Adobe MAX 2007 : Day 1

Day 1 started off with egg and bacon biscuits, fruit and a whole lotta AIR.

The Keynote

A lot of focus on Adobe AIR (formerly Apollo). Most of the Adobe Flex and AIR demos made a point to show that they were powered by Coldfusion. Kevin Lynch demo’d Buzzword, a Flex/AIR word processor they just acquired. As they showed the application stack, he mentioned that it’s running on .NET “for now”. Maybe this means we’ll see a Coldfusion powered Buzzword in the future.

The Sessions

Building a Coldfusion Multilingual Application

Steve Drucker, CEO of Fig Leaf Sotware talked about how they built the Voice of America website using Coldfusion. Did I say site? I meant sites.

Voice of America runs 44 sites in 44 different languages. They maintain content translation via an in-house resource bundle management system. Now, years ago, I ran the internationalization team at GetThere. We needed to better manage the resource bundles for our new J2EE application and were talking with a company whose product could do most of what we wanted.

Problem was, they wanted $300,000 for it. So we built our own CF-based app in a few weeks to handle everything and used it to launch the French version of the site. So how does this relate?

Since our tax dollars fund VOA, Steve told us they’ll be releasing the source code to their Translation Management System.

I’ll post the link as soon as I can confirm everything’s posted.

Case Study: Seamless Online Account Opening for the Financial Industry Leveraging LiveCycleES and Flex

The lesson learned here is that when you have a company that provides multiple services, don’t make your customers fill out the same paper forms each time they want to sign up for a new service. Their case study involved investment companies and how using a common Flex interface talking to LiveCycleES for data management they were able to simplify this process.

Effective Website Redesign

This session covered the redesign of Adobe.com after Adobe bought Macromedia. Using the Coldfusion backend of Macromedia.com, Adobe updated the look and feel of Adobe.com, re-mappping the hundreds of thousands of existing pages from both companies into a cohesive site.

Next, I was going to take the session on Large-Scale CSS on Adobe.com, but after the Website Redesign session, I felt like I needed something more substantial. Not that it wouldn’t have been interesting, but my team had recently launched a new CSS-based version of our company’s site and I figured they’d cover a lot of what we’d just seen.

Case Study: ESRI Geospatial Application Using Adobe Flex

Now this, was some cool s`t. Live GPS data streaming onto maps. You can follow an entire fleet of vehicles or choose to focus on a single car. One of the coolest applications was the San Francisco Police Departments’ officer tracking system. Find a squad car, click on it and up comes a secondary interface showing the officer’s stats and live, streaming video from his dashboard camera.

The presenter also showed how in 24 hours, they built a pretty complex mapping system to allow city managers to dynamically plot roadblocks and show commuters how to get from point A to point B after a bridge collapsed in Minnesota.

This was the end of the sessions, so we were off to dinner and later the Birds of a Feather sessions.