A big thanks goes out to Zach, Sebastian, Darryl, Phillip, Ross, Jim, and Frank for joining us at our 2nd meeting last night.  We had some good food and drink and got our hands dirty with Flex.  This time around we got some coding in and successfully completed the sample exercise from the initial Adogo Flex code camp.  I think we had a good introduction to Flex and now we’re ready to jump into more intermediate topics in both the AJAX and Flex arena (and hopefully start coding more at our meetings).

There is another major player in the RIA space that we’ve ommitted however.  That player is Microsoft’s Silverlight technology.  Since we here at RAnDOm aren’t as familiar with Silverlight as we’d like to be, I’d like to encourage anyone who is interested to attend the next Space Coast .NET User Group meeting on “Silverlight DataBinding” by Ken Tucker.  The meeting will held at Space Coast Credit Union Headquarters on 10/15 at 6:30 PM.  Silverlight and Flash are competing technologies which have taken different approaches to the RIA space.  We’ve seen how data binding in Flex works, so this is a good opportunity to see another approach.

Next month, we may try to meet at Java Surf since the rumor is they have WiFi and a dedicated room we could get, to avoid the noise of the traffic.  Look for more details in future posts.  If you have a topic suggestion for next month, please leave us a comment.  We’re always open to working on things the group would like to do.

See you all next month!

A few weekends ago, Brian and I went geocaching for a couple of hours. Out of four searches, we found two caches. The two that we missed, we believe may have been claimed by Tropical Storm Fay. To not give away the caches, we’re not naming the locations, but here are some pictures.

We have a team setup on geocaching.com, so if anyone would like to join us any time, post a comment and let us know.  And don’t forget tomrrow’s meeting at Goombay’s in Satellite Beach at 7:00pm.

RSVP here

This month we’re going to do an introduction to Flex.  Flex is a developer technology created, and open-sourced, by Adobe that allows creating Flash-based applications in a very similar paradigm to traditional web-based applications.  The goal of Flex is to supplement these technologies and provide the user with a richer experience while simplifying the complexities of working within the context of the browser.  At a high level, working with Flex entails creating components using a combination of MXML, an XML dialect, and ActionScript, a language very similar to JavaScript.  Those resources are then compiled into a Flash movie and, typically, loaded into the browser via HTML.

Our goal for this meeting is to orient you toward MXML and ActionScript and the tools needed to work with them.  We will be cheating a little bit and borrowing some sample code from the Adogo’s June code camp.  The example application is very straight-forward, so we should be able to jump right into it.

For this meeting, I suggest having the following available:

• A laptop with Windows or MacOS X installed
• A copy of the Flex Builder 3 IDE trial (free for students)
• Flex SDK 3.1
• Flash Player 9 or higher
• Web browser
• Sample code

If you’d like to get a head start on looking into Flex, The Flex Show has a great series of vidcasts which are short, informative, and a great introduction.  Additionally, for a more in depth look at Flex, the Silicon Valley Flex User Group has some great webcasts for beginners as well.

See you all on Thursday and remember to RSVP.