Yesterday, my colleague and I received notifications from MAX 2009 (the main Adobe annual conference) organizers that started with words “We regret to inform you hellip;we were forced to make difficult decisions, which topics would be of most interest to our attendees rdquo;.

The following three out of five submitted proposals were rejected:

1. Flex Design Patterns that Make Sense

2. Occasionally-Connected applications with AIR and BlazeDS

3. Partitioning Flex Enterprise Applications

At this time, we haven “t received the responses for two more submissions:

1. Starting new Enterprise Flex Project

2. Improving Performance in Flex applications

None of these presentations is about marketecture ndash; just heavy duty technical stuff from people who are actually using Flex in the real-world projects.

Of course, MAX organizers had to make difficult decisions. Of course, they wanted to ensure that engineers from Adobe could share with the Flex crowd the latest solutions and techniques. I don “t have a quarrel with that. People go MAX to get access to Flex team members. I understand and accept it. These guys deserve to have their show. But I “m not going to submit proposals to MAX anymore. The chances are slim that they will be accepted anyway. Why bother? There are plenty of other technical events where I can present.

Apparently MAX organizers don “t think that people who paid thousands of dollars to attend this interesting event need to spend much time hearing some advanced stuff from practitioners unless the latter purchase some sponsorship package that grants freedom of speech. Expect to see 100-level talks like “How to use Flex Builder debugger rdquo; or “FlexUnit Crash Course rdquo;.

I want to make myself clear ndash; I “m not complaining. Adobe can run their shows the way they want. It was my fault – I made the wrong assumptions expecting to see a selection process similar to JavaOne, the main event for Java developers, where plenty of non-Sun employees get to present based just on the technical merits of their submitted papers.

No biggies. Adobe will put together a nice show, and I ‘ll be glad to watch selected presentations online, when available.

What “s left? It “s elementary, Watson! We “ll keep running our small-scale seminars and symposiums for those who want to learn from our experience and share theirs.

Having said that, here “s the three upcoming events that we “ve scheduled:

1. Second Annual Enterprise Flex Symposium, August 7, New York City: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/355645746 . We haven “t published session descriptions yet, but expect to see most of the rejected by MAX presentations and more. If you “d like to present at this technical no-fluff event, please send me an email at yfain at faratasystems.com

2. Advanced Flex 2-day workshop in Toronto, Canada is scheduled for July 23 mdash;24. Details at http://www.eventbrite.com/event/353452185

3. Advanced Flex 2-day workshop in London, UK is scheduled for September 24 mdash;25: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/355598605.

Besides these events, I “ll make a presentation on occasionally connected AIR applications at AJAXWorld in New York City on June 22 http://ajaxworld.com/event/session/469 , and on design patterns that make sense at CFUnited in Virginia on August 14: http://cfunited.com/2009/schedule.

I also try to do my best to attend 360flex conferences made by developers and for developers http://www.360flex.com/ .