FlashBrighton: Flex 3 and AIR Launch Party! March 4, 2008

Well blow me, that was FITC Amsterdam eh, wow! Blimey, if you wanted your creative mind blown you had Jared, Natzke and loadsa people called Joshua. If you were wondering just how amazing code could be you had Andre Michelle, Ralph Hauwert and some english guy called Jeb or Zed or something to show you. Plus, three great parties, two free bars and one truly astonishing performance by the awesome, nay transcendental, supergroup "Phlash5". Please, just take the word of someone who had a front row view: there are two types of person in the world, those who have heard Aral Balkan sing "Papervision Saved My Life" and those who haven't. All that and I haven't even begun to gloss over the pancake lunches, ferry strikes, pink elephants, accessibility experts careering in at 5am everyday, and ridiculous 24hr 60-channel snail-brain data-visualisation coding marathons that happened.

All that, and still, somewhere, quietly, humbly, amongst all the mayhem, Flex 3 and Adobe AIR slipped out onto the market.

I... did we miss that? Or were we just too drunk to notice? Well, if we did it's no matter, because back home here in Brighton we've our own little Flexathon organised to celebrate. Flex is 3, and the little fella is growing up so quickly he's got a new little sister in AIR to celebrate with. Come help us wet the babies' heads with us, Tuesday 4th March. Like Willie Nelson, "I've got a long list of real good reasons" for you to be there. You wanna know what we're gonna be talking about with Flex 3 and AIR? OK, deep breath now...

FLEX:

Open sourcing Flex
Introducing BlazeDS: open source HTTP-based messaging technology using AMF3
Flex major themes, including designer/developers workflows, working with data, hybrid desktop/web apps & framework evolutions
Integration into CS3, including simple asset skinning, making flex components in flash cs3 & datagrid & charting improvements
Addition and plugins, including ILOG Elixir components (treemaps, graphs), web services introspection, introductory data wizards & combining flex with air
One-off download for the Flex framework
Javascript/AJAX wrappers
Plus a whole bunch of smaller improvementrs

AIR:

Desktop functionality, data access to the filesystem & development through a local database
Broad platform reach across Windows, Mac OS & - eventually, hopefully - Linux
Build upon proven tech of Acrobat, Flash player & HTML
Support for build in HTML/Javascript or Flash/Flex
Universal AIR installer (win/mac) with signed, secured applications
Some mindblowing sample AIR apps such as Nicolas Lierman's Google Analytics displayer
Inclusion of HTML open source rendering engine WebKit
Custom chrome and transparency apps
Synchronous and asynchronous data loading

...Phew! To show all this off to you we've got some official presentations direct from the 'Frisco source plus some of our very own FB members talking. And... well, we've also got some GA-REAT swag to raffle off. Now I don't wanna let the cat outta the bag prematurely but... yeah, let's just say Adobe have, yet again, been very generous. They've given us a fat brown envelope and a coupla mysterious packages all marked "DO NOT OPEN UNTIL TUESDAY 4TH MARCH 2008, 6.30PM, THE CRICKETERS, BRIGHTON". 'Could be a letter bomb or 'could be something even better than that! Like, can you imagine?!

Well, if you don't get on and register HERE, NOW for the event, then you aint gonna find out. Remember kids, places are limited and if your name's not down, you're not coming in. And if y'all don't come in y'all don't get to hear about the pink elephant neither. Or the speakers' chocolate brownies. Or the $1 bet with Joshua Davis. Or...

Official Website: http://www.flashbrighton.org/wordpress/?p=104