360Flex teaches top Flex skills desired in the workplace

Today and tomorrow we'll be making posts on potential hands-on sessions for 360|Flex Atlanta. As you know, we're never content with staying the same. There is always room for improvement. Therefore, in that vein, we give the following for your consideration.

We are thinking of a hands-on session entitled "Top Flex skills desired in the workplace". The purpose of this session is helping grow developers in their worth.

You've all seen the job postings listing "Experience with Cairngorm" or "Master of OOP concepts". Others have helped the new hire get up to speed while muttering, "Gosh, why doesn't (s)he know this already?"

Therefore, let's spend a day helping one another get up to speed on these things. Whether you a senior developer who knows what needs to be taught or a junior that's tired of seeing job postings with skills you don't have, this session could benefit from your help.

Go ahead and start listing things in the comments. The more topics we get submitted, the better for us to choose from. Topics that get listed often will more likely be covered. Even if you don't have items to add to the list, voice whether you think this is a good idea or not. Let us know if you want to participate and teach a portion of the session, i.e. "This is ASDoc tags and here's how to use them."

And if you really think it's great, remember there's only 1 way to experience it: by attending the show. Hands-on sessions do not get recorded for later playback.

At 360Flex, Saffron is the Spice of Life

Saffron, the upcoming Apollo... ur AIR UML tool, is incredible to say the least. One look and I realized that this was a tool that the enterprise world has been waiting for all its life. Samuel has kindly agreed to discuss the tool in detail at 360|Flex Seattle. He will give the scoop on how he built it and show off screens and functionality never seen before.

Like I said, if you're in the corporate enterprise world, you know you want this tool. If your serious about OOP (not OPP), then you know you need this tool. If you're just cutting your chops on Object-Oriented Programming, believe me, this tool will help you. Two important things about OOP are seeing all the pieces of the object quickly and seeing how objects relate. Saffron is looking to do that and so much more.

I know a lot of people (myself included) are drooling over this tool and looking to get on the beta. Hmm...what was that post about the hotel room welcome box?

Wanna know how Virtual Ubiquity created Buzzword? Come to 360|Flex Seattle

We're still working out all the details on the speakers and their sessions. This one though is something a lot of us wonder about. I know when I saw Buzzword for the first time, I thought, "How did they do that?" Well, Virtual Ubiquity is going to come and explain it to us (see description below).

These are the kinds of sessions we have in the works. If you're serious about Apollo and Flex, you need to get yourself to 360|Flex Seattle.

Here's a rough description from the Buzzword team:

Topic: How the Heck Did They Do That in Flex?

Our team has built a full-featured, fun-to-use, word processor built
from the ground up in Flex. In this talk, one of the developers takes
you on a whirlwind tour through the internals of this application,
including at least some of the following topics:

- custom components and programmatic skins we built for our
formatting bar, ruler, comments, input controls, and document organizer

- our high-performance page layout engine that reflows the document
in real-time on every keystroke

- an ActionScript-based automated test harness, built as a separate
module that loads into the application, that can put the word
processor through its paces programmatically to verify document
content, layout, and functionality

- the mysteries of the Flash TextField, and how we built a fast
scrolling rich text display with microspacing and pixel grid-fitting
to ensure full fidelity between the on-screen and printed versions

- interfacing with JavaScript and DHTML to permit Flash to read and
write rich text to and from the system clipboard, work around control
key and mousewheel handling problems, read and write local files in
IE and Netscape (for testing and debugging only)

- how we used the recently-introduced support for Modules to segment
the application into separate SWFs that can be loaded on demand,
providing not only a more responsive user experience, but also faster
build times during development