This month at the PDX RIA we are going to have an open discussion about some of the frameworks that are available to Flex developers. This is a great opportunity to come out and ask questions and here what folks have to say about their favorite frameworks. Just to make sure we have a well rounded discussion I found some volunteers to represent different frameworks.

Matt Legrand - Cairngorm

Matt Garland - PureMVC

Simeon Bateman - Mate and Swiz

If your favorite framework is not one of those listed then make sure you come out and represent! Tell everybody why you like your framework best.

Pizza at 5:30, meeting at 6PM.

Meeting at PCC Sylvania Campus - TCB (Technology Classroom Building) Room 209

Portland Rich Internet Developers Group (PDXRIA) Summer Social!

This month we are just going to head down to the Lucky Lab in SE and network a little. If you've never joined us after the meeting for libations and conversations, you have missed out. We took that awesome part of the night and just expanded it till it was the whole meeting! This is your chance to brag about the cool stuff your building, or lament about the lame stuff your boss is making you build, or ask questions about the next thing you're planning to build. I think you get the idea. Come and chat and eat and drink. See you soon!

Writing Testable code with Michael Labriola

You all know by now that you should be unit testing your code, but do you know how? It is unfortunately really easy in Flex to architect code which is very difficult to test. In this session, we will explore how to build components and applications in flex which are inherently testable, and see how we test them.

Michael Labriola is a Senior Consultant at Digital Primates and the Lead Developer for FlexUnit 4.

Get there at 5:30 for pizza, drinks and networking. The presentation will start at 6:00 pm.

Writing Testable code. You all know by now that you should be unit testing your code, but do you know how? It is unfortunately really easy in flex to architect code which is very difficult to test. In this session, we will explore how to build components and applications in flex which are inherently testable, and see how we test them.

Join us Thursday, October 14, for food and networking at 5:30 PM sponsored by Thetus Corporation in association with the PDXRIA User Group. Our speaker, Michael Labriola starts at 6 PM.

Michael Labriola is a Senior Consultant at Digital Primates and the Lead Developer for FlexUnit 4. He has been developing Internet applications since 1995 and working with Flex since its 1.0 beta. Michael is an Adobe Certified Instructor, Community Professional, and co-author of the Flex 2, 3 and 4 Training from the Source books and Breaking out of the Browser with Adobe AIR.

As an international speaker and team mentor on Flex and AIR projects, he has consulted for many of the world’s most recognized brands. His free time is spent escaping from technology through wine and food.

RSVP: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/6735069/OR/Portland/Flex-and-Maven-a-joint-event-by-Thetus-Corporation-and-PDXRIA-User-Group/Thetus-Corporation/ Your RSVP enters you in a raffle for a Powell's gift card!

Interactive is not a goal - it is a way of thinking and approaching problems. Though we have orders of magnitude more power at our fingertips, real interactivity is still illusive - but it need not be.

Interactive applications have been a multi-decade goal. Flex is yet another in a long history of frameworks for delivering interactive applications, but technology alone does not an interactive application make. You need to understand the problems, existing solutions and techniques for solving the problem, and the user of the application. Fast is never enough, because the complexity will grow until the app is not fast enough and pain limits what the user can do, underscoring the perception of your app - what the pain prevents me from doing vs. what the lack of pain enables me to do. Scaling is the name of the game - let's talk about bigger problems than you can imagine.

Speakers

Roy Hall has been writing interactive graphic applications for more than 30 years. Trained in civil engineering and architecture, he started writing 3D interactive apps for stadium roof design on E&S PSII's in the late 70's. He later wrote the rendering pipeline for Robert Abel and Associates (Tron - sucking Flynn into the computer and throwing him back out); was the system architect for Wavefront Technologies (Science and Technology Academy Award for that) - and which through many morphs is now the Maya animation software; was an Assistant Professor at Cornell's Program of Computer Graphics; wrote the 'Joey 3D toolkit' extensions for Microsoft MFC in the 90's; worked on the interaction model for Sketchup; and is now the CTO for Thetus Corporation.