Meeting: May 29!

Building Live Chat with BlazeDS

The free and open source BlazeDS project from Adobe brings a powerful new paradigm to web development. In addition to the high performance AMF protocol, BlazeDS also provides the ability to push data to rich clients like the Flash Player. With very little code, we will build several different chat applications that can be added to any website.

The presenter will be Adam Lehman, ColdFusion Platform Evangelist for Adobe.

Time/Date/Location:
Thursday May 29, 5:30PM, Huntsman Hall @ Wharton, room G55

Now Under New Management!

It is my privilege to announce that Chris Scott, a dedicated user group member (and speaker) will be the new manager of the Philadelphia ColdFusion User Group, effective May 29.

The Philadelphia ColdFusion User Group has been in existence for about ten years and in that time has had only two managers. Chris Swanson lead the original effort until handing over the reins to me in late 2000. At the time I had only been doing ColdFusion for a year, but had the folks at the Baltimore and DC CFUGs to thank for most of my knowledge. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to organize a group of like-minded developers.

The last eight years have been amazing times for the CF community: the Macromedia acquisition, the Adobe acquisition, six releases of CF (6, 6.1, 7, 7.0.2, 8, and 8.0.1), CFCs redefined the language and rich internet applications are the new hotness. Those who have stuck with CF have witnessed the amazing evolution of the application server and the community around it. A tremendous number of learning opportunities have emerged as a result, opportunities that have been great for developers who have taken the time to take advantage of them.

I hope you've found value in your relationship with the user group. I certainly have enjoyed getting to know many of you and learned a lot in the process. My favorite activity was the series of certification study group meetings held at the Great American Pub. Everybody in that group passed on their first attempt; I can't definitively say whether it was the Bubba Burgers or the discussion that helped more!

It's now time for a new person with time, energy and fresh ideas to step in and re-invigorate and re-energize the group. Chris is the right guy to do it. Please join me in welcoming Chris to the role of Manager of the CFUG - he's going to do an amazing job.

</steve>

Adobe Developer Week is next week. Lots of topics including Flex, AIR, ColdFusion and BlazeDS. Free!

A HUGE thank-you to Alex and Bart for hosting the Flex 3/AIR 1 party last night! IndyHall is available to anybody looking for a refreshing day (or a bunch of them!) working away from your cubicle/pen/corner office, surrounded by creative and entrepreneurial minds. I plan on dropping in every few weeks just for the change of scenery - maybe I'll see you there too!

As you might have guessed, we had a fantastic social event last night that just happened to coincide with the release of Flex 3 and AIR 1. We watched an intro from the Adobe folks, socialized a bit, got a firsthand demo of Wii and Flash playing together (which was awesome) and then a boatload of socializing and giveaways. Even after all the stuff we gave out we STILL took home a ton of additional schwag. Expect to see more of these shirts until we give them all away!

If you're looking for more resources on Flex and AIR, you can't do much better than Rob Hall's links at the bottom of this post on the PFPAUG site

Many thanks to all of you who attended ~ we hope to see you at upcoming Flash, Flex and of course ColdFusion user group meetings!

A Philadelphia tech conference - how cool is that? Coming in March 2008 to the campus of Drexel University. If you're going, please let me know - looks like there will be some Flex representation there in addition to a hefty helping of open source technology.

http://www.phillyemergingtech.com/

Interested in speaking? Submit your paper now!

Hot on the heels of their highly successful onAIR bus tour, Adobe is going to be swinging through Philly in January to promote Flex 3.

Details:
Speaker: Dave Gruber, Flex Product Team
Date: Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Time: 7:00 PM
Location: TBD

Free stuff: A copy of Flex 3 and a copy of CS3 Web Premium. You need to RSVP to be included in the raffle.

RSVP here!

