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!

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.

This month we’re going to give migrating an AJAX application to Adobe AIR and giving it “off-line” capabilities. We’ll be using our restaurant application from our August meeting as the basis for this test. I hope to discuss some of the tools I’ve used to migrate the app as well as discuss how to deploy AIR applications. I’ll throw a primer out over the next few weeks.

We’ll be meeting on December 18th @ 7:00 PM at Charlie and Jake’s. Keep an eye out for more details soon.

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!

For our first meeting, we’re not really sure what to expect in terms of attendance or location or even how well cooperative programming will work out, so this time around we’re going to keep it simple. I’ve thrown together a sample app using nothing but HTML, CSS, and Javascript so we can all work together to create your typical AJAX mash-up application; no server scripting need. We’ll be using everyone’s favorite Javascript library, jQuery, as well as the jMaps and jgCharts plug-ins for jQuery to make creating the mash-up that much easier.

To participate in the meeting, we suggest bringing along the following:

• Laptop with your favorite OS
• An editor/IDE for working with HTML/CSS/JS (I like Eclipse)
• A Subversion client to get a hold of the code (I like Subversive or TortoiseSVN)
• Firefox with Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar installed

That being said, if you don’t have these few things and just want to swing by, get a bite to eat, and see what we’re all about, everyone’s welcome. My shoulder is definitely available for looking over.

I’ve created the event on Eventbrite, our calendaring and event tool, so if you are able to make it, please leave us an RSVP so we can let the restaurant know how many to expect. Code should be made available withing a few days, if anyone wants to start messing around with it. Also, if you feel the urge, help us spread the word about our organization and meetings. Every little bit helps, especially since right now it’s just 3 guys who like to code trying to put this together.

Hope to see you all at our first meeting!