Day 1 is done and over, and what a day it was. From the keynote to the end-of-day sessions, it was a whirlwind day packed with information. Here's the quick recap on the sessions I attended and the things we discussed.

Morning Session: "Apocalypse Soon - component frameworks" by Michael Labriola. Immediately following the keynote I attended Michael Labriola's talk on "deriving the Flex component architecture." He talked about why things are the way they are in Flex, how the component architecture works from a very low level, and why its important to understand it. This was more than just the standard "component lifecycle" talk I've heard many times (and given a few myself) and was a great introduction to the day. I'd heartily recommend this talk to anyone new to Flex or who needs a (deep) refresher on the basics. 360|Flex is recording all of the sessions and should have them online soon, so watch for this one.

Afternoon Session 1: "Obey the Rules" on client-side rules-engines by Drew McLean and RJ Owen (me.) During the first afternoon slot I co-presented a talk on building client-side rules-engines in Flex with my co-worker Drew McLean. Our talk focused on discussing the theory behind rules engines along with different types of engines, the algorithms for processing rules and maintaining state, and some real-world examples. We gave everyone at the conference a compiled version of a simple XML-driven rules application for them to play with and discussed how we built it along with a few client projects. Along the way we talked about building dynamic rules parsing engines with Hamcrest, dynamic visual displays through lots of XML parsing and reflection code, and a dynamic data model. I feel we didn't hit Hamcrest as deep as some of the attendees would have liked and will try to focus on this a bit more in future iterations of this topic.

Afternoon Session 2: Jesse Warden on Gaia and Robot Legs. Gaia is a simple framework built for Flash that focuses on the visual tier and scaffolding the presentation layer. Robot Legs is a simple framework for Flash that focuses on application architecture and control code (it's an MVCS framework). Together they play quite nicely. Jesse gave a cohesive if-at-times-chaotic presentation of the two frameworks and the best ways to make them play together. I was really excited to hear Jesse speak, as he's been one of my Flash heroes for a while. He did a great job though there was quite a lot to learn and I feel like we covered a lot of ground very quickly.

Afternoon Session 3: Greenthreading with Flex by Huyen Tue Dao. Huen is one of the great new minds in the Flex community I've seen in the last year. Her work in the area of Greenthreading brings a lot of new insights into how to best optimize Flex applications, and she's a great presenter to boot. This talk is definitely one to check out if you spend any significant amount of time writing code that processes large amounts of data. Huen also seemed to have an easy time anticipating the questions asked by the crowd and covered every topic anyone brought up in her slides.

I heard good things on all the talks presented today but unfortunately couldn't get to all of them. I'm excited to see what tomorrow brings.

One update I have since this morning: there is no keynote tomorrow morning. It is instead a panel, so I'll probably wait to cover it until tomorrow night's recap.

Read more from RJ Owen.