Had the pleasure to make a visit to one of the best known flash-related conferences in the Netherlands, Flashtival. Quite a good first impression in my case. Some good, some bad but enough things learned to call it a great day and taking home some great ideas :) Just as i had hoped.

Overall
Flashtival seemed to be a nice organised conference. They did a nice job of getting enough speakers which should apeal to the designer/developers in the audience. Not only for the people who just started flash, but here and there even for the people who needed some more indepth information.

Introduction
Before i give brief summary’s of the presentations i attended, i just need to get this off my chest. The introduction of the conference……..guys…. it sucked. Either do a correct and informative introduction or don’t do it at all. Tip for next year….get someone in there who can give the speakers a decent introduction and the guests a decent welcoming also for that matter.

E-learning in flash
That said…I started off with a presentation by Owen van Dijk , who by the way has some funny realtime blogging of flashtival on his site, and his partner in crime Arjen Veneman. They were giving their presentation about a product they developed in flash over the past 2 (!!) years. The product, an e-learning application for children to help them learning to read, was quite interesting to look at for the first 10 - 15 minutes or so, but after that, my left shoe cought my attention and kept it for the next 45 minutes.

They did their best to explain all the great stuff they implemented in the application, but I just couldn’t help blaming myself for not getting a seat closer to the door. I have to give them credit though for prooving flash is a possibility when developing pure desktop (offline) based applications and that it is no longer absolutely nesceserry to choose Macromedia Director and the likes. They knew the problems they would face from the beginning, but chose to overcom then instead of using then as an argument why they did not use flash as an authoring environment.

Coming out of this presentation, i hoped the rest of the presentations would be a bit more informative to my personal need. (meaning the presentation was probably fantastic for people looking for this info, but just not from my RIA-information need point of view).

One final note as i hope the person who i am talking about will read this (and have the sanity to understand it’s him who i am talking about)…. Do not, not ever, again ask the same stupid question about “How many files will this application install on my computer as i am very worried that it might slow down my virus scanner!” to folks who are doing their very best to give you a nice presentation over a subject they must have worked very hard to accomplish in flash during a flash conference. FFS! You just got to be kidding me!

Flash Remoting
Next up was Waldo Smeets of Macromedia Benelux. Actually the first presentation that day with a good prepared story to tell. He knew what he wanted to tell us and why he did it. The presentation was about the advantages of using Flash Remoting as your backend and how to implements it in your projects. Either through use of components or through hard-core actionscripting.

He did get his message across. I experimented with remoting before, but could never get the hang of it. After today, i will give it another try. His whole presentation should become available as a Breeze online presentation soon, so when that happens i’ll link it up here so you can read the summary for yourself.

We know best
After giving ourselves a minute for a quick cup of coffee, we hurried on to the next speaker, which was Ewgenij Koplunik of 247 Media.

Editted: Due to me not liking my own synicism, let’s keep it at that i didn’t enjoy this precentation at all.

Document Driven Framework
On came Peter Hall to save the day. Quickly washing the dirty taste out of our mouths and reminding us that there are some very creative, enthousiastic and renewing persons out there who are trying to improve their products the best way they can and telling people about it in the process.

Peter talked about his ‘Document Driven Framework’ which in short means he created a framework which would make his flash content visible for google and the likes to index his flash site. I never saw this before and especially the use of xhtml web pages (browsable through ie e.g.) as data source in flash was a big slap in the face for me. I completely forgot that valid xhtml, in essence, is just another xml file which should be able to be parsed by flash as being xml.

Although it was a very technical orientated presentation, I enjoyed myself a lot and learned some great things. These kind of things are not the first things that pop up in your mind when developing in flash. Most of us are still stuck in the ‘one swf gets all’ way of thinking where all of our content goes into one big swf. Therefore listening to someone who has thought of a different (and in my opinion better) approach is quite refreshing. Mental note to self: take a look at Xpath.

Best practices flash development
Last but for sure not least was a presentation by Aral Balkan. This was exactly the kind of stuff i needed. He gave absolute great indepth information about how to develop your webbased flash projects in a correct, maintainable and expandable way. The subject was ‘Best practices flash development’. And boy was it.

He argumented his story very good and provided absolute fantastic support by actually showing the difference between a well developed application and a bad developed application and what developing the right way could bring for advantages. It was great to see a very very indepth presentation and it sure motivated me to look into his application framework more. When i do, i’ll try to tell more. This presentation was completely focussed on RIA development and that was exactly what i wanted to here.

At the end of his show, he gave us a sneak preview of their new product named Ariaware Optimizer. What this program does (hope i say this correctly) is search thruogh your project fla’s and extract your used classes out of them. After that, it creates a single swf file for each class and makes sure they can be loadedn into your main flash application. This way you can prevent loading large Classes multiple times if you spread your swf items over multiple files. For example, if you use more then 1 swf where you put Macromedia Components on the stage, you will see that both of those swf files include the KB’s of the Components Classes in them. Which is absolute nonsense since you should only need to load them once.

I came across this problem too when developing the fzFramework I intend to use in my projects and the only way i could think of to get around this was the use of exclude.xml’s for every .fla which is part of my project. Let me tell you in advance, it’s not a very nice prospect to maintain every single exclude.xml if you get many flas files to worry about. Great product and i for one am eager to try it out after it comes out of beta. (Which should be soon.) Let’s hope they get a demo out.

Conclusion
After Aral’s presentation we could call it a day and return home with some new interesting thoughts and some eager ideas to try out. Although not every presentation was suited to my needes as i hoped, they were all worth seeing and in whole it was a day well spend. Hope to see as many great speakers again next year… Great job people of flashtival!

Magical words of the (my version of it) day:
- Flash remoting
- EventListening model
- Maintainablity
- Decompiling your flash in multiple swf’s
- Actionscript 2.0
- Rich Internet Development
- Usability in flash
- Client/server models in flash