This evening I attended a presentation on Flex 2.0 given by James Ward at the KCJUG. In all honesty, the only reason I went tonight was because I am presenting Stripes in October and I wanted to meet some folks and get an idea of how they do their presentations. However, by the end of the presentation I was very happy I went. And no, it's not just because I won a book in a raffle.

I've been keeping an eye on Flex from a distance. I tinkered with it for an evening right around the time 2.0 was released and all the "it's free" buzz hit. I suppose I was probably more impressed with how James presented flex to a bunch of Java developers more so than Flex itself.

James introduces himself as a Flex Evangelist so I was expecting something very preachy. Something along the lines of "Flex is the next biggest and baddest thing. It wipes the floor with everything else." But it wasn't like that. James ran through a simple example using some pre-made components to show us the simplicity. Well, obviously when everything is already done, it seems pretty simple. But we'll let that slide for now since it actually worked.

What I would have liked to see during the presentation was more detailed integration with the server. Most of what we saw was simple client side demo stuff. He did one example where he grabbed some XML from a JSP. I would have liked to have seem a more detail with some Flash remoting libraries like AMF as well as some of the open source Data Source libraries.

I'm going to read my new book and play around with it. It does interest me and I do think it has merit. But it's too early for me to have a strong opinion of it one way or another. Hey, tinkering is a big step since I've never been a big fan of Flash, right?