Yesterday I presented Flex at my first BEA Dev2Dev Tech Day at Royal Orchid hotel, Bangalore.

The Dev2Dev TechDays are half day developer focused seminars that provide a guide for building enterprise mashups. Presented by technical experts from throughout BEA – these events will provide you with the latest technologies for creating a Mashup.

The BEA presenter Mr. Raju Suravarjjala, started the day by talking about Mashups, portals, microformats, and he gave an overview of the various technologies that are being used to build mashups. He then demoed building a mashup using BEA WebLogic Platform. You can actually try out building mashups with BEA products yourself - they have a online Weblogic Portal 10 Playground at their BEA Web 2.0 technology lab (http://wlp.bea.com/) - you can actually build your own mashups using this app with the various portlets available on the site. (you will need to register to use it)

My session was after Mr. Raju’s session, and I introduced Flex to the community (there were 268 registrants present - quite a number!) I started by demoing FlexBook and YourMinis, both of which were very well received.

Then came the hard part, I did some real live coding in-front of the entire crowd. It was a mashup built using Flex, Amazon eCommerce Service, Yahoo Weather APIs and some java coding. The best part is that I had the FlexBuilder installed as a plugin inside of BEA Weblogic Platform Workshop. Within 15 mins, I was able to create the Flex app, convert it into a portlet and embed it into a portal - running on BEA Weblogic Portal.

I was actually very amazed with the ease with which the BEA Workshop allowed me to convert the Flex app into a portlet - really developer friendly.

I would suggest everyone interested in building mashups and portals to come to following Dev2Dev events. (see this link for more details on where we are having it in India - BEA Dev2Dev Tech Days in India)