Flex Events Heads-Up: 360Flex

Although the activity in the Flex department never dulls, there are major events that take place annually. These certainly include Adobe Max 2009 and RIAdventure 360. In spite of the fact that the dates were set quite a while ago, i.e. no ground-shattering news here, and the events are in the middle of their preparation stages, i.e. nothing specific to discuss yet, I thought it might be worthwhile to have a roundup of the info available and have a look if there are any hints as to the agenda.

Adobe Max 2009 will be held in autumn (October 4-7) in LA. This year’s highlights are social computing, cloud computing and rich content across devices. As it is to be expected of a technology event, the conference will not only bring the community together and facilitate learning and sharing, but will also provide showcasing opportunities, which includes participation in the Annual Adobe Max Awards (project submission/nomination deadline is July, 31). In the way of a quick flashback let me remind you that last year’s finalists include the Radiohead House of Cards video and NASDAQ Market Replay. Early bird discounts for conference passes are applicable till the end of August. Speaking of birds: MAX will traditionally allocate time and space for Birds of a Feather (BOF) meetings – technology-focused and Adobe-independent. Important: this year there will be no special MAX Europe event, although there will be opportunities for those interested to tap in online.

Moving on to RIAdventure 360, a.k.a the future of RIA event, a.k.a. the pre-Christmas cruise, - December 3 through 16, West Caribbean, 70 attendees (plus friends/families). Bits and parts on speakers are already being drip-fed into the cloud – for instance, Ryan Stewart and Doug McCune have already confirmed their active involvement. I consider it pretty safe to believe that this is going to be some discussion – Doug McCune is “skipping Web 3.0 and going straight to 4” (reads his blog header, at least today, because yesterday it proudly announced that Doug “was 2.0 before your grandma was 2.0”).

As skeptic as some may be of Adobe’s approach to open-source, my personal take is that community involvement builds up as it should, with Adobe paying due attention to what it (I mean the community of course) has to say. The subject of the present post offers a fair example of that: guys and gals from the community can speak their minds as to what they would like to discuss at MAX. For that purpose, a topic submission and voting site has been set up. Although the topics submitted are still subject to review, it is still a chance to get one’s voice heard. The ideas submitted by now include automating Flex testing with Ruby, Ruby and Flex in terms of RIA development, ColdFusion for RIA and more.