cookies and code

Tonight I headed over to the Space Coast .NET User Group meeting, which consequently meets at my new office. They were trying out a similar 2 topic format, as we do at the Adogo, and it went really well. We started at 6:30 PM and ended around 8:15 PM. This evening they covered Workflow Foundation and its tools in Visual Studio 2008 as well as approaches for working cross team by using shared binary interfaces (also went into dynamic assembly loading a little bit).

What really struck me as interesting at the group was the context for conversation that occurred throughout the night. Everyone was pretty much on the same wave length, or at least appeared to be, and was comfortable; this may have been because of most of them work at the same mega-company or that the group has just been going steady for a long time, however. In any case, it was funny to see that the discussions were very different than what I’ve been exposed to in the past at user groups. There was a baseline of understanding for the work that Microsoft has done with varied technologies and discussions ensued relating to their application, not necessarily what they were and how they worked. This may have a lot to do with the average age and experience in the room (a older“wiser” demographic), but it also could be me looking into things too much.

I think I am finally able to empathize with user group members who have been frustrated with the Adogo recently. I went to the .NET user group looking for exposure beyond what I read daily on the web. The topics interest me, but I want more detail to see if I am getting excited over something that maybe isn’t worth it (and vice versa). I found myself looking for code examples during the presos more since I am new to the syntax, but not the concepts. I was eager to take advantage of the work the speaker brought the group. This was something I hadn’t previously thought about in depth. I always assumed people didn’t want to read the manual and I couldn’t see why the same conviction I had for programming wasn’t present in others. I think I now realize that, as are most things in life, it’s a matter of perspective with respect to what’s important to the developer as it applies to technology. This may seem like common sense, but I’m a pretty big moron. In fact, I look at the Adogo and realize, we’re really in a similar boat as the .NET group. Adobe has laid out the majority of the pieces we find ourselves using and until we have a common understanding of their use, it may be unreasonable to expect conversations like what I witnessed tonight without first establishing a baseline. It definitely seems like the sentiment on the mailing list to say the least.

I’ve got the April meeting next month, so hopefully this insight can help me better understand the service that a user group can perform for the community and what I can do to aid in its success.

It’s been a while since I’ve presented at the Adogo, so I figure I owe the group a couple of presentations. Based on the feedback we’ve been getting from the mailing list, I’m going to take a little bit of a different approach to this month’s meeting. We’re going to do 2, 30 minute presentations, one focusing on the conceptual and one focusing on the practical. The topics this month will be “The Mechanics of BlazeDS” (conceptual) and “RPC and Messaging Using BlazeDS” (practical). For those of you who are interested in seeing how Java will integrate with Flex, I will be showing off how to integrate POJO’s for use with RPC.

Hopefully I can keep the presentations short and the content simple and interesting. If anyone decides to stop by, make sure to hold me to that goal during the meeting. Primers should be posted soon. See you on April 1st, same time and place as always.

Yesterday I stopped by the Acadiana Adobe User Group in Lafayette, LA for Ray’s presentation on Adobe AIR. He showed off a time allocation app using Flex and then HTML/JS. He was able to show us a few quirks with SqlLite’s DATETIME datatype that Adobe added as well as some gotcha’s with respect to using HTML/JS with Spry. It was cool to see another user group in action. The Acadiana group has been meeting on and off for many years and they all seem to get along very well. Thanks to everyone in attendance for warm welcome and best of luck with the group.

Peter Armstrong, author of Flexible Rails, gave this presentation which focussed on how Flex and AIR can consume REST’ful resources. Peter unfortunately had a hard drive crash about an hour before his presentation so needless to say his presentation didn’t go as planned. Although he didn’t really have any slides (because they were all destroyed) he was able to borrow the laptop of a fellow conference go’er and show us some code examples.

The code examples were geared towards introducing MXML and Actionscript to Rails developers. I feel pretty comfortable with both, but it’s always good to see different approaches to coding in Flex, especially code using HTTPService since I spend more time using RemoteObjects. I would have liked to seen, if only mentioned, the topic of component development (visual and non-visual) and data binding, but I can understand why it was omitted since most Rails developers aren’t familiar with UI practices other than your standard web stack.

Towards the end of the presentation, Peter revealed Ruboss, a Flex framework built specifically for consuming REST’ful resources. Ruboss uses a controller to expose an Actionscript interface to translate CRUD operations to their REST’ful equivalents. He said he’s going to be releasing it over the next few weeks under his new company, so watch Ruboss.com for more details.

