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Gearing up for my talk at MAX 2006: Flex Best Practices

I’m really excited about this year’s MAX 2006 conference in October — not only has Flex 2 come out into the sunlight since last year, but there should be all kinds of other exciting news, goodies and ideas in play. And I am, of course, planning on doing some mountain biking in Nevada.

Anyway, I’ve been working hard on a talk for MAX, called “Flex Best Practices: Applying Design Patterns and Architecture”. Last week was the crunch for getting this thing together and I’m feeling pretty good about what came out.

A talk with this title could easily be a bunch of recipes: “Here’s the way you build Flex applications. Do this, do that, don’t do that other bad thing, and you’ll create a work of true beauty, utility, elegance…” Well, if you know me as an architect, you know that I am not a big fan of the word “best” when used by itself. I don’t believe in things that are “the best”, I believe in things that are “the best for something“.

So I’ve known all along that for me, this talk couldn’t be a presentation of the “right” canned architectural patterns. It would have to be a presentation of how to think about using and deploying patterns in a way that’s constructive in a given definite situation. As a result, my plan was as follows:

• draft some slides with a bunch of my favorite high-flown principles
• think of a sample application that’s engaging and makes sense to do in Flex
• build the application out, applying said principles
• reflect on what actually happened
• rewrite the slides!

I had a lot of fun with the application, which I will be posting here next week (assuming I get some kind of hosting situation together for the server side). It’s called ReviewTube: a mashup between YouTube (a popular video publishing site) and a custom web application. The ReviewTube application allows users to add their own time-based comments to any YouTube video. Visitors to the ReviewTube site can then play back the video accompanied by a display of the associated comments as captions, synchronized in time. The comments can be explanatory or thoughtful (Dame Wendy for video clips?) or funny and snarky (think MST3K). It’s up to the commentator, of course.

Despite the server-side piece (thrown together in Ruby On Rails in one day), the focus of this talk is on the client side. It will be equal parts PowerPoint and looking at/modifying real code.

More soon!