Compound Thinking

Learn Flex, TurboGears2 and WSGI

Bruce Eckel is planning to host a Flex-TurboGears jam in February, and I’m planning to be there.

I think this is going to be a really fun and useful event. For one thing, this will be the worlds first TurboGears2 learning event, and will be a great opportunity to learn all about the great stuff in TurboGears 2. Beyond that, it’s a jam session, so it’s self-paced, friendly to people of all experience levels, but you’ll also have direct access to experts in TurboGears and Flex so you get to jam with some of the best.

And of course because it’s a jam, you will be able to spend your time actually working on code you’ll learn by doing.

Thanks to Adobe, you will also get a free Flex Builder license, and I hear there is some great snow, so there will probably some awesome skiing.

These conferences are a great way to learn new stuff. And things are getting better for TurboGears/Flex integration all the time with the PyAMF project providing a full binary object interface between TurboGears and Flex which provides significant performance increases.

Flex isn’t the only way to write Rich Internet Applications, and I’ve certainly focused more on Ext.JS and other pure HTML/Javascript options at work. But you can’t beat Flex for power and simplicity, and when you couple that with a next-gen server framework like TurboGears you can get an amazing rapid application development platform.

And with Adobe’s ever increasing commitment to opening up the Flex SDK and making sure that Linux is a first class platform for Flash/Flex it seems ever more attractive to me, which is why I’m so interested in this jam myself.