Sudha Hariharan

Its been raining events in Bangalore. This time it was the Adobe RIA Architects summit held at Chancellory Pavilion yesterday. The name sounded pretty heavy and professional and I had my apprehensions on whether I would understand what was being talked about.
The event was great and I enjoyed every bit of it. It began with a keynote by David Wadhwani followed by talks by Ben Forta and James Ward. Every one of the speakers were very enthusaistic about the technology and the audience were awestruck with the wonderful examples being shown.
Ben Forta’s talk was one of the most intresting talks in the whole session. He introduced flex and Air with amazing ease. He displayed his uncanny ability to write code in about a few minutes and grabbed the audience’s attention. Lots of questions were raised most of them dealing with security and porting flex to different servers. I had a question too but wasnt able to ask him (Too many questions and too little time). My question was: Coldfusion has been for years now and Flex is around 2 years old. However flex has found a great adoption in India and Coldfusion comparitvely less (I do know the technologies have wide disparites, my focus is on Adobe’s products persepective). What plans does Adobe have to encourage Coldfusion in India?
The next session was by James ward, and as expected it focused on the technical aspects of Flex. He breifly took us through some of the best practices for Actionscript and I found the session very useful. Many questions that I had in mind were cleared. Some of the questions that the audience asked were very intresting. The questions thrown at James concentrated mainly on the performance and security of the Flash player. There were a series of questions on IFrames and rendering HTML content in Flex. (I still havent grasped much work arounds in that area).
Overall the session was very informative. It mainly focused on showcasing the capabilities of Flex and AIR to people looking forward to adopting the platform. The turn out at the event was pretty good. Probably, Adobe may think of holding many more such events in India (including MAX ) in the future.
I wonder why the event was called “Architects” summit with only one session on the architecture persepective in Flex. “RIA Summit” would have sounded good enough.