Its about the end of the day. I’m in Anaheim (my birthplace, by the way) for Macromedia MAX 2005. Its been a very cool conference for the first day and perhaps the biggest developer conference I’ve ever seen.

My early session was Flex Frameworks by Stephen Webster and Alistair McLeod. I’ve looked into Cairngorm before and, since my experience with J2EE was limited, I found myself trudging through all the MVC layers. I wish I could have seen this talk about 6 months ago as it was a breathe of fresh air. It helped me to see what goes where and how easy it is to add functionality to an application.

The next session was Architecting Flex Applications by Matt Chotin. This was a little rehash of the earlier session but it did include some useful new information. The preview of states and messaging in Flex 2 was especially interesting.

The General Session was a series of cool demonstrations and upcoming features in Flash and Flex. From my vantage point (as a Flex coder who is designing a front-end to a BI tool) the best was a demonstration of the NetWeaver component called Visual Composer from SAP. One of my complaints about BI tool vendors has been their lack of a quality web front end. Microstrategy, Cognos, SAS, and others have high-quality tools for drilling and disecting data, but their web tools are usually ugly looking DHTML messes. SAP has figured out how to take an interface that interacts with a UML-type object data model and then generate a Flash-based front end (via Flex). It’s elegant and it’s user-friendly.

More tomorrow.