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.

Just in case anyone missed it, Colin will be giving a two day bootcamp taking someone from ground zero with little coding experience all the way to ActionScript 2.0 and Object Oriented Programming. Depending on your experience, be it a designer with little formal teaching or you are looking to learn ActionScript 2.0 and Object Oriented Programming/Design Patterns I highly recommend you check it out. Colin is an excellent writer and presenter

Session 1: Beginner’s Introduction to ActionScript (Great if you are starting out)
Session 2: Introduction to Object-oriented Programming (Get a good handle on OOP)
Session 3: Introduction to Design Patterns (Take your OOP knowledge to the next level)
Dates:

Lost Angeles ca, may 16-17 (already over)
session 1 & 2 (Good for starting from ground zero)

Rochester ny, may 31-june 1
session 2 & 3 (Good if you have some programming experience but want to take it to the next level)

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 has been blogged by others, but since I also got a chance to play with this product early on and am a big fan of C# I thought I’d make a mention. NeoSwiff is a C# to SWF solution. Although there’s been press about Xamlon, NeoSwiff takes a different approach. I can’t really comment on which approach is better, I haven’t played much with Xamlon but NeoSwiff is pretty well thought out and is already pretty usable(The bytecode of generated by the NeoSwiff compiler looks to be very solid, haven’t looked at Xamlon).

Although GlobFX isn’t mainly targeting this at the Flash Community as it looks like they interested in providing an alternative for the .Net/C# developers, this is great news for the SWF platform as a whole and any Flash geek should give it a wirl.

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!