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I’m getting all packed up to head to FlashForward NY 2005 this week. The event is looking great this year. They seem to have made some adjustments, and their speaker lineup looks great too. It also helps that it’s in NY, one of my favorite cities. I’ll be giving a session on “Mission Critical Application Architecture and Flash” where I will spend half the time discussing my approach and thoughts and the rest fielding questions on RIA Application Architecture.

I’ve also got some exciting personal news to share this week at the conference that I will post here too once it’s time. Looking forward to meeting up with everyone, if you are there make sure to say hello!

I’m attending/speaking at CFUnited this week. CFUnited is the largest ColdFusion conference, and this year looks to be a great event. The CFUnited team has done a great job with the session lineup, speakers, and the venue which is being held in a brand new facility.

My talk will be on Flash and .Net integration on the desktop. For people who have Flash applications currently delivered through the web or would like to build a Flash application and deliver it as a desktop application, in this session I will go through an alternative approach to using 3rd party projectors or Macromedia Central that in certain cases will meet your needs more easily.

In the session I go through embedding the Flash OCX control in a WinForms applications, communicating to and from Flash to WinForms and other tips, and debugging techniques that help when building such applications.

Although this is not a ColdFusion specific application, I’m hoping it’s a session people will find interesting especially if they are looking to take a Flash application that talks to a ColdFusion back-end to the desktop

I live a mile away from where CFUnited is being held and will be in and out of the conference all week. I will be there most of the day on Thursday. Feel free to flag me down and say hello! MXNA has a temp CFUnited smart category which is a good way to keep up with what is happening this week at the event

Seems like a big day in announcements from Macromedia.

First, Macromedia launches a portion of its website dedicated to the “Flash Platform”

Some intersting documents on the Flash Platform

• An Overview of the Macromedia Platform by Kevin Lynch
• Delivering Enterprise Applications, Content, and
  Communications with the Flash® Platform

and

Macromedia announces their intentions to deliver an IDE for rich internet application development based on the eclipse platform.

It’s great to see Macromedia marketing the “Flash Platform” in such a prominent manner and to see Macromedia working on a developer oriented IDE.

I’ve been a bit late posting my slide notes, I had to clean some of it up and remove some content that my company wanted to keep out.

I had a lot of fun giving this presentation as it was the first time where I got to showcase what I work on day to day. The people who attended seemed to really enjoy it too which was good.

In the presentation I go through

• Overview of Mission-Critical Applications
• Why Flash, am I crazy?
• Introduction to Clinical Skills (Mission Critical Product)
• Quick demo of the System
• Problems we needed to solve
• Introduction to a state based architecture
• When to use a state based architecture
• Brief Back-end implementation overview
• Flash state loader framework overview
• What happens in real-time
• Benefits

I want to thank Sean and his crew for holding yet again an excellent event and letting me speak about an obscure subject. Fitc seems to keep getting better very year, Danny summed up my thoughts very well so I won’t repeat.

Download Slide Notes

This year’s FlashintheCan is shaping up really nicely. They have an excellent speaker lineup, everyone I know is going to be there, and I’m looking forward to giving my presentation on Mission Critical Application Architecture and Flash“. Early on Shawn from the organizing crew asked me if I would speak again this year and when presenting them with this topic they were open to the idea. Not many conferences are usually open to new/non-standard subject matter and I think that’s one of the great things about FITC. This session will be interesting to present as it will be the first time where I get to show some of the work that I do in public and go through the different parts (both Flash and Backend). The session format will be different than my other presentations as the code isn’t the core of the presentation but the overall picture is more important.

Session Description:

Flash has come a long way since its early days of being only an animation tool, but being used in mission-critical applications? In this session Chafic will detail his experience on developing a state-based application architecture for a mission-critical product in use at many University Hospitals. The session will include guidelines on when such an architecture is appropriate, real world insight into implementation complexities, and what recovery/redundancy mechanisms are possible.

The session dissects such an architecture in a real-life application that successfully implements a real-time examination system to automate multi-million dollar hardware, provide transparent fail-over and recovery, simplifies long-term maintenance, and is very scalable

I arrive in Toronto Thursday night and look forward to meeting up with everyone. If you’re going to be there make sure to say hi!