I think the event went very well. The setting was a little strange, with round tables and small screens spread out in the room, many of them looking away from the speaker. I was happy to see some more advanced presentations, so there was a little for everyone, I think. I'd like to thank Brian Rinaldi for his hard work and invitation.

I was interested in Maxim’s presentation about his Loom library for Aspect Oriented Programming for ActionScript. I already knew what AOP was and how it is supposed to work, but to be honest, he kind of lost me when he started to talk about the details of the   ActionScript bytecode that the Flash Player reads. Even though I have taken classes on compilers, bit shifting and the like, I never really enjoyed them. Thankfully, he said that when he is done with the library, none of that knowledge and tedious work will be necessary.

Another interesting presentation was Brian Legros’ continuos integration talk. It came right on time for me. Until recently, I had been using a home-made daily build (using ColdFusion’s cfant tag), which built and deployed the apps into a test server, so that we could always test the latest version. If the build failed, it would send me an email. But I was craving for more control, logs, history and better management of multiple projects. I was going to install Cruise Control, but I found it to be a bit “bare bones”. Brian showed a Java-based continuos integration system called Hudson that has a nice user interface, notifications, and support for Ant (I have my Flex builds done in Ant), and Subversion. I have installed it and managed to use it on top of Apache, on Windows, as a Windows service. I may have some more posts showing how to get it running under this configuration and how to use it to build Flex projects, if there is any interest.

Maxim also has a series of posts reviewing all the presentations.