Austin FLEX User Meeting

So I haven't posted in this blog in half a century or so. It is time to dust off this URL and get back to complaining about everything I am working on at the moment. Sorta. Kinda.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting and joining the Austin FLEX user group. John, Corey, Kyle and Ross were all really nice fellas and had some great discussions, both technical and non-technical. Ross had a great presentation on the Event Model in FLEX/FLASH and went into some great detail about the capture phase and bubble phase and their differences and importances. I also realized there is a difference between "target" and "currentTarget", in regards to events, which is something I suppose I hadn't really thought about. Apparently "target" calls the event, while "currentTarget" handles the event. Atleast that was my understanding from the presentation. We also covered "stop propagation" and how that can be deceiving behind the scenes. We also realized that a "pause propagation" (if it existed) would only lead to nightmares, so we scrapped that thought. We also talked about event priority and how having a larger priority number sets the event as a higher priority for the EventManager.

If you're event's priority is 0 or 1, it has a lower priority to an event with a priority attribute of 1 or higher. So, an event with 1000 will take priority over an event with 1. We would assume the opposite but I notice FLEX does a few things a little different from the natural human thought process :)

Ross also covered the "useWeakReference" attribute and how the GarbageCollector uses it for memory handling and management. Something I have not pondered so much. Also, Ross pointed out something fairly important...Flex events do not bubble by default. I believe this was realized by Kyle who had an issue with a non-bubbling event in his app. But dont quote me on that.

Next up, Kyle gave a very impressive presentation on his application for streaming video for MLB.tv. We went over CDN server technology, RNTP, FMS 3.5, FMS4 for DVR capabilities, BOXY (?), Encoding formats (VP6 & H.264), Flash Media Live encoders and FLEX DEV NET video tutorials. All this while we drank some "FLEX" wine. Apparently HEB carries it and was quite fitting for the presentation.

Afterwards we headed over to the Gingerman pub (did I spell that right?) and had a few brews and a few non-technical discussions. Overall my first FLEX User group meeting was very good. Maybe next time I can demo my application I've worked on for 2-3 months now, which we will be launching next week! Cheers to all the Austin FLEX developers at the meeting, John, Corey, Russ, Kyle and myself. Thanks guys.