Harish Sivaramakrishnan

A full house,additional 2 rows of chairs at the back for the folks who came in, kick ass demo’s and fantastic dinner – That’s what the Adobe Flash Platform tools review was.

The evening started with Arijit’s intro on the Flash platform and the new tools. The context behind renaming Flex builder to Flash Builder was captured well in this session and it indeed made a lot of flex guys feel confident about what we are doing in terms of re-branding. The general vibe was surely positive.

In the next 25 minutes, I presented the Flash Builder 4 beta.  I focused the first 10 minutes speaking about the new IDE features that we have added to the tool. (getter-setter generation, event handler code generation and network monitor generated a lot of excitement in the crowd.) In the last 10 minutes I went on to do a coding demo of building an interactive dashboard application using the DCD features of Flash Builder using HTTPService over PHP. Had a minor challenge with the screen resolution, but overall the demo went well. Many folks walked up to me after the event saying they would *absolutely* want to move to FB4 for *just this feature*.

Next was the flash catalyst session by Raghu. He spoke briefly about the need for an good designer to developer integrated workflow and how Flash Catalyst would bridge that gap. His demo was an end to end enterprise data viz app starting from Photoshop to Catalyst to FB4. The interaction design for states & transitions and component conversion features recieved massive applause from the audience. Raghu concluded the demo with a BlazeDS remoting workflow using FB4 DCD. We were bombarded with questions about catalyst features and there were many folks asking about the pricing and the release time lines.

Sujit spoke about the data management features and also did a whirlwind preview of model driven development on the FB4. Sujit also presented the new client side paging feature which recieved a lot of cheer from the audience. As always, Sujit had several guys asking him stuff on LCDS / BlazeDS integration – something Sujit is synonymous with. Ramesh followed Sujit’s session with the “looking forward” aspects. Ramesh also announced the launch plan of the Adobe India Evangelism portal = http://flashahead.adobe.com.

Dinner (quite an awesome one! Taj Residency serves some really good indian fare especially on the dinner menu.) followed and got fantastic feedback on that one too. In a whole, a fantastic event! All thanks to the community and the attendees who made it an astounding success!