Tonight we had one of our best meetings to date.  We did a BarCamp style meeting tonight and everyone brought some great topics to talk about.  Thanks to Sebastian for showing us the Flash clock, Frank for showing PhotoSynth, and Matt for showing us his Arduino project, Barduino.  An extra thanks to everyone for also sitting through my muddled talk about testing.

As always thanks to Zach and Darryl for providing the projector and screen.  No topics yet for the next couple months, but watch the blog for more information.  If you’d like to see a presentation on a particular topic or would like to give one, please feel free to drop us an email or leave a comment here and we’ll try to get it on the list.

See you next month!

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.

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.