360Flex - A conference for RIA developers

I'm going to be attending the 360Flex conference March 5-7 this year in San Jose, and since registration just opened, I wanted to let people know about it. I tend to be a big fan of conferences that are more developer focused because I think you learn a lot more and you get to talk to the people that are "in the trenches" and building the applications that we all use. This is exactly that kind of conference and while its focus is on Flex, I would suggest anyone looking at Rich Internet Applications register for it.

The conference is both being held at and sponsored by eBay, which is an indication of how deeply Flex has gotten into the business side of Rich Internet Applications. I'm hoping to find out more about what eBay is doing with Flex, but the little bits I've been able to glean indicate that it's a significant investment. And this seems to be the story across a wide range of industries. Midnight Coders is also a sponsor and they provide Flex Data Services functionality across a wide range of platforms including .NET and PHP. Combine that with the murderer's row of speakers (the list includes some of the best Flex minds in the business) and it means you're going to see examples of Flex being used to build great experiences for Fortune 500 companies, web startups and everything in between.

It has been a great year for Rich Internet Applications. Flex was released a few months ago and has seen a surprisingly large number of applications built for the platform. WPF and WPF/E have both been made available on the Microsoft side which shows how important experience has become. Apollo is coming down the pipeline which will enable a robust desktop RIA solution (much like WPF). Next year should be even better, and this conference is going to be a great way to see what people are doing and how RIAs are changing landscapes all over the spectrum.

Here are the details:

360Flex Conference is scheduled for March 5-7, 2007 at eBay in San Jose, CA. Come join us for this exclusive event and learn Flex from every angle. We are bringing together the best developers for Flex for this event both from within the development community but also within Adobe.

The conference costs $100, special thanks to our corporate sponsors.
360Flex will have 4 tracks as follows:

• Flex 101 - Learn Flex A-Z
• Application - Real-world Flex applications ( Browser & Apollo )
• Integration - Connect Flex to any server (CF,PHP,.NET,JAVA,FDS)
• Components - Create custom Flex components