Adam Howitt (a certified ColdFusion developer) is giving an online presentation this Thursday at noon on how to Build a scalable architecture with Amazon's EC2. Amazon is providing developers some pretty awesome functionality for grid computing ~ allowing you to push load to them during times of peak traffic. If you're remotely interested in how this might be useful to you as a CF developer, you should definitely tune in. Attendance is free, but RSVPs are appreciated.

Another group that you might want to keep an eye on (or at least join electronically) is the Philly Computer Human Interaction group. They're focused on usability and interface design - topics that ALL of us should have at least a passing interest in.

PhillyCHI meets monthly, usually in downtown Philadelphia.

Just an FYI...the AIR event on 8/22 is now starting at 7PM. The doors open at 6:30 p.m.

For the full schedule, please visit: http://onair.adobe.com/schedule/cities/philadelphia.php

The Franklin Institute Science Museum
222 North 20th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
August 22nd
7:00 p.m. – 10:30 p.m. (doors open at 6:30 p.m.)

Don't forget to sign up to attend the AIR bus tour - they're stopping in Philly on August 22. The venue: the Franklin Institute! I don't know anyone who would pass on an excuse opportunity to go there. All of the information is on the onAIR website, including registration details. I'll be there...won't you? Your attendance benefits the Adobe user groups of the greater Philadelphia Area...and you!

A Contest! A Contest!

The Philly Flash Platform User Group and Adobe are co-sponsoring a CONTEST for the best AIR application! The prizes are awesome - Copy of Flex Builder 2, a Nintendo DS Lite with a copy of Super Mario World and an O'Reilly "Ultimate AIR Developer" book bundle are all up for grabs.

To participate, register for the event, then if you are not already a member of the Flash user group, sign up as a member, download a copy of AIR and get to work on your best application. Then submit a link to your .air file no later than midnight August 20th, 2007 to be eligible for the contest.

Links you want to visit:

1. onAIR Tour Registration
2. General Tour Info
3. Contest Information
4. Adobe Developer Derby Prizes

Stay tuned for more news as the event draws near. Get started building your own AIR app today and we'll see you at the Franklin Institute in a few weeks!

The ColdFusion Developer Center has a new design, updated subcategory pages, and many new and updated articles. Here is a list of the new content:

• Introducing ColdFusion 8 Ben Forta takes a look at Ajax and PDF integration, new monitoring features, better CFML and security, and much more in the new version.
• Designing and developing with Ajax features in ColdFusion 8 - Create application layouts and work with data using the new Ajax features in ColdFusion.
• ColdFusion 8 server monitoring, Part 1: Using the Server Monitor in development - Charlie Arehart explains how you can use the Server Monitor to make better informed decisions about coding practices.
• Image manipulation capabilities in ColdFusion 8 - Build an image gallery example app with the new cfimage tag and automatically resize uploaded images into thumbnails, add watermarks, and more.
• Developer Spotlight: Focus on ColdFusion - Meet Ray Camden, picked by the community for his knowledge of ColdFusion = and involvement in several collaborative projects.
• Flash Media Server event gateway example application - Get the code for this sample app that uses the Flash Media Server event gateway to manipulate Flash Media Server shared objects.
• Using the ColdFusion 8 step-through debugger for Eclipse - Step through your code with breakpoints and more with the new ColdFusion 8 step-through debugger for Eclipse.
• Connecting to a database in ColdFusion - Master the basics of working with databases in ColdFusion and Dreamweaver. (Updated July 30, 2007)
• Displaying database data on a web page - Use ColdFusion to display custom data in your web pages. (Updated July 30, 2007)

As blogged by Rob Hall this morning, the Adobe AIR bus tour is coming to the Franklin Institute!

AIR is the official name for the platform formerly known as Apollo, the cross platform desktop runtime for rich internet applications built in HTML or Flex/Flash. It's awesome that we warranted a stop - so now all you need to do is show up!

A free event - at the Franklin Institute - with snacks and drinks on Adobe. Who wouldn't want to go?

Sign up here...you better do it soon as it's likely to fill up pretty fast! See you there!