PDX RIA > Event Calendar

The Joys of Flex 4: The Good, the New, and the Odd of Styling and Components

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 21:14:54 +0000

Date and Time

November 19, 2009 from 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Address

12000 SW 49th Ave Portland, OR 97219
google map

Speakers

Joshua Noble is a developer, occasional speaker, and frequent
writer who has recently relocated himself to Portland. He's the author
of the Flex 3 Cookbook, Flex 4 Cookbook, and ActionScript Bible, among
others.

Agenda

A quick introduction to some of the best, most different, and somewhat surprising updates to creating components using Spark and how that will change your Flex applications.

Meeting at PCC Sylvania Campus TCB 209.

Meeting starts at 6:00PM. Food and Networking at 5:30PM

Using Git (Distributed Version Control System) (1 Comment)

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 03:56:50 +0000

Event by cf_chris

Date and Time

October 15, 2009 from 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Address

12000 SW 49th Ave
Portland, OR 97219
google map

Speakers

Simeon Bateman

Simeon Bateman is a Portland area web application developer specializing in the Adobe Flash Platform. He is an Adobe Community Expert and an Adobe Certified Trainer for Flex and AIR. Simeon is also the Principle Instigator for PNW Rain LLC an RIA consulting and mentoring company.

Agenda

Git is a free & open source, distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

This presentation will be a loose and open discussion of how to get started using Git for version control. Simeon will demonstrate how to add projects, make changes, commit changes, create and merge branches. Also, he'll be showing what sets Git appart from other version control systems.

This should be a comprehensive presentation including everything you need to get started using Git for your version control needs.

We will be meeting in the PCC Sylvania Campus TCB 209.

There will be pizza at 5:30pm. And the meeting will start at 6pm.

Sim and I would appreciate it if you would RSVP for the meeting.

See you all soon.

Keywords

Git Version Control

ColdFusion Frameworks Panel

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 17:02:40 +0000

Event by Simeon Bateman

Date and Time

September 17, 2009 at 06:00pm

Address

12000 SW 49th Ave Portland, OR 97219
google map

Speakers

Barney Boisvert - http://barneyb.com

Chris Phillips - http://cfchris.com

Roy Martin - http://www.emergeinteractive.com/

Pizza Provided by Doug Reynolds - http://douglasreynoldsconsulting.com

Agenda

Continuing our thread of topics for the last couple months, this month we are doing a ColdFusion Frameworks Panel.

We have volunteers to talk about Fusebox, Model-Glue and FB-Lite. The folks that were at the CFUnited conference might also be able to shed some light on the recent FuseNG fork from Fusebox. Please feel free to come out and represent your fave, framework as well.

Lots of fun to be had in a relaxed atmosphere.

We will be meeting in TCB 209.

Pizza and networking at 5:30PM. Pizza this month is being sponsored by Doug Reynolds http://douglasreynoldsconsulting.com. Make sure to thank him :)

JavaScript Frameworks Discussion

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:25:16 +0000

Event by Simeon Bateman

Date and Time

August 20, 2009 from 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Address

12000 SW 49th Ave Portland, OR 97219
google map

Agenda

This month at PDXRIA we are continuing our series of panel discussions. This month the topic is JavaScript and frameworks.

Our own Chris Phllips and Barney Boisvert have agreed to lead the discussion and tell us about their favorite frameworks and what they love about JavaScript.

Come on out and share your thoughts.

Pizza at 5:30, meeting at 6PM.

Meeting at PCC Sylvania Campus - TCB (Technology Classroom Building) Room 209

Flex and ActionScript Frameworks Panel (1 Comment)

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 04:23:15 +0000

Event by Simeon Bateman

Date and Time

July 16, 2009 from 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Address

12000 SW 49th Ave Portland, OR 97219
google map

Agenda

This month at the PDX RIA we are going to have an open discussion about some of the frameworks that are available to Flex developers. This is a great opportunity to come out and ask questions and here what folks have to say about their favorite frameworks. Just to make sure we have a well rounded discussion I found some volunteers to represent different frameworks.

Matt Legrand - Cairngorm

Matt Garland - PureMVC

Simeon Bateman - Mate and Swiz

If your favorite framework is not one of those listed then make sure you come out and represent! Tell everybody why you like your framework best.

Pizza at 5:30, meeting at 6PM.

Meeting at PCC Sylvania Campus - TCB (Technology Classroom Building) Room 209

Building a Photo Gallery with Flex and PHP (2 Comments)

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 17:28:17 +0000

Event by Simeon Bateman

Date and Time

June 18, 2009 from 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Address

12000 SW 49th Ave Portland, OR 97219
google map

Speakers

Pete Mackie

Pete has been a software developer and publisher, first founding his own company, Seaquest Software, some thirty years ago, which is still going strong. His recent development efforts were as a volunteer code committer for the Eclipse IDE and working on PHP-based web sites for small start-up companies. Pete stumbled upon Adobe’s booth while attending EclipseCon 2006. Wondering what Adobe was doing at an open source centric conference, he stopped at the booth and discovered Flex Builder running on the Eclipse IDE. Pete instantly I recognized what Flex could do for RIA client/server applications. Rushing home, he installed the Flex Builder 2 beta and has been hooked on Flex software development ever since.

