Laura starts by discussing some of the exchanges with users in the past year since Mate's release. Specifically, she says they often asked how Mate would scale since most of the examples were of small applications. This presentation will cover how Mate can work in large and complex applications.

Laura shows a sample application that they built for this presentation. The application was something like a private intranet with contacts that can be viewed and managed, depending on your permissions. The initial code she shows uses no framework and each view contains business logic and remote object calls. She discusses how this is not maintainable and not reusable. This, she says, is the problem that every application framework tries to solve.

Jeff Tapper discusses bad code, worst practices and why developers code badly. Bad code is code that doesn't fit the needs of the project taking into consideration efficiency, maintainability and time to develop. Usually this is due to a lack of time, lack of knowledge or a lack of caring. At some point, we all right bad code...sometimes knowingly.

Tom starts by announcing the alpha release of an open source data visualization framework called Axiis (code available at http://code.google.com/p/axiis/) licensed under MIT. This session will be about using this framework. The impetus behind this framework was what they felt was the limitations of the existing Flex charting components. Axiis is more than a set of charting components though. Axiis about describing repetitive visual and information patterns.

Andy starts with an overview of LCDS and BlazeDS offerings. BlazeDS allows you to access your java objects on the server. BlazeDS is not a true server but instead a bunch of servlets and filters that you include. Blaze has no data management and no PDF generation.

FlexServerLib is an open-source set of projects designed to simplify java integration in flex applications. Andy mentions that many of the features in FlexServerLib are available in ColdFusion and specifically are coming in ColdFusion 9. FlexServerLib is made up of a MailAdapter, an EJB Adapter and dpHibernate. There is also a Spring JMS Adapter but Andy says to ignore it because the SpringSource solution is better.The mail adapter has a messaging based adapter with bi-directional send and receive as well as a remoting based solution. The EJB Adapter allows you to invoke EJBs via remoteobject.

Two new projects and and six updates this week. With cf.Objective() just ending, there were some big announcements including the new version of Model-Glue, a new payment gateway component by Brian Ghidinelli (cfPayment) and some changes to CFGroovy. Sorry I missed the conference. I am however at 360Flex and really enjoying it. Plus, as a side benefit, the conference made me miss the complete failure that was last night's Celtics game.