I’ve decided to post a few thoughts from Cracow edition of Flex:Camp. First of all for a small conference like that it was suprisingly well organized. Heads off to Krzysztof Satoła from adobers.org for putting all this together. When i finally got there, there was actually quite a crowd so i took a seat in the back. Wearing my special adobe t-shirt got me in a funny situation when keynote speaker Andrew Shorten sat next to me and asked me where had i have it from That led to almost half-an-hour talk, thanks to that i’ve got opportunity to speak english, well british to be exact (by which btw i found myself real ashamed - my english, after 1 year break of not talking in it at all, was quite a disaster huehuehue). Apart from geeky-flexy-IT-talk of two developers, I found out that Andrew was in a poker game in London for Flex/Flash developers (not as a player though) - i don’t have to throw in that i was invited for the next game:D (encouraging is a really powerful thing) - anyway - sorry Andrew, You’re really nice guy but i’ve got to save for my july trip For the rest of the day there were plenty of presentations - Bartek Soin (with whom i had a little chat either) talked about connecting Flex with external data, before that i remember presentation about skinning by Pawel Zakrzewski from IT-media. Regarding software raffle i again didn’t win Flex Builder but lucky smiled to me in other way ’cause i won a fancy book about Flex (meaby it was a Children’s Day charm :P) To sum it up - Krzysztof thanks again for organizing conference & Andrew thanks for being there to lighten up this conference. Hope it will be more of that…

p.s unfortunatelly because of my Numerics Methods exam i won’t be tomorrow in Warsaw for onAIR tour - that’s what i call a bad luck:(

Regarding to some requests i’ve been receiving lately to bringing closer light upon Cairngorm, i’ve decided to write sth about it. For those who may know nothing about Cairngorm or know very little, i’ll try to magnify some characteristic ideas behind that name (which is btw hard to say even for those who work with it on daily basis :P) Cairngorm is basicaly an architectural framework. As Steven Webster greatly observed in his already famous six-part article framework is one of the most overloaded term today. I agree with that and also want You to understand that there is important distinction between various types of frameworks. You can have persistence frameworks, application frameworks like Flex, unit-testing frameworks etc etc. But Cairngorm is very different kind of beast. It’s actually an microarchitectural framework which means that its main purpose is to provide infrastructure, skeleton of some parts around which You can build Your own app. When looking from another angle Cairngorm was also brought to life, to solve many common problems related to software engineering, that repeat themselves during development lifecycle. This idea is known as design patterns. Of course it is not a new idea and has its roots in J2EE/JEE world. Cairngorm is simply composition of some specifics patterns borrowed from Java and translated to Flex world (initially it was actually designed for Flash but that doesn’t matter now) to solve common challenges in RIA development. Saying composition i mean also that Cairngorm actually make this set of patterns work with each other. To say more it let us choose patterns that we want specifically for our need, we don’t have to stick with it as it is. By that mean Cairngorm is very flexible and give You some freedom in developing. It can also greatly help You to control the flow of Your development process by advocating some good practices. In my next posts i would try to explain some details of Cairngorm structure by actually getting my hands dirty by coding. I’ll try to examine most important patterns behind Cairngorm and show You some basic examples how it all works. Meanwhile i suggest You to read great article, by earlier mentioned Steven Webster. It’s a great start for delving in Cairngorm specifics. For now on i say goodnight

I’ve just read something, that may be very exciting for RIAs! It seems like in very close future Google will be indexing text content from flash sites/applications. I can’t say exactly how it will work but it involves an Adobe Search Engine SDK. I’ve rumbled on interview between Stephen Spencer and Matt Cutts, who’d said that they’d been working on that matter a long time, they even had their own engine to extract content from flash, but they switched to Adobe’s one. According to him, this is not a trivial thing and that’s why they thought it would be smarter to use native adobe’s search engine. I think it’s great news for many flash/flex developers out there who care about page rankings and who are still struggling with that problem. If You are eager to hear a little bit more about that i recommend listening a whole interview below:

Unfortunatelly from what i’ve dug out this whole thing isn’t out in the public yet so You won’t find much official information either from google’s main page or adobe’s. Another issue is that for now Adobe’s Engine supports only SWF files created for Flash Player 3,4,5,6,7 and 8 which unfortunatelly in my case makes this whole thing useless. Let’s hope this project will be galloping fast and sooner or later will air for the open:)

Not long ago, March 1st (saturday) in SWFiS AGH building had place the second meeting of adobers. By that name, as You may suspect, hides the group of fascinators of Flex technology. Polish Adobe Flex User Group ’cause that’s the official full name of group, drone not only on Flex but nearly of every technology promoted by Adobe. As a proud member i had pleasure to be on that meeting, which i may add, done real good. We were celebrating upcoming of official Flex 3 and Adobe AIR releases. Under this occasion, right after organisation part, we could watch video with Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch, who virtually walked us through the nooks of the firm headquarters. After half-an-hour streaming, we could hear Piotr Bęben and Wojciech Ptak(who talked about Cairngorm framework) presentations. At the end - that’s what everyone was waiting for - the big software raffle with main prize Flex Professional license! As You may correctly presume i didn’t win but the thrill of emotions still remains(as the adobe t-shirt and some little gadgets:P) The next get-together already in a month. SEE YOU