Something terrible has happened. I've just returned from the RIAdventure Conference. Yes, I've said it. This is the only conference I've ever been to where it felt tragic that it was over. I don't think I'll be able to convey how awesome this conference really was, so I'll just hit the high points.

The Concept

Doug McCune

RIAdventure is a combination cruise and conference. While it sounds kind of crazy–combining something as serious as a conference with something as carefree as a Caribbean cruise–it actually works out pretty well.

I've been going to developer conferences for years now, and for me the most valuable part of any conference is the networking. The sessions at RIAdventure were amazing and inspirational, but the after hours socializing was where the ideas were distilled out of those presentations, where you could dig deeper with the presenters and discover how other attendees were inspired in their own work. Since this was one of the first RIAdventures, this was especially true at this conference. Many of the attendees were incredibly talented and groundbreaking developers in their own right, so often conversation with them was like getting an unofficial presentation in its own right.

The presentations themselves were also different than the usual conference fare. They were more about big ideas, rather than technical implementation details. For instance, instead of "how to do data visualization in Flex," Doug McCune's presentation was about what data visualization is all about and what developers need to be doing to prepare themselves to make sense of the massive data sets that are now being collected and made available.

If there was any theme that dominated the conference, it was that mobile devices and applications have finally come into their own, and that we as developers need to be ready for that.

The Venue

Norwegian Spirit

The Norwegian Spirit is an impressive boat. It's amazingly comfortable, with surprisingly spacious cabins, and features a variety of restaurants. In some of those restaurants, the food was included in the price of the cruise, and in others you pay a small additional fee for specialty food. Both my husband and I were attending the conference, but the impression I got was that during the two days that were devoted to the conference the families and friends who were along for the ride had no trouble finding things to fill their time in the bars, restaurants, pools, spa, theater, etc.

The conference room we had was similar to a corporate boardroom and featured a wide screen television that served nicely instead of a projector screen. It also featured a large speaker that treated us to regular updates on shipboard activities, so the first day's sessions ran a bit behind. Probably the most universal complaint was lack of affordable internet access on the boat. I think that this is something the cruise industry needs to solve if they want to attract more developer conferences. One thing that we found was that some of the ports did have WiFi hot spots and internet cafes that offered access at a reasonable price, so it was possible to stay somewhat connected if you really wanted to.

The Sessions

Ryan Stewart kicked off the first day with an overview of some of the things Adobe has in the works. I'm not going to go into the full list here, but the one I found most interesting personally is that AIR will, at long last, allow developers to hook into native features, such as DLL's. Some other things they have in the works are Shibuya, a payment service for AIR apps that he described as being similar to having an API to something like the iTunes store, and support for multi-touch in Flash.

Faisal Abid

He was followed by Faisal Abid, who presented on creating Andriod applications that hook into a ColdFusion back end. He gave us an overview of what the development process is like on both the front and the back end, and also gave us a sneak peek at the upcoming andspot.com social marketplace for Android applications. Faisal was the youngest attendee, never mind presenter, at 19. I think we'll be hearing more from him in the years to come.

Adobe engineer Greg Burch spoke about the new FAI packager (sorry, I didn't get a spell out in my notes). This is the new technology that everyone was so excited about at MAX that allows developers to package Flash applications for iPhone. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on this one.

Sam Rivello talked about how Actionscript programming is like the definition of life. In addition to talking about the philosophical parallels between the two, he showed a life simulation application that demonstrated the concepts.

Doug McCune rounded out the first day's sessions by talking about the full spectrum of data visualization over time, from the earliest scratches of cavemen on rocks to the future of where he thinks data visualization is going. The important takeaway I got from this presentation is that, no matter what your focus is in building RIA applications, you need to start developing some domain knowledge. It's not enough just to be a developer anymore–in order to be ready for the future, you need to be able to synthesize what you know about development with knowledge about what you're developing for.

The next four days were not conference days, so I'll come back to them in a minute.

John Wilker kicked off the second day by talking about the future of RIAdventure cruise. I think that the organizers would like to see it be larger, and (obviously) I think it's worth spreading the word about. So I'd like to ask a favor of everyone who thinks they might like to go on this cruise in the future. Please click the green "retweet" button at the top of this article and share it with your followers.

Greg Burch once again wowed the crowd by showing a preview of the new Flex Mobile Framework, code named Slider.

Sam Rivello was supposed to speak on day 2 as well, but he was slightly injured in a balcony railing/rock pool incident, so attendee Paul Taylor demonstrated a tool he had created to allow his designers to create cool particle emitter effects for eLearning games using the Tweensy tweening library.

Next, Nate Beck previewed the upcoming PushButton game engine. This offers a lot of mix and match capability for everything from state management to handling blitting automatically. Thanks, Nate, for adding yet another task to my to-do list.

The Extracurricular Activities

Mayan Ruins in Costa Maya

Since the cruise was seven days and the conference was only two days, we did spend a lot of time where we weren't in session. During the day, we were in port, so most of us dispersed to take advantage of the many excursions available on shore. This included everything from ziplining through the rainforest to scuba diving.

So most of the networking time was in the evening. I think it came as a surprise to all of us that "the place to be" for the RIA Adventure attendees was the nightly Karaoke event. It turns out that Sam Rivello is quite a ham, and Joshua Cyr, one of the conference co-organizers, has a great voice.

Cost/Value

I thought the conference was excellent value for money. The ticket price for a typical 2-day conference usually costs at least twice as much as the RIAdventure ticket, and the RIAdventure ticket included a ticket to 360Flex. The cabin price for the 7 days was comparable to what we usually pay for 4-5 days at a conference hotel. So, before you look at anything else, it's a good value. Then, if you add in that it also included stops in three countries, it becomes an amazing value, because you essentially get a "free" vacation for what you'd normally spend just going to a conference.

Would I do it again? You betcha. I hope I see you there.

Update: The presentations were recorded, and most of them have now been posted.

Read more from Amy Blankenship.