Boston Flex Application Incubator Group

Meeting:

• Date: Tuesday, March 16, 2010
• Time: 6:15 PM EDT
• Where:
  • Online, at http://experts.na3.acrobat.com/bfaig20100316/
    • See our Attending BFAIG page for details on attending online.
  • In-Person, at the Boston office of Broduer Partners, 855 Boylston Street, a short walk from the Hynes & Copley Green Line T stops.
• Agenda: Our agenda is currently being collaboratively created on our mailing list. If you’re not signed up we suggest that you do so.
• Attendees will be eligible for our bi-annual software raffle:
  • Raffle will be held at this month’s meeting. 
  • Twice a year Adobe allows us to raffle off a software package – of the winner’s choice – worth up to $2100. Here’s how it works:
  • Attend monthly meetings of this group or of ABUG (our parent group)
  • Your name will be entered to win the software
  • Attend multiple meeting and your name will be added to the raffle list multiple times
  • Raffle will occur twice a year, some time in the first and third quarters of each year
  • Read the fine print at http://www.bfaig.org/blog/?p=144!

See you there!

About BFAIG:

BFAIG’s focus is on helping new and intermediate developers with problems and questions that arise in the course of their work and study. While we may occasionally host an expert presenter, for the most part meetings consist of learner presenters presenting to the group and obtaining input and solutions for the issues that they raise. For a fuller explanation of how BFAIG operates, please see our website.

Meeting:

• Date: Tuesday, February 16, 2010
• Time: 6:15 PM EDT
• Where:
  • Online, at http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/bfaig20100216/
    • See our Attending BFAIG page for details on attending online.
  • In-Person, at the Boston office of Broduer Partners, 855 Boylston Street, a short walk from the Hynes & Copley Green Line T stops.
• Agenda:
  • Ryan Canulla will bring a number of questions including how to use the Profiler, how to create a scalable data model, etc.
  • The remainder of our agenda is currently open. Bring your questions, problems and subjects for discussion!
• Attendees will be eligible for our bi-annual software raffle:
  • Twice a year Adobe allows us to raffle off a software package – of the winner’s choice – worth up to $2100. Here’s how it works:
  • Attend monthly meetings of this group or of ABUG (our parent group)
  • Your name will be entered to win the software
  • Attend multiple meeting and your name will be added to the raffle list multiple times
  • Raffle will occur twice a year, some time in the first and third quarters of each year
  • Read the fine print at http://www.bfaig.org/blog/?p=144!

See you there!

About BFAIG:

BFAIG’s focus is on helping new and intermediate developers with problems and questions that arise in the course of their work and study. While we may occasionally host an expert presenter, for the most part meetings consist of learner presenters presenting to the group and obtaining input and solutions for the issues that they raise. For a fuller explanation of how BFAIG operates, please see our website.

Meeting:

• Date: Tuesday, January 19, 2010
• Time: 6:15 PM EDT
• Where:
  • Online Only this month!: At http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/bfaig20100119/
    • See our Attending BFAIG page for details on attending online.
• Agenda:
  • Our agenda is currently open. Bring your questions, problems and subjects for discussion.
• Attendees will be eligible for our bi-annual software raffle:
  • Twice a year Adobe allows us to raffle off a software package – of the winner’s choice – worth up to $2100. Details at http://www.bfaig.org/blog/?p=144!

See you there!

About BFAIG:

BFAIG’s focus is on helping new and intermediate developers with problems and questions that arise in the course of their work and study. While we may occasionally host an expert presenter, for the most part meetings consist of learner presenters presenting to the group and obtaining input and solutions for the issues that they raise. For a fuller explanation of how BFAIG operates, please see our website.

Twice a year we raffle off an Adobe software package – of the winner’s choice – up to $2100 in value. This page explains how this raffle works.

• Attendees at all monthly meetings have the option to be added to the list of potential winners. Simply make sure that the meeting’s coordinator has your name and email address.
• If you attend multiple monthly meetings within a six-month period you can get your name added to the list multiple times, thus increasing your chances of winning.
• This includes online attendees for those meetings that are combined in-person/online meetings, with one caveat:
• In order to discourage the potential for multiple logins by a single person, the meeting coordinator will have complete discretion to determine who is a “known person” and add only such people to the potential winners list.
• The “potential winners list” is maintained at http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AhLe5ow6grtMdENfVllDNjBmZ3FscDhaTjJfSUZxdFE&hl=en.
• It is the responsibility of attendees to:
• Make sure that the meeting’s coordinator has your name and email address. (Don’t worry, we won’t publish your email address.)
• To check the online list within a week after the meeting, confirm that you’ve been added, and inform the meeting’s coordinator if you haven’t.
• We’ll hold the raffle twice a year, generally some time in the 1st and 3rd quarter of each year, at one of our combined online/in-person meetings.
• The winner will be contacted at their email address. If they can’t be contacted through reasonable means, the software will be re-raffled the following month.

