I’ve went today to a conference held by Adobe Romania at the Intercontinental Hotel. Of course, I’ll start with the most important aspect of this kind of conferences: the food. The food was decent, better than Microsoft provides at its events but still, an Oracle presentation from a few years ago still remains the unbeaten champion.

Now that that’s covered, I’ll move on to the more technical aspects. It had lots of presentations held by Adobe evangelists, some from the romanian team and two presentations from an adobe senior evangelist – Ben Forta – a really funny dude despite his long beard that might suggest a grumpier person. I’ve liked his presentations a lot, especially the one about Cold Fusion, an Adobe (former Macromedia) product first launched ages ago before technologies like PHP or ASP even existed, but not very popular nowadays. Never the less, it can prove quite a lifesaver sometimes. I also liked presentations held by Mihai Corlan and Mihai Pricope about AIR and Flex. There was a really boring speech from one of their VPs about…well…nothing, but apart from that, I’ve really enjoyed this conference.

I entered in one of their weird contests – the prize being a Flex Professional licence. Apart from which one might expect from a company like Adobe, this contest had nothing to do with programming. It’s like this:

1. go to Mihai Corlan and get 5 posters with Flex and AIR APIs
2. choose any bar or pub you want
3. go to the bartender and convince him to let you hang 2 posters there

Sounds easy, 3 simple steps, but it’s not. Developers are by nature antisocial beings and walking to a bar and convince a bartender to let you hang the Flex API on his wall requires a lot of courage and people skills. Lacking those qualities, I’ve decided to…cheat my way to the licence. Actually it’s not cheating, because they didn’t say that the bartender must be a total stranger. So, I’ve hung 2 posters in Interbelic, a nice bar in the middle of Bucharest’s “old center” . I just happen to know the people there

Here are some pics to prove it:

Waiting for that Flex Builder licence…

As previously stated, I intend to get my bachelor degree this year. And I have to chose from a variety of projects. I have 2 options, either choose a PHP project, that will be ready in no time and get rid of it fast or choose to do a project with a technology I don’t know yet and learn that technology in the process, so that I can honestly that I’ve learn something useful while in school. I decided to give AIR a try, for one possible project, a RSS aggregator and a RSS reader (desktop app). I if get along with AIR, this will be painless. I’ll develop the browser based application and use AIR to build the desktop one on top of this one.

Installing AIR on my Ubuntu box was a piece of cake, it worked right out the box. Unfortunately I can’t say the same about Aptana, which kept poping errors and I had a hard time installing the AIR plugin. But I get this type of problems a lot when dealing with Eclipse based software and I got used to it in time…

So I’ve the gas and tried out some code examples. Copy/paste, monkey style, see how well it does. Well, what can I say…I’m impressed. If this was a gaming blog, I would have to say “AIR pwnz”. Really! AIR is a much developer friendly platform that I initially thought. So today I’m starting my AIR learning quest for 1 week and at which end I’ll decide if I’ll go forward with AIR for my project. As I’m a seasoned web developer, I want to see how easy it is to port an web application from a browser based app to an AIR one. Yes, I know AIR does that by default. And not quite. For instance, in order to send something to the server, in Javascript you use Ajax, like such

new Ajax.Request( url, options);

…while in AIR you have to write…

var request = new air.URLRequest( url ); 
var loader = new air.URLLoader(); 
loader.load( request );

If I were to use a design pattern like MVC, it will be a lot easier to port a browser application to AIR. I’ll have to rewrite the model and probably the view. No meddling with the controller, the application’s logic would remain unchanged (parse some feeds and display them to the user). This would be a big plus. So first of all I’ve wanted to try AIR with Javascript MVC and make some sniffing in the controller, see if the application is running inside the browser or on AIR, load a different model and a different view for each case. But after giving it some thought I’ve realised that I also have to read the Javascript MVC’s documentation, try it out and get used to it. And I just don’t have enough time for that, because those South Park episodes aren’t going to watch themselves. Or do I? I’ll post some code examples as things go forward. This is a plead to my readers, if any of you is familiar with AIR, please leave a comment. I would appreciate having someone to share my problems with

Motto: I’m not fat, I’m just big boned. Back to South Park…