I actually wrote the following on Tuesday night, but WordPress was broken so I couldn’t post it. Apparently some files had somehow become corrupt; I re-uploaded them, and now it appears to be working again. Anyway, here are some of the highlights from Tuesday’s sessions.

Building Global Ready Flex Applications

Long-time Adobe employee Craig Rublee gave a solid presentation with plenty of easy-to-follow code samples. He demonstrated the localization process in Flex 2, and then showed two different methods available in Flex 3. In Flex 2, it turns out that you need to compile a separate application swf for each locale (language) that you want to support. This made me sad. However, in Flex 3 you can compile multiple locales into a single application swf, or you can compile locale swfs that have nothing but locale-specific information and load them as modules into your application at runtime. This makes me happy. Of course, the Flash Player still doesn’t support right-to-left text, but as was announced yesterday that will change with the release of version 10 next year. When that happens Flash and Flex will have complete localization capabilities. Meanwhile, I hope to post some code samples illustrating the different options in the near future.

Continuous Integration with Flex, FlexUnit, and Ant

Daniel Rinehart of Allurent provided a good introduction to FlexUnit, Ant, and continuous integration for those who weren’t familiar with them. He then stepped through the process for automating the build, testing, and publishing processes using Antennae. I was pleased to see that the best practices that Daniel (and Allurent) promote via Antennae are consistent with our practices at Eye Street. I also noticed that Daniel does his development work in emacs, which should make Ryan McGeary happy.

Building Rich Internet Applications with Cairngorm and LiveCycle Data Services

This presentation was a real shocker. Peter Martin told us that he and the other members of the Adobe Consulting Team are in the midst of a complete re-thinking of the Cairngorm framework. In their recent work with mfg.com, in fact, they dispensed with the CairngormEvent paradigm altogether, and had the View act directly on the Model instead. Peter went so far as to say that they are considering eliminating the Controller. If you’re familiar at all with Cairngorm, then you know that these are radical changes that are sure to offend Cairngorm religionists. For my part, I’m glad that they are thinking this way, because I have been thinking along the same lines (thanks in part to some prodding from Ryan M). I applaud the Adobe folks for their willingness to re-examine their own assumptions and practices, and change direction when they believe they have discovered a better way of doing things.

Update: Steven Webster has made it clear that the Adobe Consulting Team’s “deep thinking” applies only to applications that use LiveCycle Data Services, and not to applications built with service-oriented architectures. (At MAX Matt Chotin had told me privately that he beleived this to be the case, but now it’s in writing.) This is disappointing, because as noted above Cairngorm could use with some trimming down regardless of what’s being used server-side.

Building Accessible Applications with Flex

Andrew Kirkpatrick and John Bennett provided a comprehensive overview of accessibility, touching upon everything from its importance to why it is often overlooked to suggestions on how to sell it to managers and clients. They also presented some clear and simple code samples to illustrate how to implement Flex’s accessibility features.

Thanks to them I finally know why JAWS has non-Forms Mode. Until today I thought that this mode was nothing but a nuisance, since it seemed to me that it rendered the accessibility features in Flash completely useless. However, Andrew and John explained that this mode is required to read text that cannot receive input focus. So, while it may not be the best way of implementing this functionality, at least it does have a purpose. I also learned of Inspect32, a tool that reads and displays the MSAA data that screen readers use so that you can see how your application looks to the screen readers. This provides a great way of testing accessibility without needing to listen to JAWS.

Andrew and John also indicated that they will soon be posting some tools on Adobe Labs that will help simplify building accessible Flex applications, particularly with respect to video.

General Session / Sneak Peeks

There was way too much cool stuff demonstrated and announced to fit in one blog post, so I’ll write more later. For now, let me simply say this: Thermo will blow you away.