A few minutes ago, I remembered that the list of sessions would be announced for Flex Maniacs today. If you’re not familiar, Flex Maniacs is another great new conference focused on Adobe Flex. Sponsored by Fig Leaf Software and Adobe, it will be taking place in Washington DC on June 25-26, 2007. If you can’t make it to 360 Flex because tickets sold out too fast, be sure to keep your budget open for Flex Maniacs. It looks to be just as exciting!

The list of sessions includes a plethora of Flex goodness including skinning, component development, Flex Data Services, using other server-side languages with Flex, Cairngorm, memory management, and too many other topics to list them all here. Many sessions will be led by real Adobe employees like Ted Patrick (evangelist extraordinaire). Others will have an industry expert like Chafic Kazoun at the helm. Oh yeah, and I’ll be speaking too.

The lecture I’ll be giving will focus on my open source TreeMap component for Flex 2. Here’s the official description:

Though the Flex 2 SDK ships with an impressive array of useful components, opportunities abound for the creation of more advanced visualizations that add new depth and interactivity to Rich Internet Applications. Treemaps, originally developed by Ben Shneiderman of the University of Maryland, offer an interesting way to display hierarchal data that goes beyond standard Tree components.

The Flex development community is growing quickly, and many developers want a look at the process and design considerations required for the creation of a complex component. Josh Tynjala shares his open source Flex TreeMap component with an in-depth study of its data handling methods, optimization considerations, and points for extensibility.

To be more specific, I plan to talk about using data descriptors with your components to allow custom or complex data structures, to show some of the methods I used to optimize the drawing code for the TreeMap, and a bit on the subject of using fields and functions to allow the user to customize your component without subclassing.

I’m pretty excited because this will be the first time I’ll be speaking at a conference. Thankfully, I have several months to prepare, and I plan to get it down to an art form by the time I’m facing a hundred ravenous Flex developers. All I ask of my audience is that you hold off on throwing rotten vegetables until after the Q&A.

One more thing. It looks like they need a couple more brave folks to do hands-on sessions at the conference. Go submit a topic if you think you’ve got a good one.