Just a quick note to let folks know that, while I did post session summaries to my blog, I have written my overall review of cf.Objective for Fusion Authority. You can find my cf.Objective() Wrap-up here.

Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation at cf.Objective(). I know Cairngorm can be a tough sell, especially following Laura's Mate presentation, Max's Flex without a framework presentation and all the talk about Chris Scott's Swiz. Nonetheless, Cairngorm is still the dominant framework in Flex and well worth knowing, even if it's just to know what you don't like about it. Anyway, I am attaching the presentation in PDF format.

Thanks to everyone who attended my presentation at cf.Objective(). I know Cairngorm can be a tough sell, especially following Laura's Mate presentation, Max's Flex without a framework presentation and all the talk about Chris Scott's Swiz. Nonetheless, Cairngorm is still the dominant framework in Flex and well worth knowing, even if it's just to know what you don't like about it. Anyway, I am attaching the presentation in PDF format.

Two new releases and four updates this week (and a ton of presentation notes from cf.Objective()). Speaking of cf.Objective(), it was awesome, as expected, but more on that later. Unfortunately, I have to pass on the sad news to all the open-source developers that I will no longer be releasing updates or maintaining the open-source list.

Mark Mandel covers the theory of caching and what problems it solves and then discusses, in detail, how Transfer addresses caching. The main problem, obviously, is that some aspects of your code can be "expensive" such as retrieving large datasets from the database or converting large data sets into components. Caching addresses this by storing information on disk or in memory so as not to have to repeat the expensive portion of the code.Transfer uses an in memory cache.

Considering that I am giving the Cairngorm session tomorrow and that I was so impressed by Laura's Mate session yesterday, this seemed like a "must see" for me. Max starts by saying that this is not necessarily a "to use frameworks or not" but focuses more on many underlying design patterns you can use (and that some frameworks already contain).Why Use Frameworks?

Considering that I am giving the Cairngorm session tomorrow and that I was so impressed by Laura's Mate session yesterday, this seemed like a "must see" for me. Max starts by saying that this is not necessarily a "to use frameworks or not" but focuses more on many underlying design patterns you can use (and that some frameworks already contain).

The next session I will review today is by Laura Arguello of ASFusion. Mate (pronounced Mah-teh) is a tag-based Flex framework created by Nahuel Foronda that is currently in public alpha. The goals of the project waere to solve recurring problems without needing to learn a ton of design patterns while making it easy to use and making it easy to extend. The presentation was impressive and from what I can tell, anyone who uses Mach-II would feel very much at home using Mate.

Boston has been a hotbed of RIA development with Flex and AIR but up until now had no Flex User Group. Well, no more! The Boston Flex User Group will hold their first meeting on April 8th at 7:00 PM at Adobe offices in Newton. Peter Farland will speak on the open-source Flex SDK. Food and refreshements are sponsored by Universal Mind. To keep up with further meetings, sign up for the Google group. P.S.

After reading about it on InsideRIA, I received a beta invite for Aviary today and decided to give it a try. Currently the only piece of the application that is available (at least to me) was the image editor called Phoenix. In general, keeping in mind that this is in private beta, it is very impressive. There were a number of kinks in the controls but overall it is very easy to use and seems to offer most of the functionality you would need in a basic image editor.