January Meeting Tomorrow

Happy New Year everyone! We're a bit late in posting this, but tomorrow night is our first meeting of the year, and also the first to be held on Thursday. In addition to the schedule change, we are also moving to a new room: 5-17 (in the same building, room 17 on the fifth floor). We just learned today that there is one complication with the switch to Thursday night, which is the fact that Cal Poly requires visitors to obtain parking permits. We are attempting to find out if we can be granted exemptions instead, and will post an update with the outcome...

As far as the meeting agenda is concerned, we are fortunate to have Mike Brunt as our speaker this month, presenting a talk titled "Installing, setting up and using SeeFusion, a practical workshop including load-testing and reporting-analysis". Mike is one of the world's top authorities on issues related to performance and troubleshooting with ColdFusion servers:

Mike Brunt has been coding web applications since 1993 and began using ColdFusion at version 1.54 in 1995-6. He designed and created the first on-line international industrial equipment mart in 1997 (Power Bank International) at the request of a Cummins Engine Company subsidiary. In 1998 he worked with Kodak and Lucent Technologies to create a pioneering web based TeleRadiology cross-consult portal when Radiologists and Primary Care Physicians could review patient medical images. Allaire recruited Mike in 1999 to join a ColdFusion-JRun consulting team. This team was dispatched world-wide to help Allaire then Macromedia clients design and troubleshoot ColdFusion applications. In 2001 Mike co-founded his own company -- Webapper Services LLC. He now works independently, helping ColdFusion users worldwide to create strategies which ensure Enterprise level Adobe Server applications can be scaled effectively and efficiently.

Anyone with an interest in finding out how to optimize their servers to maximize performance and eliminate bottlenecks will not want to miss this, as it is an opportunity to learn from a master of the art of server tuning. Hope to see you all there!

Meeting Tonight!

Our next meeting is tonight, December 5th, and we're very fortunate to have Laura Arguello and Nahuel Foronda from AsFusion as our speakers:

Laura Arguello is CTO and co-founder of AsFusion, a company specialized in the development of Rich Internet Applications. Laura is best known for her contributions to the Adobe developer community made through her blog at asfusion.com. She has also written articles about Flex and ColdFusion for the Adobe Developer Center, the WebDJ and the CFDJ. She holds a degree in Information and Computer Science with specialization in Software Systems from the University of California, Irvine and her main interests are usability, software architecture and finding or creating tools that make the developer’s life easier.

This is going to be another session on Flex development, and will again feature some hands-on learning. Laura has mentioned that she is going to continue to work with the application that Kalen Gibbons prepared for our last meeting -- if you weren't in attendance last month, you can read his summary and download the files here.

This promises to be another great evening, so bring your appetite for Flex and pizza and we'll see you tonight!

December Meeting: Laura Arguello & Nahuel Foronda

Our next meeting is one week from today, on Friday, December 5th, and we have another great evening of Flex learning in store for attendees. We are very excited to announce that our presenters will be Laura Arguello and Nahuel Foronda, the experts from AsFusion and authors of the Mate (pronounced "Ma-tay") Flex framework.

Laura and Nahuel will be presenting on developing Flex applications using Mate, which is a tag-based, event-driven framework. Mate has been rapidly growing in popularity among Flex developers, and is frequently praised as being a very approachable, easy to learn framework that is also very flexible and powerful.

If time allows, there will be a hands-on portion on the agenda, so please bring a laptop with Flex Builder installed if you wish to participate (we do have a few configured workstations available in the meeting room as well). We hope to see you all there!

Web Directions North Conference

Any CFUG members who are interested in advancing their knowledge of web design and development outside the realm of ColdFusion may want to attend the Web Directions North conference held this upcoming February in Denver, Colorado. They look to have an interesting lineup of prominent speakers from the industry, and offer both hands-on workshops as well as sessions of interest to both designers and developers, followed by a group ski trip to Breckenridge.

Kalen Gibbons Flex Workshop Online

Kalen has posted a great tutorial online about his flex workshop he did this month at our CFUG.  The meeting was great and Kalen had great materials.  You can now find his resources in our resources page.

If you are just starting with Flex, give his tutorials a shot!!