Day 1 Keynote: CF & Flex
Flex 2 is out!
CF 7.02 is out!
Flash Player 9 is out!
Tim Buntel is BACK!
Ben Forta presented the Keynote on the first day of the presentation, bright and early at 8:30am!
He told us that since CFMX 7 was released over 30 thousand servers have shipped.
Flex Builder 2 will sell for $499. The Flex 2 SDK is free (compiler & framework). The Flex Data Services Express edition will be free (limited to a single CPU and no clustering, but includes support for the open pipe between the server & client).
There will be price tiers for the full higher end version of Flex Data Services. This is a fantastic change from previous versions of Flex. The old pricing was cost prohibitive for almost everyone. Someone sitting next to me just told me his employer bought a license for Flex 1.5. They bought a 4 CPU license with 6 months of gold support and 1 year of maintenance for $30 thousand dollars!
Ben introduced us to Jason Delmore, the new Senior Product Manager, CF. In his previous job, Jason was the director of engineering for Deploy Solutions, an HR & Talent Management Software company. While there he had Ben and someone else come to talk to the management to convince them to keep CF and work with Java in a dual environment instead of trashing CF and going with pure Java. A while later, he was asked to come onboard.
Jason demonstrated briefly 2 new Scorpio features,
Ben and a few others brought on a blindfolded Tim Buntel who told us he was returning to Adobe as a Senior Product Marketing Manager who is working essentially on the marketing and business sides to encourage enterprises to adopt CF.
As a whole the keynote wasn't nearly as exciting as those at Max 05, however, the audience and goal of it was different. Less marketing, more talk to the choir. The demos were nice to see though brief and somewhat uninformative. The real news was the updates to CF and the new Flex capability. Seeing Tim Buntel animated and having fun on stage again was nice and being introduced to the much less animated Jason was helpful.
