Ted Patrick > { Events & Community } > Adobe Systems

Wow what a week. I had a great time at 360Flex and I really enjoyed meeting so many developers. It was great to meet everyone in person and it was exciting to see so many people dedicated to building applications in Flex 2. Somewhere over the last month Flex showed its first real public signs of mass adoption. The demos at Engage and 360Flex were eye opening for me in that it highlighted adoption trends with Flex from key customers and the developer community. In short, Flex is going big.

Since the start of 2007 I have witnessed many signs of growth in the Flex ecosystem. Developers are learning the programming model and many applications are in development. The interesting part is that many of these applications are 100% off Adobe's radar, we do not know what developers are making with Flex and often we find out when the applications launch. At 360Flex there were 8-9 teams that I talked to who had a) never been in contact with Adobe and b) were building substancial projects. It is also great to see the component ecosystem take off. I mentioned 5 projects in the day 3 keynote where third party developers were extending Flex. ESRI, FlexLib, Farata Systems, Yahoo, Ebay all have components/apis for ActionScript3/Flex 2 and are enabling integration of their services into Flex applications. Flex really is bigger than Adobe and as a medium is showing signs of real grass roots and corporate adoption.

360Flex really exceeded my own expectations for a conference. Ebay was so generous in providing the conference facility and the support onsite. The catering services were awesome providing meals and kegs like clockwork! The speakers made this conference a success, the track content was the best I have ever seen and spaned so many different element of Flex in the tracks, Components, Integration, Flex101, and Application. The attendees also made the conference great, as the conference was single focused on Flex, the questions, dialog, and tone were very targetted and provided a ton of value. As they say "Location, Location, Location", well 360Flex was the center of the Flex universe for 3 straight days and being apart of that conversation was great. I could not have asked for better partners on 360Flex, John and Tom were amazing and made the conference a wild success, without their effort 360Flex would not have happened.

I am looking forward to the next 360Flex and the smaller 1 day 120Flex events coming later this year. Keep an eye out for some announcements coming soon and make sure to add yourself to the announcement list here.

I had a great time and made many new friends in the process. Thanks for a great week!

Regards,

Ted :)