Mind the Flex

Visiting the First European Flex 360 Conference

Flex is like a new island in the ocean about what you have read from books, heard from friends and decided that this is probably the place where you would like to live. The only reason you haven't moved there yet is that you still don't know exactly how is the weather there, is it going to be too crowded or too lonely, and is there something else to eat but bugs. As an unique opportunity, we found from Internet that there will be a so to speak tourism fair concentrating only on Flex island. There was no hesitation, we packed our bags and flew directly to 360 Flex Europe in Milan. The main reason why we wanted to be there was our doubt that the Flex tree grows poorly in Europe and we wanted some proof that this is not true (see previous post by Martin Where do the Flex Developers Live).

We arrived on Saturday evening and on Sunday morning we woke up early to visit the Venice. After three hours we were there and all we saw was just great. In case you'll be visiting the Adobe Max in December, it would be reasonable to arrive one day earlier to visit Venice as this place is really worth it. It is at the same time big and small and takes exactly one day to get a general an overview of it. You should definitely leave some space into your luggage to bring home some masks as they really look great.

On Monday morning we were ready to dive into the Flex world. As we walked to the conference registration desk, we didn't see the crowd we were used to see on QCon, JavaPolis or JavaOne. It was quite calm and quiet. The atmosphere in the conference reminded a bit The Serverside Java Symposium which is also a community-driven event and enjoys community support. Without the sign 360 Flex Europe it would have been pretty hard to find the right place.

After registering ourselves we got our conference maps, 1GB USB drive with presentations and badge. The event started with the keynote that took place in a room called Viscontea. This place was not very big and it was almost full of people (about 100 participants) who felt that for some strange reason they would like to invest into this new technology. As the keynote started, we took a look around to see how an average European Flex developer looks like. The room was filled mainly with men as usually but the average age of these guys seemed somewhat higher than on a general Java conference. It was somewhere between 30 and 45, which is quite interesting as we couldn't figure out why the "older" generation is rather keen to board the Flex ship than the younger generation. It could be the case that these developers have lived all there life with HTML and now they see that there is finally a way to build the corporate applications clients without entering the hell of div tags. As the first day of the conference was free for all, there was a 20 persons using this opportunity.

These two guys are doing an amazing job!

We found quite interesting the presentations of Rostislav Hristov who spoke about deep linking in Flex and the David Bigelow's (we are sorry to say but we absolutely didn't like the video as it was too primitive and we hope that this is not shown to real customers) presentation about protecting your Flex application from being stolen. 

The crazy part of the conference was Internet. There was no free Internet! We don't blame the organizers as it was there first conference in Europe and probably they couldn't imagine either that in some European country the Internet is seen as enemy. There was only Swisscom wifi available in the hotel and 60 minutes Internet with 200 MB limit (which couldn't be reached anyway) was 10 EUR (~16 USD) and we personally find this completely not normal. Ok, we come from Estonia where the country is almost everywhere covered with some kind of wireless solution and not a single hotel wouldn't even think to charge visitors for WIFI but also the guys from US were pretty surprised about the hotel's attitude. To provide about 100 persons with free WIFI for free days they required from organizers about 17 000 EUR (26 000 USD).  StarHotel Business Palace will probably never see a single Flex developer.

What we would expect from the next conference? We would like to hear more real life stories and less about introductory stuff about Flex. In this sense Frederico Minzoni's presentation (WELSY—a open source eLearning application built in Flex) was not only informative but also stimulating. The guy described his experience with Flex. Currently we don't understand the strategy Adobe is trying to push through with Flex. There are currently tens of thousands application which are built on Hibernate-Spring-HTML but somehow Adobe tries to ignore this. We guess that they want the companies to build the new applications completely on Flex and Data Services. In our opinion the Flex would be in Europe MUCH more successful if they would concentrate rather on replacing the user interface of old applications than pushing the Flex applications as a thing on itself.

There will be no new developers who will program only in Flex but there will be still the old Java, .NET or PHP programmers. (See Ted Patrick's blog How to find Flex developers). To get the Flex business going in Europe these guys have to board the Flex ship and even if they don't move completely to Flex island, they should be willing to buy at least a summer house there. Otherwise it will be a deserted place where a couple of Robinson Crusoes hunt bugs to make living.