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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!