Flash The Ripper

This was amazing. RAFPUG, or Russian Adobe Flash Platform User Group second meeting has been the best event to start this Flash year with. It took place in Moscow, January 15 2008. More beautiful, two evangelists from Adobe, Andrew Shorten and Enrique Duvos, were talking to the Russian Flash Community there. Moscow was the very first city in the Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR Pre-Release Tour.

They both were so charming and well-prepared. Despite the fact that Andrew’s Macbook has gone before the presentation (maybe due to some oocasion in the local electrical circuit, but I don’t know the exact cause), he made his speech very well and kept the delicious sense of humor through his whole presentation. Andrew demonstrated almost everything regarding Flex and creating Flex applications, he even featured the creation of component in Flash CS3 and then embed it into working Flex application. Enrique covered almost everything regarding Adobe’s Open Source initiatives, including just open-sourced Adobe BlazeDS solution for pushing data between the Flash Player and server with high performance. A lot of respect comes to Adobe and its really good evangelists.

Later, local speakers made good part too. Constantin Kovalev presented the short history of RIA and its current state. Ivan Dembitsky summarized the importance of Adobe’s move toward the Russian community and its efforts in docs localization. Artemy Malkov from the Flexis company (they made this whole event possible) told about the brand new education program for the schools, where Flash used as platform.

There was 87 flash developers total at the meeting. This was the very important event for many of them, and so important for me: I met more than a 20 famous Russian Flash persons there. We knew each other for nearly 5 years through the web, but we never met offline before. Now it happened. I saw it: everyone at the RAFPUG was completely happy!

Here’s the official report from the RAFPUG-2 in Russian, and its Google translation in English.