So the here I am at the second (and final) day of the WebDU 2007 conference.

Session 1: Keynote: The Future of Flex & ColdFusion Scorpio Unveiled
Ted Patrick started off the keynote talking about the future direction for Flex. Basically, Adobe have big plans for Flex. With two main releases already planned for this year, I’m thinking Flex will be a common word in everyone’s vocab by the end of the year.

We were shown some very cool things that have already been done in Flex, one of which was this Awesome FlipBook in flash. I spent a few minutes looking for it, and found it. Check this out, its amazing – just a brilliant combination of design and programming. An example of the transpartent Flex Flip-book can be found here.

Ted also talked about the tight integration between all the Adobe CS3 Application suite and Flex. He showed a quick example of how you can get your Designer to design the forms and screen-layout in Fireworks CS3, and then export the MXML file into Flex for your flash developer to then hack.

Which reminds me, one of the things I forgot to mention about yesterday is that when we got our sneak preview of Adobe CS3, we were shown Flash CS3. One of the BIG things with flash CS3, and apparently Adobe had heaps of requests for this, is that you can now import a Adobe Photosop PSD file into Flash straight away – and to make it even more cool, Flash imports it with your layers and everything! Very cool that was.

The second part of they Keynote was presented by Tim Buntel. I got the impression that the ColdFusion community is quite tight, and that Tim is a very humerus Cold Fusion guru which a lot of people know about. Tim gave us an insight into Scorpio. Scorpio is the code-name for Adobe’s new version of Coldfusion.

Ill be honest with you. I wasn’t really that Impressed with the new ColdFusion, well I mean I was, but the way it was presented was quite mis-leading. Let me explain. Basically it appears that Adobe have got a whole stash of stuff from sites like dhtmlgoodies.com and all these other places where you can get cool free libraries to do stuff, and converted them into a whole bunch of CF tags. For example there were tags to:

Create ‘Macromedia-breeze’ like presentations (so you could actually do this through some markup tags, all completely flash based).
With this presentation you could add, XML data imput to draw graphs, read databses, play mp3’s, and have logic in your slides. So that means you really kind of have a ‘live’ report that is programmed and can read external data sources and draw fancy charts – and yes this was very cool.

Create image resizing, editing, transparency, even print images through cfm tags

Create a dynamic HTML input type text – this basically looked like a ripped off version of FCK Editor.

Populate PDF files from data sources

Basically it looks like all these things you would normally do by getting other external libraries are all available in cold fusion and are implemented with the use of cfm. Now – dont get me wrong, this is cool – Yes. BUT, it was presented like WOW – new ground breaking stuff – well not really. This stuff already exists, all Adobe have done have grabbed all these ideas from everywhere and put them in simple tag function calls.

Session 2: Creating the perfect layout using CSS and JavaScript
I was looking forward to this session – and it was good. Basically the two presenters presented a good method to solve a current problem – How do we design websites for different browser sizes and resolution? What do we have today to solve our problems?

Well CSS3 Solves all our problems. With CSS3, we can control different screen percentages with our design. Its as easy as some code like this;

@media all and (min-width: 1000px)
{
content
{
width:960px;
}
}
But you know what? CSS3 is like on 1% of web browsers out there. Guess who? Oprah! and its going to be many years before it comes standard.. So what can we do now to solve something like this?

Basically we need to create a resolution dependant layout. How do we do this? Well quite simply we have several style sheets defined. A default one, and some other secondary ones. On top of that, we have a javascript file that detects the screen resolution. Depending on the users resolution and browser, the javascript file then allocates a corresponding CSS file. Very simple solution – and its all documented here. Try to resize the window and see what happens to the layout. Resolution.js – I cant wait to play with it!!.

Session 3: Spry Javascript Framework
A very good session on Adobe’s Spry – an AJAX Framework. I first came along this framework a few months ago, and didnt bother using it, because the community seemed dead. But its really taken off now apparently – nbc.com use it. Basically Adobe have some big plans for this.

One thing that puzzled me was why is Adobe giving this away for free? Everything else they are doing they are charging for. Eg Flex IDE, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion etc… So I asked Greg Rewis , an Adobe Evangelist. Well apparently there are HUGE plans to integrate this in the CS3 Platform. In dreamweaver CS3 you can easily put and click / drag and drop and it will implement the Spry framework. Spry is free – yes, but if you want to implement it a bit quicker, use Dreamweaver! So that should be pretty cool. I look forward to trying that in Dreamweaver CS3.

Session 4: Seeding, Developing and Growing an online Community
This was a good session that looked at practical ways in building an online community. I need to grab the presentation for this one, it had some good pointers.

Session 5: Scorpio: Better User Interfaces
This was basically on more ColdFusion CS3 stuff, like I ranted about in the KeyNote.

All in up, it was a good couple of days. Will I be going next year? Well, no not really – I cant afford the $900 rego, it really isn’t worth it. But I will be looking around for those online competitions again for free tickets .

Goodbye WebDu for 2007.