Innofest Web2.0 Workshop

I have been taking "Web2.0 & RIA" course at International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (or IIITB for short) for sometime now, with Ram and Praveen among others. Its been a quite wonderful experience for me to actually impress upon an audience what FLEX is all about.

Recently,they approached us to do a Web2.0 workshop for their techfest called Innofest07 (by the way, their website is made in Flex, quite a commendable work). So me and Ram went there this Friday to do the workshop whose theme was Web2.0, FLEX & Mashups.

Ram started off with the intro about what Web2.0 is and about the basics of Flex. Then it was my turn. I was a bit sceptical to begin with, as almost all the people who attended the workshop had never used FLEX or even heard about it. But we set sail... I did a live code mashup of a FLEX App pulling photos from Yahoo Photos! using their REST service.

To my delight, the audience not only enjoyed it, but also took part in a small code jam afterward, where they extended the application to include Yahoo Travel Search! It was amazing that they could actually build a Mashup using two web services (they probably hadn't heard about) and using a technology that they had never used, in a span of just 2 hours... really, FLEX rocks! And what's more the guys with the best app went home with a free FlexBuilder licence

I have uploaded the files from the workshop, you can see them at the links below.

1. Yahoo Photo Search using REST in XML format (what I did at the workshop)
2. Yahoo Photo Search using REST in JSON format ( JSON has caught my fancy these days)
3. The source (you can right click and do a view source on the above apps too)
4. Some extras - the CSS, the JSON parser library & assets (in the above link itself)

Some acknowledgements to be made here...

• Thanks to the IIITB guys for the great opportunity
• Thanks to Adobe Consulting for the Mac OSX theme
• Thanks the JSON community for the JSON-AS3 parser library