Christophe Herreman

Just a quick note to let you know that I’ll be giving a presentation on Prana at the Dutch Flex Usergroup called Flugr on the 13th of June. So if you’re in the neighborhood (Utrecht) and would like to meet, feel free to visit the event.

The following sessions will be given:

- Benjamin Dobbler & Stephan Janssen: The creation of Parleys
- Nicolas Lierman: Advanced Flex
- myself: The Prana Framework

For more info, please visit the Flugr website at http://www.flugr.nl/

I put up the slides of the Prana presentation I did on the Adobe Usergroup – AIR Pre-Release Tour. You can download them at the Talks section or here (direct download).

Further, a number of people have blogged about the meeting:
– Ward de Langhe
– Gilles Vandenoostende
– Wim Vanhenden

Yesterday evening, the 5th annual FeWeb conference took place in Edegem. I did a session on our Edumatic product development with Flex and what tools we use on a daily basis. Below is a download link for those interested in my presentation files. The slides contain some useful links to the tools mentioned.

feweb-12-12-2007.ppt (273 kb)
feweb-12-12-2007.pptx (187 kb)

For a review of the conference I can recommend the following post by Peter Elst: FeWeb – Flex, Silverlight, AIR and more.

Thanks to the free pass I got from Christoph Rooms at Adobe, I made it to the JavaPolis conference in Antwerp today. I visited the event last year and certainly didn’t want to miss it this year. There is a strange and attractive atmosphere of collective geeky-ness and it is oh so cool. The fact that there are people here from all over the globe proves that this is an interesting conference for every (Java) developer out there. Just like last year, this event seemed professionally organized. At the entrance, every attendee received a backpack with a shirt, a notepad and a conference magazine. There are several boots from vendors that give you interesting information on their products, reductions and of course tons of swag. There are also free drinks for everyone, dinner at noon and fruits and candies.

I arrived pretty late but just in time for the first session and found Peter Elst there as well. Up was a session on Flex for a full house. I think there were easily 500 people in the room. James Ward and Bruce Eckel (that’s right, THE Bruce Eckel) were pair presenting and did an excellent job at it. They thoroughly explained the advantages of using Flex as a presentation tier and showed some sample applications. Later on they walked us through an example on how to connect to JSP pages to fetch data and how to consume the Flickr API. The Java crowd seemed to like it and it gave me a confident feeling that we as a development team are using the right technology (Flex) for the right job (interactive user interfaces). Having Bruce Eckel over to present was probably the best move Adobe could make to convince a Java crowd.

Next session was on JavaFX by Jim Weaver. I hadn’t seen it in action before so this was my chance of getting to know it. Unfortunately I was not really impressed. The technology seemed to be ages behind on what we are doing today with Flex for RIA development and I can only imagine hard core Java developers wanting to use this. Of course their is a strong programming language behind it – just like C# is for Silverlight – but the whole thing feels like a desperate attempt to catch up with Adobe in the RIA space. I have the same feeling with Silverlight btw.

Last session was Erich Gamma on Jazz. He talked about how agile development teams are working today and how there still are many pain points in bringing all project information together. This being SCM, bug tracking, project management, iteration plans… Jazz attempts to bundle all this info in a single application that makes it easier to access project information for the whole team.

I’m glad to announce that I’ll be speaking at the 5th FeWeb Congress on december 12th. FeWeb is the Belgian Federation for Web Developers and offers support of all kinds for professional web developers.

In my session, I’ll cover some of the current development we have going on at Indie Group for the next generation of our e-learning and assessment tool called Edumatic. We’ll have a look at what we are developing, why we chose Adobe Flex technology, what tools and frameworks we use and how it all fits together.

For a complete schedule, see the 5th FeWeb Congress Program.

Hope to see you there!