Day 1 of 360Flex has come and gone. Here are some of the highlights from the sessions I was able to attend.

• *Adam Flater and Jordan Snyder demoed some of the Merapi framework to connect Flex and Java. Adam showed how some of the technology has changed since he first launched Merapi, showed how to start a sample application, and then showed a few short demos on his laptop. After that he turned it over to Jordan, who showed some of the work she's done with hardware and drove a Lego Mindstorm robot around the room using an AIR app on her laptop.
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• *Ryan Campbell gave a great presentation on Plexi Glass. Plexi Glass is a 3D implementation of the Open Flux project that Ryan and Ben Stucki contribute to. Ryan demoed some of the new layout containers and 3D cameras they've implemented. If you're excited about the new features coming in Flex 4 but don't want to wait, give Plexi Glass and Open Flux a shot.
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• *During the same time as Ryan, Laura Arugello gave a talk on Mat`e (rhymes with 'latte'), an open-source framework for Flex development. Mat`e is a slimmer framework solution than Cairngorm and seems to have been a big hit among the people who I know attended.
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• * In the afternoon I listened to Chris Scott give an introduction to the Swiz framework. Swiz seems to be the computer-scientists answer to the framework problem. It's bulkier than Mat`e, but not limited to Flex development.
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• * I rounded out the evening bouncing between Jonathan Branam's talk on the importance of digging deep into Adobe's source code and Jacob Wright's session on advanced Actionscript API's. Jonathan shared some of the secrets he's found while digging through the source code, especially on newer classes like the AdvancedDataGrid, and showed some of the common pitfalls people encounter when making bad assumptions about Adobe code. Jacob shared some really advanced ActionScript techniques, particularly surrounding custom meta-data and building Oracle-like queries for databases in Actionscript.

The slides for all of the 360 presentations along with the presentation audio will be available after the conference. We'll post a list of the sessions along with links to the recordings as soon as they go live.

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