Here’s what happens when American football is played like rugby … a little more entertaining.

Its been a long time since I’ve said anything here. What can I say? Work, family, kids, exercise … they’ve all taken priority over this blog. But now its going to become a bigger part of my workflow through out the day as I chronicle web technologies and data quality issues that arise. Stay tuned for more and better content as well as a new design.

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.

A busy project at work has taken me to San Francisco three times in the last two months. Each time has been for a week. We’ve been working with some folks in Macromedia Consulting to build the next version of one of our applications in Flex.

A couple of things about this process have been very new and rewarding. The Macromedia folks are user experience experts. Its been good to see the process of learning how our clients use our application, understanding how it might be extended to incorporate it more fully into their workflow, and to see how design is instrumental to usability. I am amazed at how fun the process has been.

We’ve had usability tests and designed prototypes, proof - of - concepts, and put out more documentation than I’ve ever seen in any project. And we aren’t even to the development phase yet!

And finally, programming has become fun again. Doing things in ActionScript is so easy, I’m enjoying the Java (at long last) that makes up the server-side middle tier, and designing GUIs in mxml is just plain fun.

As far as the trips are concerned, I’ve put up two sets of pictures in the photos section: Tiburon, September 25 and San Francisco 2005. Enjoy.

A scene from the destruction in London, uploaded by Antarctic Lemur, a flickr user. Check out the photo pool.