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.

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As you may have heard, Adobe has announced the release of Adobe Flex 3 and Adobe AIR 1.0. Now that the cat is out of the bag, this will be the focus of tonight's special meeting! Adobe is sponsoring this meeting with food, giveaways and a raffle copy of Adobe Flex Builder 3 Professional.

Flex 3 is a feature-packed release, adding new UI components like the advanced datagrid and improved CSS capabilities; powerful tooling additions like refactoring; and extensive testing tools including memory and performance profiling, plus support for automated functional testing in Flex Builder 3.

Adobe AIR is game-changing in so many ways, delivering rich Internet applications (RIA) on the desktop, enabling access to the local file system, system tray, notifications and much more. Now you can write RIAs on the desktop using the same skills that you've been already using to create great web apps including both Flex and AJAX.

Don't miss out on this opportunity to see and hear about this highly anticipated release of Flex 3 and AIR at this meeting!

More Info:

• Flex 3
• AIR 1
• ColdFusion 8
• Adobe's Technology Platform
• Adobe Open Source

Join the Adobe user group community (Flash, Flex and ColdFusion) for this "can't miss" meeting Monday night at 7PM!

Adobe's RIA technologies enable you to rapidly build and deploy the most engaging applications across browsers and on the desktop. The Philadelphia user groups are hosting a special live event to share exciting new information on Adobe's platform tools and technologies for building RIAs. You'll see an exclusive user group video presentation by Adobe Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, hear some important product news, plus get your hands on some exclusive schwag and other giveaways.

Be part of the fun and excitement and join the rest of the Adobe developer community by participating in this very special event.

Basics:

Date: Monday, February 25
Time: 7PM - whenever
Loc: Independents Hall
Directions: 32 Strawberry Street, Philadelphia, PA

Park on the street if you're lucky, otherwise there are several garages in the immediate area that you can easily use.

Join the Adobe User Groups of Philadelphia for this "can't miss" meeting!

Adobe's RIA technologies enable you to rapidly build and deploy the most engaging applications across browsers and on the desktop. The combined Philadelphia user groups (Flash, Flex and ColdFusion) are hosting a special live event to share exciting new information on Adobe's platform tools and technologies for building RIAs. You'll see an exclusive user group video presentation by Adobe Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, hear some important product news, plus get your hands on some exclusive schwag and other giveaways.

Be part of the fun and excitement and join the rest of the Adobe developer community by participating in this very special event.

Save the date: Monday, February 25

More to come soon...but don't forget about next Tuesday!

Hope to see many/all of you next Tuesday night at the University of the Arts for the Flex 3/AIR Prerelease tour event

All info is here so please make plans to attend!

Flex 3 and AIR are getting close to launch and in preparation, the Adobe Platform Evangelist team is traveling to select cities to show off the great new features and some brand new demos.

Flex 3 is a feature-packed release, adding new UI components like the advanced datagrid and improved CSS capabilities; powerful tooling additions like refactoring; and extensive testing tools including memory and performance profiling, plus the addition of the automated testing framework to Flex Builder.

Adobe AIR is game-changing in so many ways, extending rich applications to the desktop, enabling access to the local file system, system tray, notifications and much more. Now you can write desktop applications using the same skills that you've been already using to create great web apps including both Flex and AJAX.

Don't miss out on the opportunity to see and hear about this highly anticipated release of Flex 3 and AIR during this special pre-release tour. Plus, in addition to giving away some one of a kind Flex/AIR branded schwag, we will also be raffling off a copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional (pending availability) and a full commercial copy of CS3 Web Premium at this event!

Details:
Speaker: Dave Gruber, Flex Product Team
Date: Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Time: 7:00 - 10:00 PM
Location: University of the Arts
211 S. Broad Street - Terra Building
8th Floor - Connelly Auditorium

Google Maps

You need to RSVP to be included in the raffle!

RSVP here!

Tuesday night we'll be hosting two outstanding local speakers - Chris Scott of ColdSpring fame (among other things) will be instructing us all on the fine art of unit testing and Keith Dodd bringing us all up to speed on the use of Spry.

Meeting will be from 5-7PM...still enough time to get a couple hours of shopping in after we're done!

Parking is available at 18th and Arch, though as always we recommend using mass transit whenever possible. Starbucks is on the ground floor for any caffeine junkies planning on attending, plus we'll have the usual soda and pizza for a light (read: not good for you) snack/dinner.

Directions

10 Penn Center - 1801 Market St.
Online Consulting

• At 30th Street Station take the east-bound train to Suburban Station (City Hall/15th Street).
• Get off at the first stop--Suburban Station (City Hall/15th Street).
• Leave the subway via 17th Street exit. Walk one block south on 17th Street (in same direction of traffic; one way street).
• Turn right onto Market Street.
• Our building is between 18th & 19th Streets.

Sign in at the front desk as guests for ONLC

A quick reminder that we are having our next meeting tomorrow at 5PM. Thanks to our friends at Wharton for hosting us again!

Topics

• Terry Ryan - Squidhead, an awesome bi-directional code generation tool for CF. Terry's (free) utility will save you tons of monkey typing and provide you with a solid, secure platform upon which to build your applications
• Steve Rittler - CF8 application and server security. Learn best practices for securing your CF installation and best practices for coding with security and stability in mind.

Location
The meeting will be in Steinburg Hall-Deitrich Hall 1251. A map is available here. We'll be starting at 5PM and running until about 7PM. Pizza and drinks will be provided courtesy of CounterMarch Systems. Adobe has given us a box full of goodies to give away too, so show up for some knowledge and freebies!

I look forward to seeing all of you there!

November 13 (Tuesday)

Terry Ryan is lining up space for us at Penn (thanks, Terry!) for the next CFUG. Start time will be 5PM, pizza/soda will be available and the topics will be (in no particular order):

• Securely configuring and administering ColdFusion
• Squidhead: an application generator for ColdFusion and Microsoft SQL Server that uses database introspection and Stored Procedures to scaffold an application.

Terry demonstrated Squidhead for me at MAX this year and I was blown away by how much functionality he packed in to this tool - it's well worth your time to see it live. Spend less time coding repetitive tasks and more time hanging out by the water cooler!

Also, put a lock on December 11 for the final CFUG meeting of the year when we'll hold a raffle for some awesome Adobe software - double your chances of winning by attending both November and December meetings!

Terry Ryan gave a presentation on doing code reviews at one of our meetings earlier this year. He posted the slides from that talk this weekend - I highly recommend you take a look!

Conducting Formal Code Reviews by Terry Ryan.

A Philadelphia Area Flex User Group meeting is scheduled for Thursday, September 13th at 6:30pm.

Topic: Integrating Flex and Ruby on Rails Speaker: Derek Wischusen Date: Thursday, September 13th at 6:30pm Location: TBD

Topic Description: This presentation will provide a basic a overview of the Rails framework, the Ruby programming language, and how Flex can work with Rails to enable rapid RIA development. The presentation will conclude with a hands on demonstration of how to build a simple address book with Flex and Rails.

About the Speaker: Derek Wischusen is a Senior Manager of Electronic Products at Wolters Kluwer Health, where he manages and leads the development of Flex and Flash-based products. Derek has been creating applications using the Flash platform since 2000 and Rails since early 2006. He runs a popular blog on using Flex with Ruby on Rails. He has written technical articles on integrating Flex and Rails for Adobe's Flex Developer Center, where he was recently nominated as the Developer of the Month. Derek is the primary author of the Flex RoR SDK by Adobe.

For more information and to RSVP, go to http://paflex.org