Meeting:

• Date: Tuesday, December 15, 2009
• Time: 6:15 PM EDT
• Where:
  • Online, at http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/bfaig20091215/
    • See our Attending BFAIG page for details on attending online.
  • In-Person, at the Boston office of Broduer Partners, 855 Boylston Street, a short walk from the Hynes & Copley Green Line T stops.
• Agenda:
  • We’ll be brainstorming with Jack Hotchkiss from The Nature Conservancy about a project that he’s contemplating. Jack works in TNC’s fundraising department and would like to set up a website/wiki that they would use to track “donor prospects”. As part of the website he’d like to use Flex to create a data visualization screen that shows how the site’s pages are linked to one another. He’s considering using Daisy CMS for the website and either the SpringGraph (http://mark-shepherd.com/blog/springgraph-flex-component/) or the Flare (http://flare.prefuse.org/) libraries for the data visualization app. Jack is interested in getting feedback on the feasability and scope of such a project.
  • The remainder of our agenda is currently open. Bring your questions, problems and subjects for discussion!
• Attendees will be eligible for our bi-annual software raffle:
  • Twice a year Adobe allows us to raffle off a software package – of the winner’s choice – worth up to $2100. Here’s how it works:
  • Attend monthly meetings of this group or of ABUG (our parent group)
  • Your name will be entered to win the software
  • Attend multiple meeting and your name will be added to the raffle list multiple times
  • Raffle will occur twice a year, some time in the second and fourth quarters of each year
  • Read the fine print at http://www.abug.us/blog/?p=4!

See you there!

About BFAIG:

BFAIG’s focus is on helping new and intermediate developers with problems and questions that arise in the course of their work and study. While we may occasionally host an expert presenter, for the most part meetings consist of learner presenters presenting to the group and obtaining input and solutions for the issues that they raise. For a fuller explanation of how BFAIG operates, please see our website.

Meeting:

• Date: Tuesday, Novermber 17, 2009
• Time: 6:15 PM EDT
• Where:
  • Online, at http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/bfaig20091117/
    • See our Attending BFAIG page for details on attending online.
  • In-Person, at the Boston office of Broduer Partners, 855 Boylston Street, a short walk from the Hynes & Copley Green Line T stops.
• Agenda: Our agenda is currently open. Bring your questions, problems and subjects for discussion!
• Attendees will be eligible for our bi-annual software raffle:
  • Twice a year Adobe allows us to raffle off a software package – of the winner’s choice – worth up to $2100. Here’s how it works:
  • Attend monthly meetings of this group or of ABUG (our parent group)
  • Your name will be entered to win the software
  • Attend multiple meeting and your name will be added to the raffle list multiple times
  • Raffle will occur twice a year, some time in the second and fourth quarters of each year
  • Read the fine print at http://www.abug.us/blog/?p=4!

See you there!

About BFAIG:

BFAIG’s focus is on helping new and intermediate developers with problems and questions that arise in the course of their work and study. While we may occasionally host an expert presenter, for the most part meetings consist of learner presenters presenting to the group and obtaining input and solutions for the issues that they raise. For a fuller explanation of how BFAIG operates, please see our website.

Meeting:

• Date: Tuesday, October 20, 2009
• Time: 6:15 PM EDT
• Where:
  • Online, at http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/bfaig20091020/
    • See our Attending BFAIG page for details on attending online.
  • In-Person, at the Boston office of Broduer Partners, 855 Boylston Street, a short walk from the Hynes & Copley Green Line T stops.
• Agenda:
  • Announcements & opening discussion
  • The floor will be open to anyone who wishes to present. If you’d like to insure that you’ll get a slot please contact us and we’ll put you on the agenda.
  • If time allows, Douglas McCarroll will show how he uses the “strategy” design pattern to sequence audio in his Language Collaborative project.
• Attendees will be eligible for our bi-annual software raffle:
  • Twice a year Adobe allows us to raffle off a software package – of the winner’s choice – worth up to $2100. Here’s how it works:
  • Attend monthly meetings of this group or of ABUG (our parent group)
  • Your name will be entered to win the software
  • Attend multiple meeting and your name will be added to the raffle list multiple times
  • Raffle will occur twice a year, some time in the second and fourth quarters of each year
  • Read the fine print at http://www.abug.us/blog/?p=4!

