Last night (July 27th, 2007) was "Flex Camp" at Adobe in San Francisco. It was a really good opportunity to see where the vision is for Flex and the wider Flash Platform as well as a chance to see some of the great work people have been doing with Flex 2 since it's release last year.

About 250 Flex developers were there, along with many of the people from Adobe that are involved in creating the tools we all use. They were video taping the conference, so if anyone from Adobe or who were there has a link to the Breeze presentations from the event, please post a link in the comments.

Sessions opened with an overview of Flex 3 and Adobe's commitment to open sourcing the Flex framework. Much of this information is already available with the Flex 3 beta and AIR beta on labs.adobe.com, so I won't go into the same discussion here.

Designers and Developers

There are a number of enhancements planned to help with skinning Flex apps and improving the workflow between designers and developers.

One of the things we were talking about in a smaller group was that the concept that there are these masses of people who are only designers or only developers is a bit of a fallacy. Everybody in the room (or at least in the group I was in) use both Flash and FlexBuilder to produce their work. Very often, the designers are doing development and the developers are doing design work.

Regardless of who's doing what, we all agreed that smoothing the workflow between these two applications will be a huge benefit to individuals who are doing both design and development.

REDBug

In the next session, some of the guys from RealEyes Media showed a very nice Flash/Flex debugging suite that they created using Flex and deploying with AIR. It works with both Flash and Flex and they said would work with FlashPlayer versions 7, 8, 9 and up.

This seems like a very new project. If anyone has a link with more info, please post it in the comments as well. It was a bit hard to hear the presentation, so I'm not sure if this is an open source project.

Flex and Drupal

Chris Charlton from the LA Flash user group had a really interesting presentation on using Flex with Drupal. The idea was to use Drupal for all of it's well known content management tools. "How much do you want to slave over SQL code and database structures if you don't have to?" was his take on it. The concept was a bit deeper than you could get into in a quick session like this, but it was a great idea to bolt a Flex based UI on top of the existing Drupal CMS. We've been thinking to do something like this with ActionScript.com and after seeing Chris' presentation, it's quite likely that we will.

Interesting Flex Applications

There were a few sessions where people presented their own Flex applications. This was interesting to see what people were producing with Flex.

The guys from MixBook.com showed a very cool micro-publishing (printing one book at a time) application. I've seen applications like this before, but their take on it is a bit different. You can of course add pictures and text, to customize the layout and content of your book.

Where MixBook is different is that they have added a social element to it, where you can invite friends to edit your MixBook. This would be particularly useful for things like clubs or small groups that may be producing something like this in a committee. It's a great way to collaborate on a book. I could definitely see this being useful to people that do tour groups. If you were to vacation with a large group of people, you could share all of your photos and create a vacation scrapbook.

Another interesting Flex app was demonstrated by the guys at SlideRocket.com. This is kind of a PowerPoint type of application where you can make a number of presentation slides, apply transitions and text animations and then publish and share it on the web. They have some really nice 3D transitions that were done with PaperVision3D.

Conclusion

The main takeaway from the evening is that Flash Platform development is huge and only getting bigger. The demand for skilled Flex developers is through the roof, as evidenced by the people blockading the Adobe building trying to pass "we're hiring" fliers out to everyone going in to the conference.

If you're a skilled Flash developer and haven't already drank the Flex kool-aid, it's definitely a good time to have another look at it. FlexBuilder3 beta is now available on Adobe Labs. It can take a bit of time to get up to speed with FlexBuilder, but the power that it offers and the demand for skilled developers make it well worth the time investment.