Adobe MAX Europe, J-1

I guess many people are going to write or have already written blog posts with a similar title. But hey, this is a big event for me. I’m so happy my company offered me this reward, really. I know it can seem hard to understand how one can be so excited about attending technical conferences all day. But discovering and learning new technologies is so central to why I love software development, and Adobe stuff has become so important in my “artistic” evolution lately, that I really can’t wait.

Amongst others, I hope to learn more about Flex 4, Thermo now known as Catalyst, Flash 10 and its possibilities, Adobe AIR, but more importantly I have a few questions for Adobe guys, especially:

• Open Source is not just about a license and a Subversion repository, it’s also about community and listening to it. And when I see some of the highest voted bugs in JIRA deferred and deferred again, I would love to understand what is their policy regarding community feedback.
• Portability is obviously a big argument in favor of Flex, but I still wonder why things like mouse wheel are not natively supported on the Mac. Fortunately there is a workaround but it’s still a pain.
• How about backward compatibility? A year back, I wanted to propose Flex as an implementation technique for the UI of the operational monitoring application at Thalys, but we argued with a colleague about the governance problem: contrary to Sun Microsystems with Java, Adobe has never clearly committed to maintain backward compatibility. Of course, let’s not forget that some people are still migrating their JDK 1.4 to Java 5 because they had variables called “enum”… Joke aside, I was kind of disappointed to see that the application I’m working on right now worked with Flash 9 but has a bug with Flash 10 because of the changes they made with FileReference API. Hopefully, this will be fixed with Flex 4, but in the meantime we’re still struggling.

Over all, it’s the first technical conference I attend outside of Belgium and Javapolis (now Devoxx), and I hope that the organization will at least match the one of the BeJUG.

The 2 weeks to come are going to be legen… wait for it… DAAAAARRYYYYYY!