Christophe Herreman

I just got back from JavaPolis ’06 in Antwerp (Belgium) where Adobians James Ward and Christoph Rooms did a great 3-hour session titled “Building Sexy Web Apps with Adobe Flex“. Having seen a couple of presentations on Flex 2, there was not that much new for me, but I still enjoyed the session. Not only was I (again) convinced of the power of Flex, I’m pretty sure they also convinced a lot of Java developers (99% of the audience) to give Flex a try. Ok, the Bruce Eckel quote probably helped out on that as well.

A Java minded friend of mine was ironically bashing Flash as we entered the conference room. “All right, in a few minutes I’ll know how to build an application with glowing buttons that have rollovers sounds!”. As the session progressed I could actually see his jaws drop. He was pretty impressed by the examples James showed us on connecting to different data sources, integration of POJO’s, the Data Management Services, etc. In the end, it only proofed how much prejudgment there is against Flex and Flash in general. I enjoyed the moment and had a good laugh.

James also demo’d a benchmarking application he created which showed the time and bandwidth needed to transfer and parse huge amounts of data in different ways (Json, XML, AMF0, AMF3, …).

On top of the great presentation, there were also some cool Adobe goodies they gave away like Flex T-shirts, Rubik’s Cubes and Flex 2 and ActionScript 3 API posters. All JavaPolis visitors also got a backpack, Flex 2 trial, T-shirt, coffee mug, etc.

Thanks a lot to Adobe and Christoph Rooms in particular for the free entrance tickets!