Our April meeting will be tomorrow night, 04/16/09, at 7:00 PM and will be quite the smorgasbord.  Sebastian is going to be giving a tutorial on how to build a simple clock in Flash and I’m going to be giving a show and tell about the basics of testing your code.  If anyone else would like to give a short preso, BarCamp style, feel free to come out; we will have the projector and screen available I believe.  Tommorrow’s meeting promises to be very informal and may run short, so at the very least come out to socialize and meet fellow developers in the Brevard area.

See you tomorrow and don’t forget about BarCamp Orlando this weekend!

Ben Forta and James Ward, evangelists for Adobe, announced on their blogs today that Adobe is giving back to developers who have been effected by the current economic situation.  For developers who find themselves without work in the software industry, Adobe is providing free licenses for Flex Builder 3 to all who apply.  You can check out the details of the program at https://freeriatools.adobe.com/learnflex/.

In addition to the efforts being made by Adobe, below are a few resources that can help in the job search for those still seeking work:

• http://flex.org/jobs – National job postings focused specifically on Adobe Flex
• http://www.riajobs.org/ – National job postings focussing on RIAs including AJAX, Flex, Silverlight, and more
• http://groups.google.com/group/adogo-jobs – Although not very active, this is the Adogo job mailing list containing local as well as national postings
• http://www.forta.com/blog/ – Ben Forta quite frequently advertises job openings across the nation that might be worth watching

If you have any additional resources you’d like to share with the community, let us know so we can spread the word.

As a developer, continuing education and professional growth are always important with respect to technology.  Please always consider yourself welcome at the RAnDOM.  Best of luck to everyone in the days ahead.

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!

On March 4th @ 6:00 PM, the Tampa Flash, Flex, and AIR Developers Group will be hosting Ben Forta, Kevin Hoyt, and Greg Wilson of Adobe. They will be covering a plethora of topics covering ColdFusion, Flex, AIR, and BlazeDS. The TFFADG just started up last year and looks to be having great success, so if anyone can make the trip out to Tampa to support our fellow user group, this is definitely a great meeting to attend. They will be meeting at the Art Institutes of Tampa which located at 4401 N. Himes Avenue, Tampa, Florida. If you’d like to attend, they ask that you RSVP @ rsvp@tffadg.com. For more information about the event, see the TFFADG’s blog @ http://www.tffadg.com/blog/.

If there was anyone who was interested in going to FlexCamp Miami, but could use a lower price, look no further. Use the discount code Adogo, when registering for the conference and save $10 off the purchase price! The discount code is only good until next Friday, 02/27/2009, @ midnight. If you haven’t registered yet but were debating whether or not you should go, here’s your incentive; that’s a half a tank of gas … well as at least in my Civic.

Only two weeks remaining until the event, 03/06/2009, so don’t miss out!

Thanks to Zach, Darryl, Frank, and Doug for making it out to the meeting tonight.  Doug gave us a great introduction to installing and working with LCDS.  He gave examples of working with the data management api including the Conflict class and the SQL assembler.  Doug lost his presentation 2 days ago, so he did a great job getting code ready in such a short time. Thanks to Zach and Darryl as well for providing the AV equipment this evening.  It was great to finally all see the same thing on a much bigger screen; also thanks to Frank for providing the essential extension cord that we needed to get power to the projector.

We’re still working on the topic for March, so stay tuned to the blog for more information.  See you next month!