Day one at Adobe Max 2007 Barcelona

The conference seamed to start very wrong for me. I arrived Sunday afternoon in Barcelona and decided to check in right then to avoid the rush on Monday. I quickly found the the conference center (CCIB), went to the registration desk and identified myself. At such a moment it's always a bad sign when the person at the other side of the desk asks for your name multiple times when looking up your stuff. After having given my name three times still no pass was found. She asked if perhaps I was a speaker. Well no, not yet anyway :-). A look in the registration system solved the problems and a pass was printed. A good thing that I didn't check in during the rush on Monday. Monday at 10.00 the conference really started for me. For a change this conference did not start with a general session. My first session of the day was called 'Building RIA's wit cairngorm and Data Management Services'. Cairgorm is a best-practice framework for RIA Development with Flex. It is an implementation of design patterns that the consultants at Adobe Consulting have taken from enterprise software development (with technologies including J2EE and .NET) and applied rich Internet application development using Adobe Flex. In my opinion this was a poor prestentation. Instead of explaining the basics and use of cairngorm and how to build RIA's with it (as the title suggested) the speaker showed the end product of his last project. If I want to know more about cairngorm and how to use it I think I best Google on it. There were some useful tips on Data Management Services tough. Next there was a general session. This session was a lot about user experience. Some cool demo's where shown. Sometimes we watch CSI, I then usualy complain about how unrealistic their software looks. It looks like I just might have to stop doing that. The lunch was very good, altough I found it sometimes hard to identify what I was eating. The first session I took in the afternoon was about working with persistent data in AIR. AIR can be used to build desktop applications by using the same techniques as used for web development. These include HTML, Javascript (and with that Ajax), Flex and PDF. Obviously, most desktop applications need to store their data. There were already some options for that in the previous version of AIR. Now they have embedded the SQLite database management system. With this there are now three ways to store data. These are 'Local Shared Objects', 'File system' and the 'SQLite database'. SQLite is a embedded DBMS that uses a single file to store the data, has zero setup (except that you have to point to your data file), is transactional and has a large capacity (theoretical maximum of 2TB of data). For now there still is no ORM functionality in AIR. This is expected to be added in a future release. I closed the day with an hands-on session on 'Building a Rich Internet Application with Flex 3 and Java. The Java back end was already set up using Livecycle Data Services. We then step by step made a RIA in Flex 3 that connected to this back end. This connecting was done using various techniques: HTTPService, RemoteObject and Livecycle Data Management Services. I Already knew something about this topics from reading but really doing it yourself is still the best way to learn. After that is was time to explore the city of Barcelona.