Thanks to Sebastian, Chris, Sarah, Derek, Doug, and Darryl for coming out to the December meeting last night. Also a special thanks to Kim from Veredus for sponsoring our meeting and hanging around so late; the beer and food was great! I’d encourage everyone to visit our SVN repository and download the AIR bundle that was created from last night’s meeting, if you haven’t already. If you’re interested in learning about application sandboxes and non-application sandboxes by example, the source for this month’s project may help. We’ve also got simple examples of how to write to the file system and use the network monitor available for those who are interested.

Next month Sebastian will be taking the reigns to present on a Flash/Flex topic. We will also be moving our next meeting back to January 22nd, due to some conflicts in schedule for myself and Sebastian. Sebastian’s a great designer, so if you’re look for a different perspective on the topic, this may be the meeting to attend.

Thank you to everyone who has found the time to join us for our meeting since we started in August. I hope RAnDOM can continue to service your needs as a community in the new year. Happy holidays and see you in the new year!

I’ve updated the code base for tonight’s meeting so the application works just like what we built in the web version of the application. If you haven’t downloaded the code for the meeting as of yet, you can grab it @ http://svn.itsrandom.info/20081218/. I did some refactoring to pull out the jQuery plugin for Google Maps in favor of us using their APIs directly; over time I’ll try to add this back into our AJAX application as well. I have to thank Simeon Bateman for all his help with the code for tonight’s meeting. Without his help, we’d be learning a lot less about Adobe AIR tonight; thanks Sim!

If you think you can make out, please RSVP so we can get a head count for the restaurant and sponsor. See you tonight!

Adobe AIR is a technology platform aimed at bringing the ease of conventional web development to the desktop development experience.  AIR is a cross platform technology, just like the Flash Player, capable of running on Windows, Mac, and Linux.  An AIR application can be created using traditional HTML and JavaScript, the Flex framework, or a combination of the two.  When developing with HTML and JavaScript, Adobe provides a tailored version of Webkit.  This being available, it’s possible to utilize JavaScript frameworks such as jQuery, Prototype, and Dojo as well as most of their plugins.  AIR also exposes a set of JavaScript libraries which allow you to take advantage of  desktop integration features such as file system access, SQLite access, network monitoring, and more.  Additionally, with AIR running on the desktop, some of the cross-site security concerns imposed by the browser are removed, conversly though, a new set of concepts regarding security sandboxes are introduced which can get a little tricky at times.  Overall however, the experience is very similar to what we as a group are accustom.

In this month’s meeting, I’m going to show you the what’s involved in migrating our restaurant application to the AIR platform.  My goal is to give a brief introduction to AIR, show you the tools I used to migrate the application, and last, but most importantly, show you lots of code to relay some of the previously mentioned concepts.  If you’d like to follow along on your own laptop, having the following available will make it easier:

• Adobe AIR 1.5 SDK and runtime
• Aptana Studio with AIR support installed
• Code from SVN

I’ll show most of my code examples in Apatana, since it’s stupid easy to use with AIR, but I’ll go over the command line tools for adl and adt as well.

Hope you can join us on December 18th @ 7:00 PM at Charlie and Jake’s for the end of year meeting.  If you think you may be able to attend, please RSVP here so we can give our sponsor a head count.  If you can’t make it out, Happy Holidays from the RAnDOM crew!

NOTE: Sorry for the delay on this primer.  I realize the meeting is this Thursday, so I hope you can join us for our meeting.

Kim from Veredus Corporation has graciously offered to sponsor a round of beers at this month’s meeting at Charlie and Jake’s.  Here is a blurb about our December sponsor:

Veredus Corporation provides highly skilled Information Technology professionals for contract, contract-to-hire, and permanent placement. Their veteran team of professional recruiters utilizes an aggressive, personal and thorough process of discovering ideal candidates and matching them to client companies, based on that firm’s unique corporate culture and needs. With the core values of professionalism, integrity, and world-class customer service, Veredus is committed to providing the highest caliber of staffing solutions and maintaining long-term relationships with both its clients and candidate partners.

Don’t forget, our meeting starts at 7:00 PM and we’ll be covering Adobe AIR this month.  Hope you can make it out.