Speaking of local events, Gregg Pollack from the ORUG emailed us this evening asking us to get the word out about Battle of the Web Frameworks on April 9, 2009.  The event is kind of a precursor to BarCamp Orlando to get everyone in the spirit and will located at Slingapours beginning around 7:00 PM with networking at 6:30 PM.  A panel of developers is going to be comparing an assorted set of frameworks covering Ruby, Python, Java, and PHP.  Here’s the blurb from the website:

If you had to build a website from scratch, which technology would you use to do it? Would you use an older more established framework, or a framework on the cutting edge of technology? How would you begin to make an informed comparison and an educated business decision? What if you could throw each web framework into thunder dome, watch them battle to the death, and see which emerged the sole survivor?

Well my friends, I’m here to grant your wish. On April 9th, 2009 four web frameworks will duke it out in “Doterati Arena,” aiming to prove once and for all who has the right to wear the framework championship belt. The fight will consist of 4 rounds of 15 minute talks where each framework contender will tell you why you should use their own, and why their competition just doesn’t make the grade.

Although the fight will inevitably contain much blood, sweat and tears, in the end the audience members will be the final judge as to who will emerge victorious (at least until next year).

The event is sponsored by Doterati and sounds like fun.  On a side note, if you’ve never checked out BarCamp, dont’ forget about this year’s BarCamp Orlando on April 18, 2009 in Downtown Orlando.  Should be a great time, hope you can make it out to either of these events.

It’s conference time of year and over at Adogo I compiled a list of upcoming events that I thought was worth posting for us as well.  Below is what I have thus far:

• BarCamp Orlando – April 18, 2009 – Orlando, Florida
• mySQL Users Conference – April 20 – 23, 2009 – Santa Clara, California
• SpringOne Europe – April 27 – 29, 2009 – Amsterdam, Netherlands
• Microsoft Tech-Ed – May 11 – 15, 2009 – Los Angeles, California
• cf.objective() – May 14 – 16, 2009 – Minneapolis, Minnesota
• 360 | Flex – May 18 – 20, 2009 – Indianapolis, Indiana
• wedDU – May 21 – 22, 2009 – Sydney, Australia
• JavaONE – June 2 – 5, 2009 – San Fransisco, California
• Scotch on the Rocks – June 1 – 5, 2009 – London|Manchester|Edinburgh, England
• Top Gun (formerly Webmaniacs) – June 8 – 10, 2009 – Washington D.C.
• CFUnited – August 12 – 15, 2009 – Leesburg, Virginia
• Adobe MAX – October 4 – 7, 2009 – Los Angeles, California
• No Fluff, Just Stuff Tour – April – November 2009 – Assorted locations

Here are a few events that have already come and went, but are worth mentioning for anyone who would like to plan for the next year:

• CodeMash – January 7 – 9, 2009 – Sandusky, Ohio
• acts_as_conference – February 6 – 7, 2009 – Orlando, Florida
• Ignite Orlando – March 4, 2009 – Orlando, Florida
• FlexCamp Miami - March 6, 2009 – Miami, Florida
• Orlando .NET Code Camp – March 28, 2009 – Orlando, Florida

If you know of any events that I may have missed, let us know and I’ll add them to the list.  I wasn’t able to find any PHP related events, so if anyone knows of any, please let us know.  Also, Joe has posted on the Adogo LinkedIn group asking if anyone is going to cf.objective or CFUnited this year.  If you will be heading out, drop the group a note on the thread.

Darryl did a great job tonight with probably the most detailed presentation we’ve had at RAnDOM to date.  His AIR presentation took us through the step-by-step process he used to create the Flex port of the HTML/JS application we built a few months back.  He showed us some cool uses for Degrafa when it comes to working with CSS and Flex as well as how to use as3corelib to work with JSON data.  Darryl also went into some samples showing how to write AIR installers and how to use Badger to create AIR badges for distributing your application.  Overall, it was a very informative and well prepared presentation.  Next time you see Darryl as a presenter, you should definitely try to make it out if you haven’t before.

Thanks to everyone for making it out tonight.  Sebastian and I are going to work to put badges out for the HTML/JS and Flex versions of the AIR Restaurant Guide over the next few days.  We’ll post when they’re available or you can check http://apps.itsrandom.info/restaurant_reviews.  See you next month!

Just a reminder to everyone, that our March meeting will be on this Thursday, 03/19/2008, at 7:00 PM at Indian River Coffee Pineda Ridge.  Darryl is going to be showing us a port that he did of the Restaurant Guide application to Adobe AIR using Flex and ActionScript 3.  We’ll have the projector and screen again as well as wifi, so if you have the time and are intersted in learning Adobe Flex and AIR, come on out and join us.

This month, after much hounding, I was able to convince Darryl to show us some examples of working with AIR and Flex/ActionScript.  He’s going to be working on converting our HTML/JS AIR application to Flex/ActionScript.  For anyone who would like an introduction to AIR from the other side, this is a great opportunity to come out to RAnDOM for the first time.  Last month’s meeting went well at Indian River Coffee, so we’re gonna give it another try; we should also have the projector and screen this time around as well.

We’ll be meeting on March 19th @ 7:00 PM.  Hope you can make it!