It may surprise you to know that the Pacific region has its fair share of web talent. Having just been surrounded by most of them for the past couple of days, I can attest to the fact. This year was my first WebDU, and I'm still tingling.

WebDU, the self proclaimed Rock Concert for Geeks, is held annually in Sydney, Australia. It is organised and run by a company called Daemon who did an incredible job this year of satisfying the plethora of talent that attended. Originally, WebDU was called MXDU and was of Adobe (then Macromedia) persuasion. Now it's all grown up, with Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! all along for the ride; albeit in the back seat.

In such company, you might imagine that a spark of the Silverlight vs Flash debate would have ignited (as many, I suspect, secretly hoped). However even after prodding, both sides remained jovial. Indeed Microsoft were happy to self depreciate for a laugh - doing more for their tarnished image in five minutes than both IE8 and Windows 7 put together.

What impressed me most about this year's conference, were the creative innovations designed to stimulate delegate interaction. These included:

• CodeWars: a speedy coding tournament held on the eve of the conference (run by sponsor RocketBoots);


• Trading Cards: a competition using weighted cards of the speakers, divvied out by them on request;


• Birds of a Feather: likeminded delegates led by a peer talking shop for a couple of hours;


• Q&A: an open audience question session at a panel of Adobe, Microsoft and Yahoo! representatives.

The content itself was laid out in five streams: UI/Team, two web streams, one on Flash/Flex and the final on Coldfusion. To some extent, I found myself meandering between rooms. On the whole however, the scheduling was satisfactory (webcasting next year perhaps?).

We were treated to two separate keynotes. Day one was all Adobe. They showcased the newly named Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst. The latter was a world premiere of its Windows edition. I noted with interest the new Flex Data Service feature in Flash Builder 4. This means we'll have remote object support from Flex to both PHP (based on Zend I'm told) and Coldfusion. I did query Steven Heintz from Adobe later on the possibility of .NET in Flash Builder, and while not shipping with version 4, he said it was on track for 4.1 (as a variant of BlazeDS).

Day two's keynote was a blending of Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft. Google had the stage but apart from a brief mentioning of geospacial ads, told us nothing new. Yahoo! surprised us with a brief overview of their current development offerings, including YQL, YUI and BOSS. They are doing intriguing things in the web space, and that was mostly all news to the tech saavy audience. Even Yahoo! conceeded that they need to promote their efforts more keenly. Microsoft finished the keynote with a charismatic local speaker, Michael Kordahi, who reminded us all that Microsoft are continuing to innovate development.

Of course, there were fantastic sessions from both local and international speakers. A few of the standouts for me were Michael Labriola on databinding (straight on the heels of 360), Andrew Muller on AIR (Sydney), Simon Reid on UX design (Sydney) and Mike Chambers on advanced AIR (Adobe).

If I had to sum up the themes of the conference, I would say they were User Experience design and Enterprise Flex development. Obviously, the RIA space is awash with talk of UX design and user-first principles. With our ever expanding palette in both the web and the desktop, these issues are gaining priority. The blurred line between developer and UI designer has dissolved into a gray mist. Many of us will be brushing up on our Illustrator and Fireworks prowess before long, as an immersive software experience will likely be the catalyst of our next project's success.

The second issue is even closer to my heart. Enterprise development in Flex and AIR certainly does exist, though resources are scarce. Once you've traversed the Adobe docs and got your head around the essentials, the pond seems to dry up. Twitter becomes your best friend, and you find yourself waiting for those critical blog posts by a handful of industry professionals from around the world.

Something of interest came up in the Flex "Birds of a Feather" discussion from a Java developer in the audience. He noted that software engineers have been dealing with all of the issues of large scale software development that we are still trying to get our heads around - concurrency, memory usage, ant builds, unit testing, extensibility, just to name a few. Many developers who concentrate on Flex and AIR, not to mention Silverlight and WPF, have unwittingly graduated from web to application development. It's time for us to step up and see how we can apply techniques from the enterprise world into our sphere, and I for one would like to see both Adobe and Microsoft throwing in their weight.

As conferences go, this one was exhausting, thought provoking, and absolutely entertaining. My only suggestion for improvement would be more diverse content. Perhaps some Silverlight, LCDS, JavaFx. What about an objective comparison of the strengths of these technologies? That would be a discussion that would benefit us all.

All up, WebDU 2009 was a fantastic conference, and it was just a stroll from the office. Thanks to the Daemon team for putting it on, and cheers to everyone who put up with me and my rants.

Read more from Justin J. Moses.