Completed Flex 2.0 Training Course

So, last week I completed the Flex 2.0 course for trainers. The course was held in Sydney, at the Adobe office in Chatswood. Spread over 5 days, the training comprised of two courses run consecutively. The first course, Flex 2: Developing Rich Client Applications, was spread over the first 3 days. The last two days covered Flex 2: Data and Communcations.

It was good to go over all the basics in the first 3 days. Even though most of the trainees of the course were fairly comfortable with a lot of the concepts in Flex, all felt that that it was good to put all the various concepts together. The labs at the end of the day were very well thought out and consolidated the concepts and learnings.I am a trainer for ColdFusion and ShadoCMS (a content management system written in ColdFusion). I often encounter a sense of wonder — the “oooh” feeling — that the trainees feel when they are able accomplish seemingly complex tasks with little effort. The second course, Flex 2: Data and Communications, had a lot of “oooh” moments for everyone, including me.

It covered areas like web services, remote objects (CFCs and Java), data validation and working with complex data (ArrayCollectiosn). A significant time was spent on more exciting areas like, Flex Data Services, Flex Message Service, Flex Data Management Service, and E4X. And all this generated a lot of ooohs. The ease with which one can architect apps with real-time chat and collaboration between different users is quite amazing. And so was the relative simplicity by which one can synchronize data between a Flex client and a web application’s data tier.

Robin Hilliard (of Rocketboots) was the instructor. And usual, he made the course very interesting by providing lots of real-life examples of concepts and his distinct sense of humor! Some of us were familiar with the basic concepts of Cairngorm 2. But we wanted to work on a simple Cairngorm 2 app. For those of you who don’t know, Robin is Cairngorm king down under. So he took out some extra time during lunch and evenings and we started building a simple contact manager using Cairngorm. (Rocketboots had built a simple contact manager in Flex 1.5.) Although there wasn’t enough time finish the app during the training, I’ve been working on it over the past few days and am almost through. I’ll post here in the next few days.

For me, the consolidation of all the Flex 2.0 concepts, the introduction to the data and communication capabilities flex, and working on a Cairngorm app made the training very useful.