Thanks to Sebastian, Darryl, Sarah, and Chris for making it out last night to the August meeting. Over the course of the evening we had some great discussions about HTML5, the new Google Maps API, Rails 3, Flex, tablets, and other fun topics. Congrats to Darryl for winning the channel developer contest with Litl and on his trip out to FITC 2010. He gave us a demo of his how the Litl development environment worked and the sign language channel he’s developed which very cool to see.

At the close of the meeting, we came to the consensus that we’d like to start building an application as a group. I shared my idea for a pub crawling application using HTML5, Google Maps and Geo-location, LawnChair, CouchDB, jQuery, and an assortment of other fun libraries that everyone seems to be into. Each meeting we’ll try to building a piece of the puzzle and see how it goes. If anyone has any suggestions or requests for features or technologies they’d like to use, come out to the next meeting and let’s dig in.

Our next meeting will be on September 21th, 2010 @ 6:00 PM at the Suntree/Viera Library, since the venue seemed to work out pretty well this month. See you then!

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!

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!