The final leg of the On AIR European Tour took us through Prague, Munich and Milan here are my thoughts. On this stage of the tour we were joined by Adrian Ludwig from AIR Marketing, Andrew Shorten an Adobe Evangelist from London and again by Dion Almaer from Google.

After a bit of rest on the weekend in Prague we toured the event venue on Sunday complete with a tour of the Staropramen brewery where the event was to be hosted. The event Prague was packed with almost 300 developers. Dion's session focused on App Engine, Google's hosting of Ajax libraries and how to create cloud services. Obviously Ajax development is now more than possible with App Engine, but so is Flex and Flash development. There's a new project called the The GAE SWF Project:

"The GAE SWF Project is a resource of Flash and Flex-related knowledge specifically aimed at getting you up and running quickly with Google App Engine, a wonderful platform for building and deploying massively-scalable Flash and Flex applications."

If you're looking for more info on building on building with AIR and Google App Engine check out James Ward and Dick Wall's simple photo fixing app, QucikFix, they wrote. They've open sourced it on Google Code so go check it out.

The train ride from Prague to Munich was interesting. We were on an old train that was packed, to add to the excitement a woman with a little muzzled dog stole Kevin's seat! Is was neat to see some of the left overs from the communist regime.

The event in Munich was great too. We were set up in an old power plant or something on the river. I met some cool Ajax/Dojo developers doing cool stuff with BMW and I think they're working on an AIR that they're going to blog about quite soon. Hopefully they'll let me know;-)

Last but not least the land of great pasta and better wine, Italy. The train ride through the Alps from Munich to Milan was by far the most beautiful train I've taken. The jagged alps and hill side vineyards were amazing. I got to hang out with Kevin Hoyt and Adrian Ludwig, so in between breath taking views we brainstorm on some very cool hybrid Flash / Ajax components and apps. Glad to be picking this thread up again. Some of the most successful web apps have use these technologies together very effectively. Flickr, YouTube and Slideshare to name a few.

The Milan was quite interesting, I met a lot more than Italians there including Irish, Philipino and Finish. I was feeling the effects of 2 weeks on the road, but the presentation went and my Tabrio AIR/VOIP demo worked well enough to call Ryan's cell phone and get a beer delivered on stage. I had the chance to get a peak at new AIR and Flex based UI prototyping and design tool. It's really simple and basically let's quickly make "back of the napkin" type sketches of your user interface. It's called Basalmiq Mockups and will be released June 19th. Should a great to make quick mock ups of you RIA ideas, or even to pass over to clients to get their ideas and input in a concrete format.

I've now presented in 29 cities about Ajax and AIR. I hope I helped at least a few people, I know I learned a lot and met a lot of very interesting people. Until the next one;-) If there was another tour where should it be?

Read more from Andre Charland.