We’ve asked Peter to give a Connect presentation at an Adogo meeting later this year on Flex/AIR and Rails. The Orlando community can definitely benefit from Peter’s work with Flex/REST and we hope to pimp that to its fullest … j/k Peter, keep up the great work.

This Tuesday, 02/05, is the February Adogo meeting. This month is the ColdFusion ORM Showcase with presentations on Reactor and Transfer by Adam Fortuna and Joe Zack, respectively. For all of those who are interested in alternatives to working with ColdFusion CFCs and the database, this is definitely a great meeting to attend. Hope you can make it.

For those who aren’t following the Adogo blog, the January meeting promises to be a good one as we have been chosen by Adobe to be the only stop in Florida for the Flex 3 Pre-release Tour. For our leg of the tour we are extremely fortunate to have Ben Forta, Senior Technical Evangelist for Adobe, as our guest speaker. We’re going to be giving away tons of schwag as well as some pretty nice software licenses. We’re getting to use a conference room at Westgate Lakes thanks to the Porges and are going to have Pizza Hut cater most likely.

I’m really proud of all the work we’ve done at the Adogo (Adam, Max, and myself) and getting Orlando as a stop on this tour helping to affirm that. In the few months since last August, we have been able to create the beginnings necessary to revitalize the Adobe community in the Orlando area. We still have a lot of work to do to get the word out, but we’ve got a good foundation to build on.

Hope to see everyone at the next meeting (January 21st @ 7:00 PM at Westgate Lakes near the Smokehouse)!

If anyone is in the Orlando area tomorrow night, stop on by the Adogo meeting! We will be raffling off a license for ColdFusion 8 as well as giving away great Adobe stuff to anyone in attendance. Luis Majano will be giving a presentation on the latest version of ColdBox as well as an overview of the framework. Also, I will be leading a BoF on the multitude of ColdFusion frameworks that we have access to as a community. Hopefully I can encourage a good amount of discussion like Max did for our RIA BoF back in August.

Hope you stop by tomorrow, 12/04, at our usual time (7:00 PM) at Devry in Millennia. Highwinds Network Group will be sponsoring the meeting and bringing food along, so worse case you get fed and enjoy some casual CF conversation.

Just a reminder, the November Adogo meeting is tonight at Devry in Milenna @ 7:00 PM as usual. We will have a presentation on on “Continuous Integration” by Ryan Miller as well as a presentation on “AIR, Flex, and Twitter” from Adam Fortuna. If you haven’t already, join our Google Group so we can send you a Google Calendar invitation for our next meeting.

It promises to be great meeting, so I hope you can make it

Just in case anyone had forgotten, the Adogo (http://adogo.us) meeting for October is tomorrow. We’re going to be having the “Build Tool Shoot Out” to continue our series on “Ideas on Software Configuration Management”. I’ll be presenting on Ant and I’ve just finished putting some finishing touches on my presentation; I’m hoping it’ll turn out well. I’m really excited to see Max, Daniel, and Tyler’s presentations. Ant has always been the defacto build tool for Adobe folks, so I’m hoping that the group can walk away with quite a few options to consider when thinking about building.

I’m also hoping that quite a few folks from the ORUG will make it out to our meeting tomorrow night since 2 Ruby build tools are being represented (Rake and Buildr). We didn’t publicize this meeting with the other UG’s that much, which was probably a mistake on our part, but I hope a few stragglers find their way over to the meeting.

No word on sponsors yet, so we may be doing cookies, but come on out and support the Adogo in what promises to be a great meeting. If anything, come out to see me forgot tons of details on Ant so that you can publicly “boo” and “hiss” my presentation. See you there!

Well, I’ve got the slide portion of my presentation ready for tomorrow night’s Adogo meeting. I still have to prep some of the SVN examples, but if anyone is looking for ideas on how to implement “version control”, definitely come to the presentation. I may end up talking more than showing examples, but I’ll do my best to balance it out.

On that note, don’t miss the next Adogo meeting tomorrow at 7:00 PM at Devry. Adam will be giving a presentation on ColdCourse as well, so it should be a good night. We don’t have a sponsor so I may try to pick up some cookies, but we’ll have some t-shirts to raffle off, so definitely come out.

See ya there!