Adobe Developers of Greater Orlando » Primers

October Adogo Meeting Tonight

Adam Fortuna — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:20:11 +0000

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.

September Primer: Flex, Rails, and RubyAMF

Brian LeGros — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:40:03 +0000

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.

August Primer: What’s new in FlexUnit4 and mock-as3?

Brian LeGros — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 03:55:34 +0000

For this short session, I’m going to be doing a walk-through of the FlexUnit4 turnkey project. FlexUnit 4 is the latest rendition of the FlexUnit project managed by Adobe and has had a new infusion of developers from the Fluint project. FlexUnit 4 has not only brought a new syntax for creating tests, but also offers a level of compatibility in the Flex testing community. Out of the box, FlexUnit 4 can execute FlexUnit1, Fluint, and FlexUnit 4 tests and suites as well as offer integration with hamcrest-as3, for more robust assertions. Additionally, FlexUnit 4 provides an extension layer for which custom runner classes can be written to bring a whole new depth to writing your unit tests. In this session I will show a few custom runners as well.

Drew Bourne has graciously provided me with some cool code to show off at the meeting. I will be showing a very alpha extension to mock-as3 which will add type-safety to this great mocking framework. Additionally, he’s provided me with a PoC runner that can be used to provide testing contexts (ala BDD) to your unit tests. Definitely some cool stuff when it comes to testing that you may be interested in seeing if you’ve ever written tests for Flex.

Come by on Monday, August 3rd @ 7:00 PM at Devry in Millenia to hear more. See you then!

Adogo Meeting Tonight!

Adam Fortuna — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:57:03 +0000

Hey all, just a reminder that there’s an Adogo meeting tonight at Devry (room 122). The meeting starts at 7pm, but for whoever is interested, we’ll be at BJs Brewhouse beforehand (on Conroy, across from the Mall) for some food and beers probably from 6pm – 6:45.

There is one change in the meeting tonight though. Due to a scheduling conflict that came up at the last minute, Jason’s talk will have to wait until another month. Instead we’ll have the HTML 5 talk followed by a short birds of a feather session discussing what technologies we’re all using. If you have something you’re passionate about and want to share you experience and enthusiasm we’d love to hear what’s inspired you. This will be in the form of a led discussion, rather than a presentation. The second session is completely optional as always, so feel free to stay if you’re interested. Look forward to seeing everyone tonight!

What’s New in HTML 5? – Primer for July

Adam Fortuna — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:01:42 +0000

For something that’s been in the works for so many years, HTML 5 is still relatively unknown to most developers hoping to maintain cross browser compatibility. With the release of Firefox 3.5 today, and recent highlights at the Google I/O conference, HTML 5 is starting to make it’s rounds with developers. In this talk we’ll be going through some of the most exciting new features of HTML 5 including , , geolocation and local storage as well as some of the browser limitations of these implementations.

Balsamiq Mockups – July Primer Pt. II

Jason Madsen — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 21:56:16 +0000

Why do we use pen and paper to sketch software mockups? Here is the problem, if you create your mockup in Illustrator or Photoshop then we start to expect them to look professional. The point of a mockup is to illustrate the layout and allow us to focus on user experience, not design. So we get analog and use pen and paper, or perhaps a white board and dry erase markers. All of that is only because you haven’t used Balsamiq Mockups yet.

Balsamiq Mockups is application that allows you to quickly develop wireframes and mockups that look and feel like sketches, it is a fantastic tool. Mockups is an Adobe AIR based application, as such is runs on most major OS’s (Mac, Windows, Linux). At the next Adogo meeting I will be doing a overview / presentation of what Mockups has to offer. As an added bonus I will be giving away a free license to one lucky attendee via Balsamiq Studios. See you there.

Jason Madsen

July Meeting Just Around the Corner

Adam Fortuna — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 16:12:56 +0000

With our next meeting right around the corner, we’re looking for some speakers this month if anyone is interested. If you have a web development related talk, or an Adobe related idea that you’d be willing to present on, we’d love to have you! Whether it’s for this coming July, or another month later this year, we’re always looking for speakers.

As for this month, we have one talk planned so far (looking for a second 20 minute talk). Recently at Google I/O, HTML 5 was one of the hottest topics that Google is fully embracing. It’s making a lot of headway across multiple browsers, and Google is betting big on it. In this talk we’ll be going over some of the new features that are making their way into this emerging standard.

This meeting is scheduled for July 6th, at Devry as usual in room 122. Meeting starts at 7pm, but feel free to stop by BJ’s brewhouse beforehand (on Conroy, across from the Mall) for some dinner and beers.

FlashCamp Orlando Giveaway Winners

Maxim Porges — Tue, 19 May 2009 15:29:44 +0000

Congratulations to Derek Myers, Darryl Ho, and Gail LaPinsky for being our FlashCamp Orlando giveaway winners. Each of these lucky people will be attending the event for free, courtesy of the good folks at Universal Mind.

As for the rest of you, if you haven’t registered yet – what are you waiting for? At just $50 for event registration, free parking, and lunch, it’s still a giveaway however you look at it. We look forward to seeing you there!

April 6th Primer: In Search of AOP for AS3

Maxim Porges — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 20:41:55 +0000

Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) is used under the hood of some of the most powerful libraries for Java, .NET, and Coldfusion development (amongst others). AOP finds uses primarily for cross-cutting concerns such as logging and security, and supporting practices like object mocking for unit testing. Developers can also use AOP in their own applications as they see fit to handle additional functionality that does not lend itself well to an object-oriented implementation.

While the need for AOP is just as prevalent in ActionScript 3 development, no general purpose libraries for AOP in ActionScript 3 have been released. After grumbling about this for six months in 2008, I decided to look in to what it would take to provide an AOP library for ActionScript 3.

My presentation will take you through the journey I undertook understanding the inner workings of AOP in other languages, and how AS3 and the ActionScript Virtual Machine really worked under the hood. I will also be showing you Loom, the library I am about to release which supports AOP using the methods devised during my search (it might even be finished by the time our meeting rolls around!).

Prior to attending, I would recommend that you get understanding of AOP by reading the Wikipedia entry. I look forward to seeing you there!

Adogo March Meeting Tomorrow!

Adam Fortuna — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 12:49:04 +0000

After moving January and February’s meetings back a week, this one really snuck up on us. We’re going to try to get back on the first Monday or month though, starting tomorrow! Maxim Porges will be presenting on In Search of AOP for AS3. If you can’t make it to FlexCampMiami, this will be a great chance to check out one of the talks. We’ll be following this up with a round table discussion on what people are working on and what they might be interested in learning more about for anyone interested.

As usual, we’ll be at BJs Brewhouse, right around the corner from Devry, from about 5:45- 6:45. Feel free to come out for a beer or quick dinner.