Adam C. Hegedus

Last week I had the privilege of attending the 360Flex conference in San Jose, California. I didn’t really know what to expect since I am new to Flex, but it turned out to be a great trip. I learned a lot about Flex and now my head is filled with ideas that could benefit from this great technology. Hopefully in the next few days I’ll post some sample code from the conference (Written by Tom Ortega) that I’m adapting to use a HTTPServices written in Ruby on Rails. Trust me on this one, it’s cool stuff. I’m sure we’ll all be seeing more of Flex in the near future.

During this trip, I also had the opportunity to visit the Apple Campus in Cupertino, California. I’m a relatively new Mac user, but I was still really excited to go there. I did buy the one T-Shirt that I have wanted since I found out that it existed. It simply says, “I visited the mothership”.

I love that. I have to give much credit to the Apple marketing folks because they come up with some great stuff. I came very close to buying a second shirt:

For those of you who don’t get it, ‘Redmond’ is referring to a certain Company based in Redmond, Washington. I wish I could come up with stuff like that!

As I am writing this post, I am sitting in the auditorium of the EBay Town Hall in San Jose, California. No, I’m not here to try to get my money back on a scam auction I was involved in… (another story, for another time!), I’m here for 360Flex. For the last 3 days, Ryan B. and I have seen some very cool new technology at work. It’s called Flex, which isn’t really new, since it’s at 2.0, but it’s becoming evident that as a web app developer, it opens a lot of doors to some things that were either not possible or very painful to do before.

Anyway, we’ve seen some of the development team from Adobe show off some of the things that they have done, and it’s quite amazing. Here’s a sample. So I’m seeing some of this stuff and realizing that this could completely redo some of the things that I do. In the hotel last night, I slapped together a Flex front end to a Rails back end web services… and I was able to do it in less than an hour. And I didn’t even know what I was doing! And just like that, I’ve got a rich front end that looks identical on any web browser out there. Super cool. I’ll probably stick a post up here in a few days that shows how to do it.

P.S. We also made a stop to a certain company store. more later.