Last week's Flex Camp was a huge success in Toronto - over 175 talented developers came to learn about Flex in person, get copies of cool Flex swag (copies of O'Reilly's Flex book), t-shirts and more. Perhaps the only problem with the whole event was the $399 that the Metro Toronto Convention Center was charging for wireless internet access, per person per day. (Yes, three hundred and ninety nine dollars per person.) If you're interested in the event, I've posted the slides for my keynote presentation online on the Flex Camp page.

So, what's this have to do with an RIA for airlines you ask? Well, I left the hotel and took off for Pearson Airport (Canada's busiest airport) early the next morning for my flight back to Ottawa, and noticed a lot of people waiting to check in. A lot of people. Probably everyone who had arrived at the airport that morning actually. Air Canada had a major system failure on Friday that forced the cancellation of many flights to and from Toronto. OK, great, when are you getting to the RIA I hear you asking.

While at the airport and waiting, I was able to connect online and read some email and RSS feeds. I noticed on article at the New York Times titled "Airlines Work on Systems to Reduce Delays". So, I clicked on the article and started reading. About 1/2 way down the page I noticed this image - clearly a Flex application built by American Airlines (check out the drop down boxes). The application helps track flights after they've been diverted to other airports.

It was a little late for Air Canada, but hopefully someday that Flex application will help reduce the wait time that someone has in an airport. For me, I ended up driving back to Ottawa instead, while Air Canada resolved their computer problems.

Vayama is a travel website that allows you to easily find cheap fares using a Flash based interface. Like Expedia, you set the travel cities (arrival and departure), dates of travel and number of people travelling. Vayama then goes out and get the valid fares for flights that fit. The map at the top of the screen shows a visual representation of the flight, which (not surprising) is extremely useful. Its so much easier to see what the connections are for the flight. (When flying out of Ottawa, there are rarely direct flights to anywhere.)

There are a number of user interface improvements that you get in Vayama versus plain HTML sites. For starters, you can click on the map itself to set locations for departure and arrival. Sliders on the left allow you to easily filter results based on travel time or cost. Unlike most sliders that I've seen, these ones actually work (hello Aeroplan website on Safari). The site also integrates blog entries into the application (under "getting around" navigation item).

The site is an improvement over HTML based sites, but still has some improvements that can be made. Clicking on the maps is a bit difficult unless you zoom in, and filtering out results could use some small animations to show that its filtering the results. Otherwise, this is a welcome improvement from what I normally go through for booking flights. Hopefully some mainstream sites will start incorporating elements from this site into their own.

If you're looking for something fun to do, try repeating the title of this post 10 times fast.