I was at MAX Conference in Milan last week and I had the opportunity to attend a lot of interesting sessions and labs. As a RIA Engineer I attended only purely technical sessions, for reports about the creative ones you can read Kira's last blog post.

One of the first sessions was "Advanced PaperVision 3D". I had no experience with flex and 3D apart from some screencast on the web, I wanted to know something more about architecture, performance and limits. Carlos Ulloa presented two projects currently in progress in which Papervision was involved and described the problems they were facing during development; moreover he explained various parts of the framework such as lights, cameras, materials, shadows and physics (with box2d).
On his blog you can find some videos http://blog.carlosulloa.com/, for more information about Papervision: http://blog.papervision3d.org/.

I also attended a pair of sessions about Flex 4/Flex Builder 4 news and I discovered a lot of exciting new features. Of course a part of the session was dedicated to Flash Catalyst and the new workflow of flex skinning and styling. They showed us some examples of FXG, the new XML-based graphics interchange format, a bridge between designers and developers: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/FXG+1.0+Specification
An important change has been made to the structure of user interface components in Gumbo: the component layout is completely separated from its business logic; if you want to see something similar in Flex 3 you can use OpenFlux: http://code.google.com/p/openflux/
Another interesting improvement is the so called 2 way binding inline: now using the syntax of "@{expr}" you obtain something that in flex 3 you would obtain with a little more work. A small example can be found here: http://www.johncblandii.com/2008/06/flex-3-twoway-form-databinding.html.

Even the flex compiler got some attention from the developers: a lot of commits were targeted to compile speed optimizations; in some big applications you can get a speed boost of 2x.

If you want to follow closer the flex 4 development you can download the latest build here: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4.

Flex builder 4 has a lot of big and small changes aimed to make the developer's life easier; among them there is a new "Data/Services" view that helps to speed up connection to remote services, a new package view with library class exploring (so that you can explore the content of imported swc), an event handlers automatic stub generator, and last but not least the return of the network monitor (disappeared since flex builder 1). Probably I'm forgetting something, I'll make a tour of the Gumbo preview that Adobe distributed during MAX to check.

I participated at a lab with François le Droff about Flex and Maven; during this Lab he introduced a new project from Adobe Consulting: Fna.
From the project home page (http://code.google.com/p/fna/):
"Fna is a set of samples, mavenized flex open source contributions (flex-contrib-spring and event-source, a flexunit extension for testing cairngorm event dispatching) and maven archetypes that uses open source tools/frameworks built on the Java and Flex platform to help you develop RIA applications quickly and efficiently.."

This MAX Europe was a really nice experience just like the last year in Barcelona: interesting sessions, a lot of news and a lot of nice people; I think that here in Italy we will see a great increase in Flex and AIR usage next year.