It seems that companies are hiring Flex developers again!  If you are in the market, let me know at nick@theflexgroup.org and i will pass on the current list.

• R.L. Polk & Co. is hiring a Flex/Java developer to be located out of Southfield, MI.  Contact Eric Haener for more information eric_haener@polk.com
• Michigan State University Telecommunication Systems Department is looking for a student employee to help enhance and maintain existing Flex applications.  Must be a full-time student at MSU for the FS/SS 09/10.  Contact nk@msu.edu for more information.

Indiana University Bloomington will host the third annual BFusion and BFlex conferences, two days of hands-on training from experts in Adobe ColdFusion, Flex, AIR, and Flash Catalyst -- technologies used to rapidly build Rich Internet Applications.

   When: Saturday, October 24 (BFusion); Sunday, October 25 (BFlex)
   Where: Kelley School of Business

BFusion is a full day of hands-on ColdFusion training. It features a true beginners track, a beginners track for programmers new to ColdFusion, an intermediate track on framework-based development, and
other hands-on sessions for intermediate and advanced developers.

BFlex is a full day of hands-on Flash Platform development with Flex, AIR, Catalyst, and Flash Builder. It also features beginner and true beginner tracks, as well as hands-on sessions for intermediate and advanced developers. New this year is a track for designers looking to use Adobe Flash Catalyst for developing Rich Internet Applications.

This is a tremendous training opportunity, especially with the cuts in training and travel budgets. Some of the sessions being given at this event are the same sessions by the same speakers as were at Adobe MAX in LA last week for as much as $595 for the day of training. This event at IUB is $10/day and is open to students, faculty, staff and the general public.

I encourage you to point your developers to this opportunity. Send your designers too! There is a full day Flash Catalyst course on Sunday. This prerelease technology allows designers to take Illustrator and Photoshop comps and turn them into Rich Internet Applications (including cross-platform, network aware desktop AIR applications) without any programming.

So send your staff and come yourself. It is a great skill-building experience and wonderful candy for the brain!

For details and to register, visit the event web site:

   http://bflex.info/

On Thursday, October 8th, 2009 we are proud to host Michelle Bagur, an Accessability and Useability expert from Effective UI.  We will be meeting in Room 161, Communication Arts and Sciences Building on the Campus of MSU.  The meeting will start at 7pm.

Ever been tasked with building an RIA that was accessible? Then you know what Michelle’s talking about. Accessibility and Flex don’t go hand in hand, despite what you might have heard.

Accessibility is getting pretty hot these days, RIAs need be accessible if they’re gonna continue to be viable. Knowing the tricks and gotchas is going to be invaluable for any Flex Developer.

After lingering under the radar for years, accessibility is now becoming a necessary consideration in application and Web site development. Recent events and increased public focus, combined with the maturation of the Flash platform, create an environment that almost demands that accessibility be built into applications. Knowledge of accessibility methodology will soon become vital to every serious Flex developer or designer’s resume.

Despite the important role accessibility plays in applications, it is still difficult to implement well in Flex. In this session, we will examine the ways Flex is and is not useful for creating accessible applications. We will discuss Adobe’s basic accessible components and accessibility methodologies, along with the importance of accessibility considerations in initial design and architecture. We will also discuss the bugs that exist in Flex which preclude accessibility. The session will highlight lessons learned in an attempt to implement accessibility late in the development cycle of an application, and offer experiential advice on how to minimize frustrations of creating accessible applications. Finally, we will look at how the accessibility implementation is slated to change with the release of Flex 4.

On Thursday Sept 10th, 2009, The Michigan Flex Users Group will be hosting a meeting called "Cool Projects in Flex."  We will be showcasing some of the common demos that are used to promote Flex like the Graphics Libraries, 3D (Papervision 3D), Audio Toolkits and much more!  We will be showing you how to create basic apps with these frameworks so you can make your own eye-poping demos!

We will be meeting in, or near room 161 in the Communications Arts and Sciences building at 7pm.  This meeting will not be broadcast live.

On August 20th, 2009, the Michigan Flex Users Group will be hosting our 2nd annual BBQ in the Park.  We will be meeting at, or around 6:30pm at John M. Patriarche Park located on the SE corner of Saginaw Highway and Alton Dr. in East Lansing (about 5 minutes north of campus).

The Michigan Flex Users Group will be supplying Hot Dogs, Burgers, Soda and Water.  If you wish anything else (including veggie-burgers, etc), please bring it with.

There will be no presentation this month in East Lansing.  Rather, we pass on the invitation from one of our sister groups, the Detroit Java User Group, that will be hosting James Ward from Adobe on August 19th, 2009.  See the below :

The Detroit Java User Group is pleased to announce ....

What: Java and Flex
Who: James Ward
When: August 19, 2009, 6:30PM - 8:30PM
Where: ePrize

Please RSVP: mckinnon.david@ymail.com

Java and Flex
Building highly interactive software that users love to use is usually a challenging endeavor. However, the open source Flex SDK and Java are a perfect combination of technologies for building very rich and highly interactive software for the Web and the desktop. The communication between the Java back-end and Flex front-end can utilize a number of different communication protocols, but the easiest and best performing is the open source BlazeDS library. This session covers the fundamentals of using Flex, Java, Spring, and BlazeDS to build rich and highly interactive software for the Web and the desktop.

James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe and Adobe's JCP
representative to JSR 286, 299, and 301. Much like his love for climbing mountains he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places. Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including: Pascal and Assembly back in the early 90's; Perl, HTML, and JavaScript in the mid 90's; then Java and many of it's frameworks beginning in the late 90's. Today he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front-ends for Java based back-ends. Prior to Adobe, James built a rich marketing and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems.

Food and Beverages sponsored by The Epitec Group
Prizes Provided by O'Reilly Media and Manning Publishing