blairsblog

Flex developers needed in Australia

What with the news of Cynergy Systems setting up an office in Sydney, people send me Flex job openings  on a regular basis and at last weeks ColdFusion user group all the Flex skilled folks telling me they are turning down Flex work on a regular basis, we have a problem on our hands, but it's a nice problem to have ...

We need more Flex developers in the Australian market ... so what are you waiting for, jump on board and get skilled up in Flex you won't regret it! 

OMG - Adobe did it!

Today Adobe has announced to open source Flex.

You can read more on lots of several other blogs, but I personally wanted to recognize and congratulate the folks involved in Adobe for making this happen, well done!

Let a thousand flowers bloom ...

Australian Flex Breezo - 17th August 11am AEST

The Australian Adobe Marketing team have organised for a Flex 2 seminar to be delivered in the Australian timezone in a couple of weeks time over Breeze

You need to regsiter here  ...
http://events.adobe.co.uk/events/cgi/event.cgi?eventid=3729&country=pa

If you want to learn more about Flex it's a great opportunity ...

enjoy!

Official Australian Flex Developer Derby - Win a plasma TV !!

Hat's off to the Australian Adobe Marketing team for this one ....

Clare Gillespie, who among other things focuses on developer marketing for Adobe in Australia has managed to get an Australian version of the Flex Developer Derby kicked off.  You can find more details here ...

http://www.builderau.com.au/comps/adobe-flex-derby/

Can't wait to see the results of this one, just wish I could enter ... again well done Clare, great to see Adobe bringing this to places other than NA.

How cool is this - Flex for free ...

Flex 2 Annoucement

Matt & Todd from the Flex team go down under

Check out Matt & Todd at the sneak peek sessions at MAX getting into the whole Aussie croc hunter thing.  Possibly a little Scott Barnes influence going on ...

On Google Video

Flex Enterprise Services

I just sat in on  Christophe's "Flex Enterprise Services" presentation at MAX, this technology is going to change the face of RIAs as we know it today.  It's such an elegant & simple way to build real time collaborative applications.  Seeing this sort of technology coupled with Flex Builder 2 I think 2006 is going to be an exciting year for RIAs

Incidently I'm going to be giving a similar presentation on Flex Enterprise Services @ the Asia Pacific MAX events in November and in Australia online using Breeze, again in November.

AS3 - Custom Namespaces

I'm sitting in Gary Grossman's session on "Next Generation ActionScript".  He just mentioned something interesting about having the ability to create custom namespaces for encapsulation of method calls in classes and packages.

So I'm used to having public, private and protected modifiers but AS 3.0 introduces the ability to create custom modifiers, I didn't get chance to take down the entire syntax but the resulting methods would look like this ...

myPrivateLibrary addWidget ( )
{

}

Interesting stuff ...

Flex Frameworks = Cairngorm

MAX kicked off for me this morning with Stephen & Alistair (formally of Iteration Two, now part of Macromeida Consulting in Europe) presenting on Flex Frameworks (in other words Cairngorm)

It was a great presentation in which Stephen discussed the fact frameworks are a much over used term and tried to position the different uses of the word, which I found very useful.

They went on to describe the Cairngorm framework using the Cairngorm Flex Store as an example.

The room was full and Stephen asked how many folks were using Flex in the room, almost all hands were raised, he then asked how many people were using Cairngorm, and about half the room raised their hands ... great news for Flex and Cairngorm.

Cairngorm, Flex and Flash Seminar

Here in Australia we run a monthly seminar series where someone from the community presents on a Macromedia server related topic over a Breeze live session

This month we have Robin Hilliard of Rocketboots presenting

Building Real RIAs with Cairngorm, Flex and Flash

I'm expecting a good turn out, in November we had Geoff Bowers of Daemon talk about FarCry which ended up running for 3hrs! with at least 70 people of the breezo.

If you're interested the URL is http://www.macromedia.com/go/anzcommunity/

It starts @ 3pm AEST tomorrow Friday the 28th of January.  They always occur @ 3pm on the last Friday of every month, next month we have Tim Buntel, the CFMX product manager talking about something exciting happening in the ColdFusion world, can't think what mind ;)

Hope to see you on the breezo ...