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.

We’ve published the EventBrite page for November, so if you think you’ll be able to join us for a beer and some code at Charlie and Jake’s this Thursday, 11/20, @ 7:00 PM, please RSVP.

In preparation for this Thursday’s meeting, we’ve also updated the site a bit.  We’ve added the subdomain http://apps.itsrandom.info which contains the restaurant review application from our August meeting.  We’ve also updated the restaurant service to work via JSONP and updated the code base for the client and service in our SVN repository.  In this Thursday’s meeting we’ll be working with Selenium and this application to show examples of integration testing in web applications.

Hope you can join us!

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!

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!