Recently, the Chicago Flex users group raffled off two tickets to the 360|Flex conference.  I was lucky enough to be one of the winners! The conference will be held in Washington DC this year, from September 19^th – 22^nd.

This year Roundarch will be one of the sponsors alongside Adobe, O’Reilly and APress to name a few. As well as sponsoring the event, Roundarch will have a booth set up for the many social events in between the scheduled seminars and workshops. Roundarch rock stars Adam Flater and Jesse Freeman are also scheduled to speak.

I am very excited to have the opportunity to attend this unique community event and there will be a lot to gain from it. This conference provides an exceptional opportunity for Flex novices, and ninjas alike, to learn from community experts and industry leading engineers. With the tremendous line up, attendees will also have the rare opportunity to meet the authors of the great blogs and articles that we as developers come to rely upon.

Some of my top level goals:

- Be a sponge and absorb as much knowledge as possible.

- Heckle Adam and Jesse during their presentations (just kidding)

- Meet Doug McCune, because he is hilarious.

- Represent Roundarch!!!

Stay tuned for my detailed re-cap after the event. For more info on the conference see the links below.

About 360|Flex

Schedule

Speakers

Chicago Flex

Chicago Flex(LinkedIn)

“360|Flex is the first and still the best Adobe Flex developer conference in the world.’”

The Problem:

When using the square bracket notation to de-reference a property of an object within the mxml, you receive an invalid warning as in the following example. It stops you from noticing warnings that actually mean something, I’ll call it “warning blindness.”

First seeing these warnings a developer might think they need to add the [Bindable] tag to the object. Doing so will eliminate one of the errors, but will add to the compilation time and won’t really add any value unless the value of the object changes and it needs to actually dispatch events for binding updates. Furthermore, the developer would still have the warning regarding not using the square bracket operators within a binding tag. If the user wants to receive binding updates or is less concerned about the extra overhead added by using the [Bindable] tag they may do so. This is a useful warning; it informs you of something that will actually make a difference come run time. The other warning is not taking into account the context of the square brackets, and falsely “believes” that the type of the variable using the square brackets is an Array or an ArrayCollection rather than an object, and is thus informing you of your possible error. This isn’t a problem if you have 1 or 2 of these, but say you have 30. Now it starts to clog up your warnings box and you start ignoring (or not seeing) things that actually matter. This is especially a problem in Flex Builder because warnings tend to not clear properly when doing an incremental build, so many times it will replicate the warnings (clean build in my experience has always worked to clear the warnings and give me the proper list, but clean building means building things that didn’t change and therefore wasted compilation time).

The Solution:

Since the function call in the binding only references the object changes to the underlying properties it will not cause the bound value to be updated, rather the entire object must change as in the following example:

If this is an issue across an entire application, the method can easily be plugged into a static utility class and used throughout the application. Also be mindful in the above example the curly braces in the click event of the button signify a new object not a binding.

package utils
{
public class ObPropUtil
{
public static function obProp(object:Object, prop:String):Object
{
return object[prop];
}
}
}

And then easily used anywhere with ObPropUtil.obProp(someObject, SOME_PROPERTY) in place of someObject[SOME_PROPERTY]

If you aren’t using constants, you can generally chain along the dot operator without a problem (you cannot use constants in place of a literal variable using the dot operator chaining, and therefore are forced into using the square bracket operator).

John Peebles and Aman Datta

Aman Datta, Vice President of Roundarch, and John Peebles, Vice President Online Marketing at Avis Budget Group, were keynote presenters at the Autonomy Interwoven GearUp 2009 Executive Briefing Roadshow in New York City this past Monday (4.27). Roundarch is a Platinum Partner of Interwoven and this event gave us the opportunity to share the Avis innovations with Autonomy and Interwoven executives, customers, and other partners. The presentation entitled “Driving Next Generation Solutions at Avis” explained how Roundarch and Avis used Interwoven solutions throughout the Avis project to develop an entirely new way to experience the car rental reservation process. Roundarch developed a multi-channel approach for Avis and three components of this approach were showcased in the presentation.

1. Avis.com – This was a full site redesign. Based on strategic research, Roundarch developed a new user experience and design that evolves the entire online car rental experience.

2. Site Extensions – This is a concept Roundarch has developed as a way to leverage the Avis.com site experience and extend the reach of Avis to partner sites and other sites on the Web. It is developed in Adobe Flex and is one of many innovations that Roundarch and Avis are bringing to the travel market. This site extension can be found at www.rentacar.com as well as on Air New Zealand.

3. iPhone app – Responding to customer needs to rent cars on the go, Roundarch saw a demand for the development of an Avis iPhone application as part of the overall strategy. Avis is the first car rental company to release a fully integrated mobile application.

The key goal of this multi-channel approach is to allow customers to perform a full service reservation process from multiple digital points. The project was not just about redesigning the website, but thinking about the entire reservation process in a whole new way.

Later in the day, Datta also participated in a panel discussion with Renee Rodgers, Senior Director of Interactive at Avaya and Patrick Gardella, Senior Director Interactive Architecture for Discovery Communications that was led by Anthony Bettencourt, CEO, Autonomy Interwoven. The discussion covered the future trends of the Web and how Autonomy Interwoven’s solutions are working to capitalize on these Web trends for clients such as Avis.

Patrick Gardella, Renee Rodgers, Aman Datta, and Anthony Bettencourt

GearUp 2009 Executive Briefing Roadshow is currently touring 5 cities across the globe.

Additional photos of the event.

Photos of the iPhone application.