Waldo Smeets .com

This weekend I finished preparing my MAX 2005 presentation ‘Integrating Rich Flash Content into Flex Applications’. I’m very much looking forward to the conference and this session in particular; it is a topic that I discuss frequently when I’m out in the field meeting customers.

The Flex feedback I am getting is often very positive, especially when meeting the targeted users of the technology: Java and .NET developers. However, I also meet many people – for example Flash designers and developers, or marketing people – that have concerns about whether Flex really is a good fit for them.

Why?

Those people want to know how Flex will impact the work Flash users do at their creative department, whether you still can build those expressive applications that ‘do not look like Flex’, whether their Java developers now suddenly are also controlling the design, how to best have Flash and Flex users work together, what to do with which technology, how to re-use components in both Flash and Flex and so on.

Very often this concern is driven by their assumption that Flex and Flash are alternatives for each other, whilst they are not!

My goal is to go into this topic a bit more during my session. I want to introduce the audience to the concepts of integrating Flash and Flex content. Do you really have to create separate Flash content and if so, how do you do it? If not, what are the alternatives?

I don’t plan to give only a technical presentation, there are more sessions dedicated to component development, the skinning framework and so on. Additionally, I try to focus on concepts and best practices from the field. I want to go through several Rich Internet Applications and discuss with the audience what can be done in Flash and what in Flex. I want to share what I have learned from customers that had to make these decisions last year. And yes, I will show how to create a SWF or SWC module (I am especially not calling it a component, to avoid confusion).

Just to ensure; this session is not only targetted to Flash developers. I actually hope to have a good mix of Flash and Flex developers out there, as there are things to learn for both groups!

I would love to receive your feedback on this topic, share your experiences in the comments section!