If you’re in Orlando tonight, and you’re interested in Air please come on over to the October Adogo meeting near Devry tonight. Brian LeGros already posted a brief description of the meeting. As usual, if you get there early, feel free to stop by BJs Brewhouse for a quick bite to eat and a drink.

Sorry for the short notice, but our October meeting has been moved to the 12th this month. We will still be having the meeting at Devry in Millenia at 7:00 PM as usual. We are fortunate enough this month to have long time Adogo member, Greg Groves, presenting to the group. Greg works for Florida Hospital and will be showing us an AIR app he’s built to help work with HL7 medical data. We’ll additionally be having a BoF discussion afterwards for all of those in attendance.

We had a great turn out last night in our first joint meeting with the local Ruby users’ group. Thanks to Dan, Brian, Adam, Max, Greg, and anyone else I missed, from Adogo for making it out. Thanks should also go to Jacob, from the ORUG, for all his hard work and showing us how to use RubyAMF. I’ve uploaded my code and presentation to the Adogo SVN and you can find Jacob’s code on Github. We also have a couple of Connect recordings that we took from the meeting for Rails and Flex. The Flex portion’s audio is completely garbled, so I’d suggest watching it on mute to get the most out of it; let it be a lesson to me to always calibrate my mic before giving a presentation. Thanks again to everyone who came out and we’ll see you next month!

Tonight the ORUG will be having their October meeting at Devy in Millenia at 7:00 PM. Tonight’s speakers will be Justin Blake, presenting on Genetic Algorithms, and Robert Dempsey, presenting on Document Based Databases. Robert’s told me he’s going to be doing some compare and contrast against relational databases so he hopes to give a balanced perspective. From the mailing list it looks like everyone will be meeting up at BJ’s Brewhouse next door for food around 6:00 PM, if anyone would like to meet-up before the meeting.

In the world of Adobe technologies, most of us that work with Flex and the Action Message Format (AMF) typically look to LiveCycle DS or Blaze DS as our server technologies of choice. AMF, however, is is a a message format open-sourced by Adobe with a multitude of server implementations for an assorted set of languages. In this session, myself and Jake Swanner, will be showing you one of those implementations in a Ruby flavor called RubyAMF. RubyAMF is a plugin for the Rails framework which allows you to easily expose models from your application for RPC calls using AMF. We’ve created a simple Flex application, which works with the Yelp web services, and uses a Rails controller as an endpoint to recieve XML, JSON, and AMF messages containing restaurant data. We will show our example application working with each of these message formats in our presentation. Additionally, I will give a brief overview of the Flex technology stack to give an idea of how all the pieces fit together. If you’re new to Flex and AMF, or just interested in learning about something new, we hope you can make it out to the meeting.

Fore more details, check out the Adogo and ORUG post on the meeting. See you there.

This month since our normal meeting would be on September 4th, which is Labor Day, we’re going to be pushing back our meeting date to Thursday, September 10th at 7:00 PM at Devry in Millenia. We’ve chosen the 10th so we can have a joint meeting with the Orlando Ruby User’s Group (ORUG) on using Flex, Rails, and RubyAMF. This presentation will be given by myself and Jake Swanner of the ORUG.

For this presentation we will be showing a simple Flex application built to integrate with a Rails service using data from Yelp. We’ll show how easy it is to integrate Flex with Rails via XML, JSON, and AMF with out the need for anything fancy. The AMF integration is being provided by RubyAMF, which is a plug-in for Rails, and an easy way to offer the AMF support. I’ll also be giving a brief introduction to the Flex framework, so newcomers are welcome.

This is our first joint venture with our local community, so come on out and support the Adogo if you can spare the time. Hope you can make it.

The Orlando Java Users Group is having Adobe Evangelist, James Ward, into town on August 25th, for a one day training event entitled Flex Jam. James hosted a similar event in Colorado with Bruce Eckel, so it’s great to see this type of event in Central Florida. The cost for the event is $100, includes all of the training materials needed for the day, and will be held at Swampcast HQ in Winter Park. If you’re interested in attending, check out this message on the OJUG mailing list for more information. Additionally, James will be speaking at the August 27th OJUG meeting at Devry. Seating for the event is limited (~20 seats available) so Mike’s asked that anyone who is interested RSVP on the Codetown website for the event.

For all who are interested in either of these events, let’s support our local Java user group and welcome James to town.

As promised, I’ve updated the code from the August presentation with a working version of the MockAs3TestRunner class for FlexUnit4. You can find the latest incarnation in the Adogo SVN. I’ve also bundled, what will probably be, beta version 2 of FlexUnit 4 with the project in swc form (built from the latest 4.x branch) if you can’t wait for the eminent release. If you’d like more details on how to use the runner, check out my most recent blog post for more details.

Thanks to everyone who made it out virtually and in person to last night’s meeting. I’ve published the source code and recording from the FlexUnit4 and mock-as3 presentation for anyone was unable to attend. There are a few edits to the presentation that should be noted however:

• Drew has published the BDD-style runner on the FlexUnit4 mailing list as well as it being available in the Adogo SVN.
• The roadmap for the [Suite] metadata defaults I suggested was just me postulating, there hasn’t been a decision made by the FlexUnit4 team as of yet.
• I butchered the explanation of BDD and context-based testing, so you may want to read more about BDD at Wikipedia or check out testing frameworks like Shoulda or RSpec to see better examples of my ramblings.
• The Loom project itself is not purpose built to preload byte-code woven runtime generated subclasses, the SWFLoader being worked on in unison with the project, is intended to tackle this approach.
• I will be implementing the MockAs3TestRunner for FlexUnit4, I was just being cheeky, but the current test in the source for this presentation will not run.

Again, thanks to all who came out and to Erin and Ashely at TEKsystems for sponsoring the meeting. See you next month.

Just a reminder that this evening, 08/03, @ 7:00 PM is this month’s Adogo meeting at Devry in Millenia. We’re being sponsored by TEKsystems, I will be giving a presentation on new features in FlexUnit4 and mock-as3, and there will also be a group discussion on uses and abuses of RIAs. Hope you can make it out tonight!

BTW – If you think you will be attending this evening, please RSVP for our sponsor so they can obtain an accurate head count.