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.