Two weeks ago Zach, Brian, Kai and I went geocahing in the Indialantic Beach area. Where we found 3 caches. Today Brian and I went on a bike tour of Suntree and found 6 out of 7 caches. Then on my way home, I decided to check one cache that I drive by every day. That makes a total of 12 cache finds as Team RAnDOM.

And as usual, here are some pictures.

Also, don’t forget that on Thursday, October 30th RAnDOM will be at Seminole Community College’s ninth annual Freaks and Geeks Event. Freaks and Geeks is a huge LAN party and we’ll be there representing in our cool RAnDOM gear. You don’t want to miss this.

Thanks to everyone who made it out to the October meeting last night.  We had a great turn-out of 8 people at our new venue, Java Surf.  Although, there were only a few laptops, I think we were able to have a good dialog about RESTful web services and, for those who toughed it out, a working client finally came to be.  I’ve committed my client code to get the client working on an instance of the Rails application running locally, but I was unable to get the JSONP code working with jQuery and Rails.  I hope to get something working over the next few weeks for anyone who is interested.  

We are interested in getting feedback about our new venue.  If you have time, please leave a comment on this post with what you did and didn’t like.  I know there were a few complaints about parking and internet access being limited to 60 minutes, so if these are points of concern, please let us know so we can look for another place to meet.

In any case, we will have the November meeting date and topic posted soon, so thank you to Zach for offering to present next month.  See you all next month!

I’ve published the code we will use for our October meeting being held tomorrow. You can find the code in our SVN repository. The /restexample folder is the source for the extremely simple Rails application that we will use to talk about RESTful interfaces. The /client folder is the source from the AJAX application we built in August with a some hints for integrating the application with these RESTful services. Additionally, we’ve setup a new subdomain (http://services.itsrandom.info) which you can use to access the services being used for tomorrow’s meeting.

For the meeting, as usual, we suggest bringing a laptop with your preferred HTML editor and an SVN client to get a hold of the code. Don’t forget about our new location this month at Java Surf; if you’d like to get wifi, make sure to bring money for a purchase. See you there!

Sebastian, Darryl, Frank, and I represented RAnDOM at this month’s Space Coast .NET User Group meeting.  Ken did a great job of talking about the various options available in Silverlight for data binding with objects and services.  Silverlight definitely has more options than Flex in terms of data binding (one-time, one-way, and two-way), so it’ll be interesting to see what’s coming in Flex 4 to compete.  Ken also gave a peak at some of the new features in the recently released Silverlight 2.0.

Thanks again to Ken for letting me speak about RAnDOM to meeting goers as well.  Great job!

This month we’re going to hop over to the server side of things and take a look at one of the most common protocols used to create services for rich clients, representational state transfer (REST). REST is based on the transmission of data as resources. These resources are identified by Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) are used to describe how the state of these resources are to be accessed or changed. Think of it as a simple way to represent CRUD (create, read, update, delete) operations over the web.

For this time around, we’re going use a very simple set of RESTful services built using Ruby on Rails. We won’t be focusing on the code of the services in great detail, but more on their RESTful interfaces. We’ll also look into integrating these new services with our Restaurant application we created in our first meeting.

I hope to have the code ready and in SVN by Thursday at the latest Don’t forget about our new venue, Java Surf. Bring your RAnDOM coffee mugs! See you there.

Thanks to Sebastian’s hard work, we now have custom gear available for RAnDOM via cafepress. Right now there are shirts, hats, and coffee mugs (fitting for our new venue) available for purchase. If you’re interested in buying anything, proceeds from your purchase will go towards the user group. Definitely check out the entire store and if you see anything you like, help support a local artist and fellow group member.

After a busy morning of geocaching (3 out of 5 for the day), we took some time to stop by and check out Java Surf, on the corner of 5th Ave and Highway A1A, as a potential new location for our RAnDOM meetings. The room at the front of the shop has a great, comfortable vibe. The manager said even though they close at 8:30 PM, we can hang out as long as we need. Wi-fi is available and with any purchase, free for the evening. Seems to be a fair trade to me since they have good selection of coffees, teas, and other beverages as well as some good looking snacks. Boardwalk Burrito and Bizarro’s are right next door as well, just in case you feel like a larger meal.

We’re going to give Java Surf a chance for our October meeting and see how it goes. Thanks to everyone for the suggestion, I’m looking forward to it.

As we talked about earlier on the blog, RAnDOM has the starts of its own Geocaching team (basically Sebastian, Zach, and me). If you’re interested in joining us for some Geocaching fun, here is your chance.

We’ll be meeting up this Saturday, 10/04/2008, @ 9:30 AM at Paradise Park on A1A in Indiatlantic (North end of the parking lot) to do some exploring. There are quite a few caches North and South of Paradise Park, so we’ll play it by ear as to which way we head out. If time permits, I’d also like to swing by Java Surf on 5th Ave and A1A to see if it’s a viable meeting place for the future.

Bring sandals since we may be on the beach, but you may also want to bring some shoes and socks just in case we end up truckin’ through the woods. A bottle of water, bug spray, and a towel aren’t a bad idea either, although you may not need them. If you have an off-road GPS unit, bring it out. We have a couple iPhones that we use, but the more devices we have with us, the better.

It’s not coding but every now and then it’s good to goof off too. All are welcome, so we hope you can join us!

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