Agenda

I have Flex client photo rendering application, which sources the photos from a MySQL database via AMF 3 RemoteObject messaging thorough the WebORB application server, which I will review in some detail. The Flex client's particular interest is that it performs received photo array caching before rendering to eliminate photo display update flickering. There's not much around in the way of good Flex client photo caching examples. My Flex caching example, is simple coding but elegant in how it performs.

Second, there's a problem in remoting photo arrays from a PHP server. PHP insists that photos are strings (and allows not other data type else can be force cast), and Flex likes (and also insists) that photos be received as ActionScript 3 ByteArrays. Simply PHP photo strings and Flex photo ByteArrays are not compatible in any way. I have yet to see a PHP application server which can properly return photos to the Flex client via AMF 3 RemoteObject messaging. I have created the PHP code chicanery, which dynamically converts PHP photo "strings" to AMF 3 ByteArray data streams. I would cover technique the interesting details of how and why I created this code hack.

Third, I will demonstrate using MySQL full text searching functions, to return photos based on powerful searching capability. Very few developers are even aware of what can be done to access a database base on full text searching. I would like to share what I know about how to use full text searching for return of specific database records.

Fourth, Flex developers have difficulty returning arrays of PHP objects (photos + metadata in my example) from the server to the Flex client and the processing the received objects. I would also briefly review the object array transfer "how to" concepts too. I have a new O'Reilly InsideRIA article out on this topic. See below for article details.

Briefly, background wise, I've been writing software for nearly forty years and have owned and operated my own software company for 31 years. My Flex Builder development experience is ~2.5 years.

Networking starts at 5:30 PM with Pizza.

Meeting at PCC Sylvania Campus - TCB (Technology Classroom Building) Room 209

Keywords

flex, php

RIA development life cycle

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 21:56:36 +0000

Event by Simeon Bateman

Date and Time

May 21, 2009 from 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Address

12000 SW 49th Ave
Portland, OR 97219
google map

Speakers

Mark Piller is the founder and Chief Architect of Midnight Coders, an innovative and forward-thinking company specializing in products for RIA development, testing, integration and analytics. Mark has over 15 years of software development experience. For the past six years he has been specializing in building software infrastructure products designed to integrate Flex, Flash, and AJAX applications with a variety of backend systems, including .NET, Java, PHP, and Ruby on Rails. Mark is very passionate about ease-of-use of software and prides himself in creating technologies that clearly demonstrate that quality.

Past presenting experience:

Adobe MAX 2007
Adobe AIR Bus Tour
WebManiacs 2007
Dallas Flex User group
Denver Flex User group
Silicon Valley Flex User group
Seattle Flex User Group
New York Flex User Group
Dallas TechFlex 2008

Agenda

Session will provide an overview of various techniques and approaches developers can use in day-to-day activities for Flex and Flash application development, testing and runtime optimization. You will learn about ActionScript code generator for remoting and data management use-cases, learn how to create real-time messaging applications, see a demo of remoting invocation debugger and AMF traffic visualizer. Finally, you will see a demonstration of user behavior tracking and analytics in a Flex application. The session provides a lot of coding samples and API reviews. It is targeted at a wide range of developers ranging from beginner level to very advanced. Parts of the presentation will be useful for management folks and they are welcome to attend as well.

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

Come at 5:30 PM for Pizza and Networking.

Gumbo Study Group

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:24:57 +0000

Event by Simeon Bateman

Date and Time

May 6, 2009 from 6:30pm - 8:00pm

Address

930 NW 14th Ave Suite 280
Portland OR 97209
google map

Agenda

This month's meeting--on skin classes for Gumbo components--will be led by Matt LeGrand. We'll be focusing on code rather than Thermo/Catalyst. We'll meet again at Emerge Interactive (formerly known as Empire Group), on Wed, May 6, 6:30 PM. Map here. The office is on the second floor around the corner from an Office Depot. Matt Garland summarized last month's presentation on component architecture in a blog post.

Super fast, multi-threaded, number crunching in Flash

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 17:26:28 +0000

Event by Simeon Bateman

Date and Time

April 22, 2009 from 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Address

12000 SW 49th Ave
Portland, OR 97219
google map

Speakers

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.

Agenda

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.

Simeon Talks Flex (2 Comments)

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:19:26 +0000

Event by Simeon Bateman

Date and Time

March 19, 2009 from 6:00pm - 8:00pm

Address

12000 SW 49th Ave
Portland, OR 97219
google map

Speakers

Simeon Bateman is a Portland local who specializes in consulting and training around the Adobe Flash Platform and Adobe AIR platform.

Agenda

The Adobe Flex Framework is a vast and marvelous beast of a Framework. But it is an amazing asset in building RIA's for the Flash and AIR platforms.

This presentation will be a loose and open discussion of how to get started building Adobe Flex applications. Including a short overview of Flex Builder, MXML and ActionScript, Application creation, building components and communicating with events.

This should be a comprehensive presentation including everything you need to get started building your first application.

Also for the first 10 people at the meeting I will be giving away the Flex handbook, and 1 lucky attendant will win a Flex 3 Total Training DVD.

We'll be meeting in the PCC Sylvania Campus Library Room 112.

See you there!

News Flash: A-VIBE has offered to sponsor the Pizza for the event so come on out at 5:30 and have some social interaction with other RIA developers!

A-VIBE Web Development is a team of advanced web developers, specialist ColdFusion programmers, and web designers with a shared mission of developing easy-to-use, easy-to-manage Web applications. Our team has developed a reputation for exceptional customer service skills, including clear communication, flexibility, and an ongoing commitment to quality work and timeliness.