There I was, a hard core ActionScript guy sitting in a room full (30+) of Java coders. A little intimidating at first however the attendees were all very nice. During the break one of the Java coders came up and asked me what I programmed in if it wasn’t Java. I said ActionScript. He said “really!?” I replied AS2 at my full time job and a lot of AS3/Flex in my free time

I was first warmly greeted by the group’s organizer Paul Weber with a handshake and a welcoming smile. The meeting didn’t kick off until about 7 so I sat in the back of the room and worked on the Papervision3D Cheatsheets while most of the others were eating free pizza provided by Adobe.

Paul Weber kicked off the meeting by going over some of the upcoming SDJUG sessions and events. Google should be presenting in July showing off new stuff so that’s probably worth attending. He also mentioned SoCal Code Camp which will be happening June 30 and July 1. At one point Paul asked the group who was not currently programming in Java and I had to raise my hand. (This is the reason Lou asked me what I programmed in if not Java.)

The session presented by James was pretty good overall. I picked up a few new pieces of information including some details on AS3 JIT compilation and AMF (the binary messaging protocol for the Flash Player). Data serialization was touched on including some info on Java to AS Object communication. He explained the whole: ECMAScript 4 = JavaScript 2 = ActionScript 3 concept and also spoke about the Tamarin virtual machine that will eventually be rolled into Firefox.

James went on the demo his Flex application Census which does “RIA Data Loading Benchmarks.” He showed some comparisons for AJAX vs. Flex (AMF3) which were pretty impressive (despite the Internet connectivity problems he was having). Client side sorting was illustrated using 20,000 records being bound to a Flex DataGrid component. The sorting was blazing fast (of course).

Ely Greenfield’s DisplayShelf and FlexBook Components were demonstrated. The attendees seemed pretty impressed by the FlexBook transparent Anatomy example. I asked if these were SWC files and James confirmed that they were. He also touched on MXMLC, COMPC, their differences, and uses. (Here is a COMPC example by Mike Chambers not mentioned in the session. Here is an MXMLC example I did, also not mentioned but useful.)

Flex Data Services were shown including automatic cross client/browser updates on data that was bound to a DataGrid. This particular feature stirred the audience a bit and a few questions, comments and thoughts were brought up. Red5 was mentioned. RTMP was also mentioned in context to data push for AMF (and video too).

Cairngorm was briefly mentioned.

A discussion about why Adobe doesn’t just include the JVM into the Flash Player ensued. James was quick to point out that 1.2MB is the maximum size allowed for the Flash Player (so the JVM would bloat The Player). From here the conversation drifted to using the Java language and libraries in Flex. James mentioned Jseamless. (I was thinking artemis but didn’t say anything.)

Yahoo Maps was shown (which was built with Flex). The application has Next/Back browser button support and unique URLs for bookmarking. (Something I believe AJAX struggles with?) Some other reasons of why Flex would be better to use than AJAX were mentioned including: the compiler, multimedia support and vector drawing api/graphics.

A few words were sprinkled about some new “indicators” that might be in Flex 3. I believe these are notifications for the users via components. I found some indicator references on the IFocusManager page for Flex 2. Sounds cool.

Lastly a few Apollo applications were shown including the ebay desktop app “San Dimas” being developed by: effectiveUI.

The night ended with some Q&A for James and finally the raffle. Three different books for Flex and/or Java were given to a few lucky attendees. I scored some Flex stickers and an Adobe Pen. NICE!

Well that wraps it up. Thanks for SDJUG for having the session on Flex and having an AS coder infiltrate the Java Users Group for a night