahh!), Import & New keyword.

After seeing that I was wondering why Adobe did not decide to replace CFScript with ActionScript 3.0? If you were at MAX last year, you have probably seen this demo of server side ActionScript in Centaur… why maintaining another scripting language so close to AS 3.0? It would have made things easier…  Anyone agree with that?

ORM (Hibernate)

Centaur implements Object Relational Mapping via Hibernate: ORM provides Database vendor independence, caching, concurrency via a representation of your relational data in an Object Model. I’m not that comfortable talking about ORM so I will make that one a bit short. I can only tell you that Bolt has full support for ORM and generate all the code for you, even if we only saw a simple example

Bolt

Bolt is the new ColdFusion IDE: it’s an Eclipse plugin like Flex Builder, so people doing Flex development will be happy with the full integration. It has Server management, server monitoring, services introspection, code generation, etc… what is interesting also is that you can create extension for Bolt using CFML code! So you will be able to create plugins to do code generation in your favorite framework

I think that’s almost everything that has been covered. I was really happy to see some many enthusiastic ColdFusion developers… haven’t seen that for  a while And remember that those features are only a small part of what will be available in the release version.

A last thing to finish: if you don’t know yet Claude Englebert, the EMEA ColdFusion Product Specialist, don’t hesitate to get in touch with him for anything related to CF (events, User Group, promotion, support…)!

I know Ben Forta loves when people are playing with photoshop