James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe and Adobe’s JCP representative to JSR 286, 299, and 301. Much like his love for climbing mountains he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places. Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including: Pascal and Assembly back in the early 90’s; Perl, HTML, and JavaScript in the mid 90’s; then Java and many of it’s frameworks beginning in the late 90’s. Today he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front-ends for Java based back-ends. Prior to Adobe, James built a rich marketing and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems.

Flash Player 10 added a new feature called Pixel Bender which is primarily used for manipulating pixel in an image. However it can also be used to do super fast floating point math on a separate thread.  That means that when you need to do heavy client-side calculations you don't need to lock the UI while AS3 does the processing.  Until now this hasn't been very feasible because it's difficult for developers to write and debug Pixel Bender machines.  James will introduce a new AS3 library that makes this much easier.

Meeting will be at PCC Sylvania Campus.  Library Room 112.

Come at 5:30 PM for Pizza and Networking.