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

On June 18th, we are very proud to host Terrance Ryan, one of the evanglists from Adobe.  Terry will be updating us on some great technologies that Adobe is working on, including Adobe Flex 4 SDK, Adobe Flash Builder, Catalyst (formerly known as Thermo), and Adobe ColdFusion 9.  

Our meeting will be held on the 3rd Thursday of the month (this is a week after our normal meeting date), at 7 PM in Room 147 in the Communications Arts and Sciences Building on the campus of Michigan State University.

Make sure to spread the word!  We are going to be getting a great sneak peak at some of the coolest RIA technologies to hit the market this year!  You can download the flyer to the left here.

See you on the 18th!

PLEASE RSVP HERE.  We would like to get an accurate count of people so that we can order the correct amount of Pizza.  Thanks!

On May 14th, we will be having our monthly Flex Users Group meeting.  We will be talking about building Better Help Engines.  Have you ever visited a website with a complex input form that just confused you?  Sometimes there will be an online help system, and if you are lucky, a way to chat with a representative.  We will be showing you how to build your own system so that your customer support group can see what your customers are experiencing, and allow them to help your customers through your application.

The meeting will be held in room 161 Communication Arts and Sciences, on the campus of Michigan State University.  The meeting will start at 7pm, and should be broadcast and recorded (contact Nick for more information on the live streaming).

On April 9th, 2009 Ryan Stewart an Evanglist from Adobe, and a columnist from ZDNet will be visiting us at the Michigan Flex Users Group on the campus of Michigan State University.  Ryan will be talking to us about Flash Catalyst, a new, unreleased product from Adobe that will be used to prototype Flex and RIAs.  We may also get a preview of what is coming up with the next version of Flex (codename Gumbo).

The Flex Group will be providing a light meal, and we will be going out for drinks after the meeting.

We will be meeting on the campus of Michigan State University, in 1281 Anthony Hall, promptly at 7pm.  This is NOT our normal location. 

See you there!