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MAX 2007 Day One
By Sean Corfield
Expert Author
Article Date: 2007-10-02
It's been an exhausting day. MAX is completely overwhelming, partly because of the sheer scale of the event.
Registration was very organized, breakfast for 4,000 people followed by a keynote for nearly 4,000 people (there were overflow rooms with live video feeds). The keynote was mostly run by Kevin Lynch and really only touched lightly on a lot of the ways that Adobe is addressing the "engaging experience".
Ben Forta and Scott Fegette showcased what a week with Dreamweaver CS3 and ColdFusion 8 can do for a website. It was nice to see CF getting such a high profile feature in the keynote!
Some of the coolest stuff shown was based on AIR - Kevin showed all sorts of previously unseen applications with some very slick drag'n'drop capabilities (desktop to AIR, AIR to AIR, browser to AIR and even application to AIR - columns from Excel dragged into a reporting AIR app that instantly showed charts based on the new data).
He also showed off Buzzword, a web-based word-processor built in Flash/Flex that Adobe just acquired (via Virtual Ubiquity).
I did not get to the next session but lunch for 4,000 people was, like breakfast, very smooth (with dessert elsewhere to keep people moving).
After lunch I went to Tom Jordahl's session on ColdFusion and LiveCycle Data Services. I pick up a new little nugget each time I hear Tom talk about this.
Then it was Erik Larson's session on the collaborative hosted services roadmap. This is essentially my old team so I was interested to see what they have been up to. He demo'd Buzzword in detail and then demo'd Adobe Share. He talked about APIs and target markets and so on. I wasn't particularly surprised by anything I heard but I could tell that some of the audience were pretty impressed at what Adobe is reaching for here (Buzzword is impressive - and Share is useful - I'd just seen both before). Eric also talked about their plan to release a set of Flex components that effectively implement Adobe Acrobat Connect so that developers can create their own versions of the application, on top of the underlying service.
After that I went to Tony Hillerson's "Flex On Rails" talk and I was very disappointed. I guess I wasn't the right audience because he spent twenty minutes talking about HTTP-based applications before he got to REST and then spent most of the rest of the session giving an introduction to Ruby and then all the console-based stuff you have to do for Rails. Eventually he got to actually invoking RESTful Rails apps from Flex, just as he ran out of time.
More food (and some drink) and then it was time for the BOFs.
Meet The Team - ColdFusion - saw the product team here in force from Newton and Bangalore fielding many of the usual questions although the overall tone did seem more positive than usual. Several comments that ColdFusion is well positioned to be a key part of the Adobe platform - and references to the high profile of ColdFusion in the keynote. Overall, it was the most upbeat ColdFusion team event I can remember so perhaps ColdFusion 8 has made the community more charitable than usual :)
Next was the Frameworks BOF which was not all that well attended but Matt Woodward did a great job of organizing it, even if both Joe Rinehart and myself had problems with the projector! Matt talked through the Mach-II 1.5 release (the final release is official as of today!) as well as the 1.6 roadmap. I talked through Fusebox 5.5 (which is now officially in Public Beta). Joe announced "Gesture" (Model-Glue 3.0) and showed some of the work-in-progress ideas behind it - optional XML with auto-generation of controllers, event handlers and views.
Finally, I sat in on the design patterns BOF with Joe Rinehart and Kelly Brown. I ended up giving a bit of a preview of my "INSPIRE" session because the discussion turned to a couple of "hot buttons" for me. You'll have to read other people's blog reports of my session to see whether or not anything thinks I'm being controversial...
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About the Author:
Sean is currently Chief Technology Officer for Railo Technologies US. He has worked in IT for over twenty five years, starting out writing database systems and compilers then moving into mobile telecoms and finally into web development in 1997. Along the way, he worked on the ISO and ANSI C++ Standards committees for eight years and is a staunch advocate of software standards and best practice. Sean has championed and contributed to a number of CFML frameworks and was lead developer on Fusebox for two years.
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