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360Flex Presentation Posted

Thanks to everyone who just attended my presentation at 360 Flex in Atlanta this morning, “Advanced Case Study: Building the Allurent Display Architecture”. For anyone who’s interested (including attendees of my talk of course), you can download it at:

http://www.joeberkovitz.com/presentations/AllurentDisplayCaseStudy.pdf

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Heading to Atlanta to Speak at 360Flex

After a far-too-short breather from the last snow-encrusted landing at Logan Airport, I will be flying to Atlanta on Monday to speak at the 360Flex conference Tuesday morning. I really like this conference because it’s small, 100% focused on Flex development and has an extra-congenial, hang-friendly atmosphere.

Many of my speaking topics have to do with architecture, patterns, or some kind of preaching about best engineering practices. I love all that, but, to be completely frank, it feels a bit abstract and windy sometimes. I like to build concrete stuff that does something useful, and that’s where my real interests lie. (”Dammit, captain, I’m an engineer, not a methodologist…”) So this year I’ve made a pact with myself to only do talks about real live projects.

At 360 Flex I’ll be sharing a detailed case study of the architecture and implementation inside the most challenging and interesting product we’ve built at Allurent to date: the Allurent Display Platform. This system includes an engine that visually renders XML markup as Flex components — but unlike MXML or HTML, the markup resolves bindings to nonvisual data objects (usually products or product categories) that can live anywhere in a “virtual namespace” of content. Allurent Display also includes a fully-featured visual authoring tool for this markup similar to Flex Builder Design View.

This talk is a case study, not a product demo: I will be sharing the big decisions we made, the Flex or Flash technologies we used, the implementation tricks we had to resort to, the alternate approaches we considered (maybe the audience will propose something better). I think it’ll be a fun time. Anyway, hope to see you there, if this kind of thing interests you!

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Mountain Biking In Mexico’s Copper Canyon

I just returned from a week-long mountain bike trip in Las Barrancas Del Cobre (Copper Canyon), a canyon system in southwestern Chihuahua state of truly remarkable scope and scenery:

The trip was organized by Western Spirit, a bike expedition company about which I have only great things to say. [Continued…]

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A Single Link for MVCS Resources

A few folks have pointed out that it’s difficult to track down all the resources about my MVCS approach to building Flex applications. They were right, and in response I’ve consolidated everything into a single page accessible at this URL:

http://www.joeberkovitz.com/mvcs.

I’ve also included a few addenda to MVCS reflecting more recent thoughts and practices. As more materials become available, I will add them to the above location.

Thanks to everyone who prodded me into doing the right thing!

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