Randy Troppmann

The first session was part 2 of Yahoo! AS3 libraries. Alan Rabinovich talked about Upcoming.org. Scott Morgan showed a “communication kit” for using the existing Yahoo! Maps component in Flex 2 Builder. It uses ExternalInterface to facilitate communication between the two AVMs. This kit maps the entire api and addresses issues that other similar methods have run into: multiple map instances and dropped calls.

Everyone, including the Y! devs really want the AS3 version of Maps! but anyone I talk to says it is up to management to put the resources behindgetting it done. My sense is that the resources who would do this are already very busy with other stuff. Y! also showed off a way to conncect your Flex app with Y! Pipes … very cool. They announced that this week the pipes team are going to add a wide open crossdomain policy file to the server that Pipes runs on.

Next was Flex Modules by Alex Harui from Adobe. Modules or RSL (runtime shared libraries) … which is better? Neither. They have different purposes. Modules are good for items where the instantiation can be deferred such as with popup dialogs accordians, or other navigators. Think of modules as abstractions through an interface.

MXML vs AS3 by Ted Patrick. ABC means “actionscript byte code”. By adding -keep to the “additional compiler arguments” you can see the AS3 classes that get generated from your mxml. Ted showed the code-behind method … hmmm … I am not convinced but I will try it.

E4X with Dan Patterson was a basic overview of the new XML object in AS3. AWESOME! The last session was “Using Ant with Flex” by Joe Berkovitz. Joe used emacs to show how he used command line techniques for building progressively more complex ant scripts. It went over my head quickly.