Neil Webb
Bio
Neil Webb is a senior Flex application developer from the beautiful city of Bath, England.
He has a passion for teaching and the ability to make complex topics simple with the aid of a little Photoshop, humour and the odd stretched analogy.
He started out writing tutorials for ActionScript.org, won a copy of Flash 7 and has never looked back (heady days indeed). He has since written tutorials for various publications and websites including Adobe Devnet, and regularly posts on his own blog at nwebb.co.uk.
Recently he has been pimping himself out on the Flex conference circuit and enjoys amassing all those free bags and stickers, but is still looking to match that high of winning Flash 7.
Neil has worked for clients as diverse as FIFA, VIP, Hutchinson Whampoa and Cambridge University. His current role requires security clearance and if he told you more about the project he'd probably have to kill you.
Session
Cairngorm For Beginners (Architectural Frameworks 101)
Cairngorm is an open source architectural framework for Flex, created by Adobe.
This talk is appropriate for you if (1) You've never heard of Cairngorm or don't know what an architectural framework is, but you plan to contract as a Flex developer at some point in your career (2) You've tried to learn Cairngorm but find the concepts too difficult (I have an analogy which should help) (3) You've read up on Cairngorm but haven't yet got to the stage where you're confident enough to architect your own applications around it (4) You develop projects as part of a team and realise the need for better organisation but are not sure where to turn next (5) You've got nothing better to do until your next session ;)
I explain about frameworks (architectural frameworks in particular) from the ground up and why you may want to consider using one. I then get in to the specifics of Cairngorm in which I go over a basic example, talk about both the good and bad points of the framework and how best to deal with some of the aspects which are less popular.