Ideas for the User Group
If you have any ideas about resources that would help members of the User Group please let us know! Also let us know if there are any speakers you would like to try and get in for our meetings. Our first target is James Ward…!
July 11th, 2007 at 7:55 am
I don’t think I’ve ever been a targeted speaker before.
Cool! I’d like to make the trip over, but will probably need more justification. Maybe you could help me setup a few other speaking engagements to combine into one trip… Java User Groups? Conferences? Or perhaps I could stop by on either end of my trip to JavaPolis this year. Lets figure something out. 
-James
July 11th, 2007 at 8:19 am
Great news James! Are you coming over for Adobe MAX? I could definately set up some other engagements and have been taking to some guys at Adobe UK about getting you over, so they may been in touch.
July 12th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
I have been thinking about writing a series of articles (when time permits) titled, “Wot no timeline” - to introduce Flash developers to an Eclipse based IDE and in the process highlight some of the reasons why Flex affords greater speed when developing an application. My thoughts are, whilst there are plenty of good quality tutorials on learning Flex, I haven’t seen any that take this approach. Coming into Flex from a Flash developer’s perspective, I find myself in agreement with the following review of the Friends of Ed publication ‘The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0′ http://www.cruciallimit.com/blog/?p=77
I work with a variety of Flash developers ranging from the slightly Flex-curious to the downright Flex-confused … perhaps the biggest barrier to the psyche of the hardened keyframe addict is simply ‘not having a timeline’, yet the time saving rewards afforded through Flex development make me urge Flash developers to see where its strength lies. Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and a place for Flash … but for everything else … consider Flex you’re weapon of choice.
One begs the question of how many of the User Group came to Flex from a Flash development background?
August 29th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
Hey guys, just joined up and wanted to send in my thoughts…
I quite new to flex, coming from a PHP background I don’t have any problems with having no Timeline but still the learning curve is quite steep.
For myself, I would be very interested in any best practice / quick ways to handle loading data from XML to a flex form, validating and then sending back (via XML) to a database. I do this all the time with PHP and have developed some handy classes that handle all the boring bits. Right now, i’m finding flex quite slow for this kinda thing so I think i’m missing something.
Any thoughts?