Last night I attended Ben Forta’s Flex 3 and AIR Pre-release tour in Raleigh, NC. While I don’t do any Flex/Air stuff at work I still wanted to check things out and I’m glad I did. I was really impressed with both technologies and may have to experiment a bit at home with them…

There was a huge turnout, several local Adobe user groups were there, and I’m guessing there were 60-70 people there at least. Ben spoke for about 3 hours (!) and covered quite a bit. A few things I wrote down:

• About 50% of the audience had tried Eclipse as an IDE
• The crowd was a mix of ColdFusion, Flex, Flash developers and some designers
• For some reason I thought Ben was a Mac person but he was using Vista
• Adobe is pushing more and more stuff open source – BlazeDS, Flex 3 SDK, etc!
• Ben mentioned Aptana had some support for Flex/Air (mxml)
• Flexbuilder for Linux was coming (he said there was a firm date but he wouldn’t tell us)
• Air client for Linux was a bit behind but would eventually be in sync with the Win/Mac releases…

Overall it was a great presentation and I hope we can get Ben back here again soon. Maybe to demo the new, free, open source, feature laden Eclipse based ColdFusion IDE (hopefully)!