Flash Forward in Austin is over.
The conference was ok but I couldn’t say I am super excited about it. I met some nice people, but then again, also met some very full of themselfs speakers too. ð
And because there were a lot of young speakears, it made me wonder if maybe Flash has the developers it deserves. ð I can see Actionscript being like the snowboarding of programming languages, where as Java is like skiing, C++ hardcore skydiving without a parachute and LISP some sort of golfing. You can do really neat tricks on a snowboard, but how come the Olympiads are won only by 17 year olds? ð
On the upside, I went to some really inspiring presentations like the one from Hillman Curtis about how he is doing video now. There has been some nice stuff about Apollo and the vision of the Adobe guys on it (though it’s pretty alpha and they didn’t sort out some of the details).
There was a nice session on how the garbage collection in AS3 works and how easy it would be to skrew things up with memory leaks. While he had good points and recommendations about using weak references, I have doubts about his need for using weak pointers *everywhere*. ð I mean… listeners, hash maps, caches, okay. But everywhere?
On the downside, there were a few sessions that really made me angry. One, about Flash controlling the browser, where the speaker was recommending that you embed Javascript code inside the Actionscript code. Just keep it there as a string and then do a getURL(‘javascript: eval(str)’); on it, he was saying. This is so wrong from so many points of view that I just got up and left.
Another talk that dissapointed was the guy from Yahoo that was supposed to talk about AS2 to AS3 migration. Instead, he presented the Yahoo Maps API written in AS3, talked about all the things you can do with it and advertised Yahoo flash-related jobs in the end. That was just plain wrong.
All in all, it was nice being there, though it will probably be my first and last year at FlashForward.
typo: “I have doughts” -> “I have doubts”
It’s refreshing to see a mature view of these conferences. I havent been to Flash Forward since the first one in 2000 for pretty much the same reasons you point out here. One of the pervasive themes with Flash self-promotoers is that they are somehow doing something new. Well, Flash is just a richer way to do the same things that people have been doing with netowrk apps since the dawn of connected computers. It is so irritating to listen to a 24 year old extoll his genius about Flash when an average Java guy could utterly trounce him from a technology perspective. Ugh.
What’s so terrible about injecting JS into the page from the Flash? I’m not sure why I’d want to, but the idea doesn’t make me angry.
Some of the other stuff in that seminar was really good, especially embedding flash with SEO in mind.
I thought the conference was pretty strong overall, about 1/3 excellent/very useful, more than 1/3 worthwile and/or entertaining, and less than 20% irrelevant. Only one session pissed me off over 4 days, so I’m very satisfied overall.
Well, the part about the SEO was good, true.
The part about injecting JS into AS is wrong because it leads to development pains:
– when you need to update the JS do to something different
– any time you need to change the JS you have to republish the swf, put it on the server and so on, as opposed to just changing a text file
– it’s really hard to follow the JS if the code is complicated.
– it’s time consuming to keep escaping that code with the str += ” thing.
– you have to keep a separate JS file with the code anyway to debug the JS whenever you find a bug.
– it’s against all the principles of code separation, and one of their arguments was that it’s good because you don’t have to search in other files and stuff… it would be like argumenting to put all your classes in a project in a single file because they are easier to find. ð