Mate

A couple of weeks ago, Adobe launched an AIR application called Adobe Enterprise Cafe:

The Adobe Enterprise Café AIR app helps you stay in touch with Adobe teams and the enterprise community, receive news, find information, and aggregate content related to the entire enterprise community knowledge base. This is great place for all partners to receive timely news and stayed informed.

I am happy to say that we developed the news section of the application in Flex using the Mate Framework, and its backend, which is powered by Mango Blog. 

MAX is less than a week away. There will be tons to do and see, so we hope to see you there.

It will be an honor to present Mate along side other framework creators and experts and Christophe Coenraets. The session is called "Using Flex Frameworks to Build Data-Driven Applications", where the same application will be built using four different frameworks. This session will be given Tuesday (1PM) and Wednesday (1:30PM), but it is almost sold out.

I will also present about Mango Blog at the ColdFusion unconference (Tuesday 4:30PM). It will be an overview, but I am planning to have a longer Q&A section for more advanced questions or any other question people may have.

Finally, Jeremy will be presenting at Mini-MAX (right after MAX) about skinning in Flex.

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.

If you don't know, there will be a Flex Camp in Miami, in only two weeks. These one-day events are a great way to get a taste of Flex and to have the opportunity of attending a "mini" conference, close to where you live. So if you are in Florida, don't miss it!

I'll be giving a presentation about Mate there. As part of a series of interviews for the event, Brian and I had a little chat where we discuss Mate and Mango blog.

I hope to see you in Miami!

Two of us here at AsFusion just got accepted to speak at 360|Flex Indy! Laura will be presenting a deep dive into Mate, and I will have a hands-on programmatic skinning session. The show will be going down May 18-20, 2009.  You can check out the other great 49 speakers on the schedule at: http://360conferences.com/360flex/downloads/schedule.pdf It's looking like it's gonna be another great 360|Flex conference, especially with yours truly speaking.  Tickets are cheaper on a first come, first serve basis! So buy your tickets asap at http://360flex.eventbrite.com to get the best possible price. See you there and you better go to our sessions :)

Mate will be at MAX this year thanks to the Unconference event.

I will give a presentation tomorrow at 5:30pm (Monday November 17th).

Applying Dependency Injection to your Flex application using Mate Framework

This presentation will focus on how to solve some common problems encountered when working on views. We'll discuss what a view needs, and how we can use dependency injection and Mate framework to fulfil those needs in an unobtrusive way. We'll also discuss the advantage or disadvantage of alternative approaches and how Mate helps you deal with difficult-to-solve problems.

We will have some time at the end, so bring your Mate questions

There will also be other two presentations that will touch on Mate:

Comparing Flex Frameworks by Yakov Fain

Tag Based Frameworks by Harry Garland

I hope to see you there!

360Flex has started and we will be there. We arrived to San Jose and now we are waiting for our hotel room in the lobby. Laura is adding the finishing touches to her session about Mate for tomorrow. I need to help her with the example that she will use at the session.

She is planning to show how you can create an application with Mate and how all the parts are assembled together. For this, we created a sample app that allows you to browse movies and make movie recommendations. To skin it and make it look nicer, we are using Degrafa.

If you want to use a library in your Flex project, distributed as a SWC file, you should not look at the SWC file size as any indication of how much your compiled application will increase in size. If you want to know how much size overhead the library imposes, look at the compiled release version of your app (Click on Export Release Build button). Even then, it will depend on how much of the library you are using.

I feel like a star. I was interviewed by John and Jeff of The Flex Show podcast about Mate Flex Framework. They have a very interesting interviewing style, where they ask you a question and then you go for like... 10 minutes, then they ask you another question, and so on. It's good because you don't get interrupted, which would be bad if you are trying to have a coherent thought. Not so good if you don't have much to say. Thankfully, I was able to manage it, I think :)

It is difficult to be able to give an overview of the framework by just telling about it, but if you are interested in trying Mate, it is a good high level overview.

You can listen to the podcast directly from their site, subscribe in iTunes or similar to their RSS or download the MP3 file directly.

A new Flex framework has been born. Actually, it is not really new, because we've been developing and using this framework for a long time, but it is now available to everybody.

"Mate" (pronounced "mah-teh" like latte) is a tag-based Flex framework that uses implicit invocation to route events to handlers using an "EventMap". Those handlers are a list of actions that is executed when the event is dispatched.

The ColdFusion Weekly Podcast, hosted by Matt Woodward, has a new episode. The topic this time is Flex Frameworks, and I am on it! I talk about the soon-to-be-released Mate framework and my presentation at cf.Objective(), which is rapidly approaching.