Daniel R.

Rough Draft Notes

Christophe Coenraets is giving the Keynote

Talking about Flex 3 Improvements

Advanced DataGrid: hierarchical data, flexible grouping, custom formatting
Charting Enhancements: data-oriented graphical APIs, per-item labels and fills, region selection
New List and Data Effects: choreograph data

Showing iLog charting example
3D bar and data charts
Organizational chart example with grab and pan

Showing code example with the AdvancedDataGrid

<mx:AdvancedDataGrid>
<mx:GroupingCollection>
<mx:Grouping>
<mx:GroupingField name="category"/>
</mx:Grouping>
</mx:GroupingCollection>
</mx:AdvancedDataGrid>

Need to tell grouping collection to refresh itself.

Persistent Framework Caching
Flash player caches Flex framework across projects and sites.
Size of target SWF can now be as small as 50KB.

Base application size 600KB, removing debugging via compiler flag -compiler.debug=false 380KB, Flex Build path/library path/framework linkage, change that to runtime shared library, 200KB. Has fall back capability to support loading SWF instead of using signed SWF caching.

Memory and profiling and code refactoring are two big improvements in Flex Builder 3. Demonstrating sample application called Salesbuilder as a way to show these two new features. Source code is available off of his blog. Application is AIR based and supports desktop drag and drop to save graphs along with offline data synchronization using the SQLite DB and LCDS. Next talk is about profiler so this he isn't talking about it. Showing find references and rename variable support.

Designer and developer workflow is improved through skin asset importing and CS3 Flex component support in Flash. Showing Fireworks example of show to easily skin a button, export the asset and pull it into the Flex CSS file. Once in Flex Builder one can use the new CSS Design view to manipulate the file. Ability to graphically assign Scale 9 parameters that it updates the CSS file with. Can also export style information from Flash.

Flex Builder 3 now supports wizards for working with data and web services. Will generate both client side and server side code in PHP and some other languages for data access. Can introspect a web service through a wizard, select desired methods, and generate stub code on the fly that is strongly typed.

Flex 3 has enhanced JavaScript/AJAX wrappers and improves the deep linking support from Flex 2. Showing deep linking support in Buzzword. All about anchor management. Can leverage the existing URLKit.

Showing new Flex pricing and packaging. Flex 3 SDK, free, Flex Builder 3 standard is $249, there is other pricing.

bugs.adobe.com/flex
www.flex.org/community