See you there!

About BFAIG:

BFAIG’s focus is on helping new and intermediate developers with problems and questions that arise in the course of their work and study. While we may occasionally host an expert presenter, for the most part meetings consist of learner presenters presenting to the group and obtaining input and solutions for the issues that they raise. For a fuller explanation of how BFAIG operates, please see our website.

Update (Tuesday): Today’s meeting will be online-only. Please join us online, as detailed below. Thanks, Douglas

Arising from a rather lengthy slumber, the Boston Flex Application Incubator Group will begin meeting again, starting on Tuesday, September 15th. We’ll be meeting monthly on the third Tuesday of each month, from 5:45 – 7:15 PM, Eastern Time. Meetings will be combined online/in-person meetings, with the in-person part happening at the offices of Metatomix in Dedham, Massachusetts. Please note that the building’s doors are locked at 6:00 PM, so you need to arrive promptly if you will be attending in person.

BFAIG will continue its focus on helping new and intermediate developers with problems and questions that arise in the course of their work and study. While we may occasionally host an expert presenter, for the most part meetings will consist of learner presenters presenting to the group and, hopefully, obtaining useful input and solutions for the issues that they raise.

For a fuller explanation of how BFAIG operates, please see our website.

Meeting:

• Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2009
• Time: 5:45 PM EDT
• Where:
  • Online, at http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/bfaig20090915/
    • See our Attending BFAIG page for details on attending online.
  • In-Person, at Metatomix.
• Agenda:
  • Announcements & opening discussion
  • The floor will be opened to anyone who wishes to present. If you’d like to insure that you’ll get a slot please contact us and we’ll schedule you.
  • If time allows, I’ll show some of the code that I’ve been working on for my Language Collaborative project.

See you there!

It’s decided – BFAIG will begin team projects!

Our goals:

1. Building Flex applications.
2. Learning various development techniques.
3. Develop skills in collaborating on team projects.

Since O’Reilly very generously provides the group review copies of their books the group thought creating an application around managing the book requests and reviews would be useful.

We have some requirements gathering to do, but our initial thoughts were:

- Interface with Amazon or O’Reilly services as a data source for book info.
- Allow users to search and add books as requests.
- Keep track of who received which books and capture book reviews.
- Include an admin feature to pull the top n most requested books.

Some technical features that I think would be great to include would be.

1. Use an MVC or DI Framework (Cairngorm? Prana? Parsley? other?)
2. Modules
3. BlazeDS / Java for the back end
4. Drag & Drop
5. Internationalization

TODOs to get started:
1. Set up a VCS (google hosting?)
2. Find reasonable $ hosting for a Java back-end
3. Brainstorm feature ideas.

Once we have a better idea of what we want to do, we will assign portions of the application to members who would like to participate. As people complete tasks (or hit a wall) we would begin code reviews to see how the task was completed.

Hopefully this provides a great forum for us to learn how to create better Flex apps!

What:

• Marc Hughes will show us how to build a basic diagramming application using Degrafa and ObjectHandles. You can see the application in action at here, play with it, and view its source, or download a zipped source code file here. Marc is the Manager of Software Engineering at Tom Snyder Productions, is the creator of the Adobe AIR Derby winning Agile Agenda project planning application, is the creator of the ObjectHandles and Pulse Particles libraries, and writes interesting stuff at his Marc’s Musings blog. This should be a great presentation.
• ObjectHandles allows you to add resize handles to your graphic objects, as seen in the image above.
• Degrafa is a declarative graphics framework for Flex. It allows you to use MXML to declaratively specify graphics. Here’s one example:

Where:

• Online, at http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/bfaig20080707/
  • See our Attending BFAIG page for details on attending online.
• In person, at Douglas McCarroll’s home at 26 Hamlet Street, Somerville (map)
  • Marc will be presenting remotely, so he won’t be here in person.
  • Please RSVP via our contact form if you’ll be attending in person.
  • Parking: Douglas has a fair amount of off-street parking in his yard. If you RSVP Douglas will contact you with details.

When:

• Monday, July 7, 2008, 7:00-9:00 PM EDT

Software Raffle:

Twice a year our parent group – the Adobe Boston User Group – raffles off an Adobe software package of your choice up to a value of $2100. If you attend this meeting your name will be added to the list of possible winners. For full details, see the ABUG software raffle page.