Peter Elst

I attended the university session on Flex 2 RIA’s with James Ward and Christoph Rooms at JavaPolis, Antwerp today and have to say it was an absolute blast!

For a moment it felt as if I landed in a parallel universe, wandering through the exhibition area with my rather limited Java skills it almost seemed like I was a Microsoft employee at the MacWorld conference trying to blend into the crowd by sporting the swag and nodding confidently at all the obscure acronyms thrown at me. One minute longer and I’d been offered a job as a lead Java developer at Oracle… well not quite

Christoph and James did a great job introducing Flex 2 concepts and I particularly liked the focus on Flex Data Services and the ease with which you hook up Java back-ends to the engaging Flex interfaces we all know and love. They even went into Apollo and the Flex-AJAX Bridge, which went down a treat.

But then it hit me… the Flash platform has grown up, we’re finally there! Watching Java developers eagerly grabbing for Flex and AS3 API posters, the eagle has landed - world domination is within hands reach!

In some strange way seeing the reaction of mainstream developers validates the work Macromedia and Adobe have been doing for years now. User experience meets enterprise development and we, both as Flash platform developers as end-users, can only profit from this revolution.