Sunday, April 5, 2009

Plex Updates

Wow! What a week.

I, like many of you spent 3 hours on the recent CA Plex/2E webcast marketed as 'Blitz'. For me it was a little more inconvenient as it was from 2am until gone 5am in the morning. To top it off it was a school night as well. Suffice to say, Friday night after a hard days work, I was exhausted.

The result though was worth every last minute of sleep deprivation. I felt energised by what these guys had achieved.

To kick off we had an overview from Bill Hunt with a plug for the 4th Annual Conference in Ft Lauderdale, Florida, USA. Then the action got going.

We were treated to an update for the ADC Austin/Websydian Plex Web Client. Delivered by John Rhodes. This is a plex client delivered out of the box once you have the patterns and web environment setup which is receiving plaudits from around the community.

Then Gary McGeorge from Desynit in old blighty demonstrated their customer solution for a trading desk. The highlights for me were the sheer speed of the screen refreshes, the look of the application using the codejock controls with their YouEye pattern. The ability to split the application over 4 dealer screens and have configurable screen layouts blew me away and was a topic of discussion with one of my Plex introduced friends here in NZ the next day. Well done lads.

I wasn't so chuffed with the screaming baby in the background from one of the attendees of the conference who clearly forgot to mute their phone line. I would suggest in future that each presentation has a slide saying 'Mute that damn line now punk. Do you feel lucky!!!'

This was followed by Soren from Websydian showing us what TransactXML was capable of. I had never seen this before but now I understand what it delivers and with the import facility, how easy it is to implement, I will definitely take a much closer look.

Then we had Marty (MKS) and Chistoph (CM First this is the English link) demonstrate the new features in their respective toolsets that support Plex integration and best practice modelling concepts. I would certainly like to know how configurable the flow that was demonstrated actually is, but it looked like a pretty good start to me.

Finally Bill wrapped up with a sell for the upcoming conference. With the guaranteed weather and content similar to what we saw on Thursday it will be a great event by the looks of it, and I thought Cincinnati was good.

My only disappointment is that the guys at ‘all about’ didn't have a slot. What I have seen of their Plex-XML solution is mind-boggling and the presentation layer is amazing. This is a great solution and I am interested in seeing how this develops. They have recently updated their website to include integration with a rich web editor. Amazing stuff.

Until then.

Thanks for reading.
Lee.