Speaking at the Flash Platform & CF pre-Launch event in Chennai

On the 27th June 2009, The CF & Flex User Groups in Chennai are collaborating to conduct a Flash Platform & CF pre-Launch event at Hotel Dee Cee Manor in Chennai. It is a full day event with ColdFusion and Flash Platform Sessions followed by Hands-on experience using Flash Builder and ColdFusion. Bring your laptops so that you can experience the software yourselves.

I will be there from Adobe along with Manju Kiran, a Sr.Lead Software Engineer Adobe ColdFusion team and will show exciting new features of the next generation of CF & Flash Platform.

It is a free event. Register here… Seats limited! See you all in Chennai on the 27th

Adobe nominated for Developer Awards @ GIDS – Vote

GIDS (Great Indian Developer Summit) is an annual event that happens in India (where else) featuring sessions and workshops by top companies… Me, Harish, Sujit, Anirudh and Ramesh are going to be there along with CF wiz-guys Rakshith & Hemanth for the event. We have several sessions and a workshop lined up from Adobe.

GIDS also has a Developer Awards along with it under many categories… Adobe has several products under various categories… vote for it and let Adobe outshine everyone at the awards.

• Development Environments – Flex Builder
• Web Development – Flash Platform & ColdFusion
• Mobile Development – Device Central
• Frameworks – Flex
• Collaboration Solution – Acrobat Connect
• Security – LiveCycle Rights Management ES

Trivia: CF won the best Web Development Platform last year and this time we have 7 nominations

Vote Here

The early bird catches the discount – mx:devsummit registrations open.

Register for mx:devsummit here [http://www.endtoend.in/ete2008/adobe/ria/micro]

You would see early bird discounts for well… early birds, till Sep 3rd. So, get together your colleges and register ASAP. There are also group discounts that people can take advantage of. See the chart below for all price details.

	Registration Type Early Bird/ Delegate(Before 3rd Sep) Regular Rate Per Delegate (After 3rd Sep) Individual Rs.4500. Rs.5000 2-5 delegates Rs.4000 Rs.4500 6-9 delegates Rs.3500 Rs.4000 10-14 delegates Rs.3000 Rs 3500 15 and more delegates Rs.2500 Rs.3000

One of the problems that people might have is that, according to the event website, like any of the usual conferences, Group Registration Participation Rules say that:

All group registrants must be employed by the same company.

You can’t get so many people from your company? Dont worry !

I realize that this might be a problem as a lot of places like Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad… etc have a strong Flex user community, but cannot get groups of 15 developers to come for the conference from a company. This is usually due to the small sizes of the companies themselves, compared to those in other cities.

So, I have worked with the registration desk, so that even a “community or group of individual developers”(though it sounds oxymoronish, that’s exactly what it is) to get group discounts for the event. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Make sure that all your group members register into the event website
2. One person take the responsibility of being a group leader/ co-ordinator (can be a user group manager for instance) and make a DD for the total amount for all the people after discount. Say you and 9 of your friends are signing up for a group discount, make sure that you send only one DD for the amount, in this case, for 3000×10 = Rs.30,000. Please not that if you are opting for the group discount, it has to  be in one DD!
3. Mail the DD to the address on the page
   
4. Also, send a mail out to adobe@endtoend.in and quote the community promo code “raghuonflex” in the subject and have the following info from each delegate in the body of the email:
   • Name,Company & Email  of each delegate
   • DD Details

And lo, you also can avail your discounts… So, Sign up fast. Network with fellow Flex developers to rialiaze your dreams and save money ofcourse:)

See you all at the conference…

RIA Architecture Summit 2008

The RIA Architect Summit on 3rd April 2008 was a really exciting affair. We had gurus like Ben Forta, James Ward & David Wadhwani (GM & VP Platform Business Unit, Adobe) on stage.

The event started off at a very small scale with just 100-150 people planned. But as we started inviting people the demand just went through the roof, that we had to open it up. We finally had over 400 people attending the event that saw the venue logistics being stretched to the limit.

Bangalore FUG Meeting Survey

I just saw a twitter from Mrinal (Bangalore FUG Manager) announcing a survey on surveymonkey that is aimed at making the FUG meetings better & more interesting…

Go ahead and fill it up and help us improve 🙂

While on the topic, Mrinal has arranged for some Microsoft guys to come at the next BFUG meeting and talk about Silverlight. Be there, it is going to be interesting.

Register for the event here

Adobe RIA Architect Summit 2008

It’s summit time again folks ! You might recollect the RIA Leadership Summit that happened when Shantanu was in Bangalore, which saw industry leaders from various IT Companies from across India attended the talk about Adobe’s vision and plans for the Rich Internet Application space.

Since then, the India RIA scene has been more dynamic than ever and there has been an increasing demand for insights into architecture & design principles around RIAs. As an acknowledgment to this Adobe brings “The RIA Architect Summit“.

What is in it for me?:

• Hear Naresh Gupta (MD, Adobe India), David Wadhwani (VP, Platform BU, Adobe) share the exciting future of RIAs using Flex & AIR
• Meet and learn from acclaimed evangelists James Ward & Ben Forta
• Hear about the success stories of leading IT Enterprises who have adopted Flex & AIR.
• Experience RIAs built on Adobe platforms and hear from the teams that built them

Who should attend ? :

Architects, Technical Managers and Strategic Decision Makers

When & Where? :

Date : 03 April ’08

Venue : The Chancery Pavillion, Bangalore

How do I get in?:

Register ASAP at http://adoberiarch.eventbrite.com/

Hurry! Registrations on a First Come First Serve basis…

The initRIA Conference Experience…

The initRIA conference conducted by the Bangalore Flex User Group on Sunday, 16th Dec, 2007 was just awesome. It was a platform for me to learn a lot of things, meet other fellow Flex enthusiasts and network with guys from startups who were trying out Flex. The event had a lot of people talking on several topics…

• Data Visualization in Flex – by Me
• RIAjaxified – Rakshith, Adobe
• Designing RIAs with RC pattern – Yash Mody, TeknoPoint Multimedia
• Flash for Flex developers – Bhavin Padhiyar, SAP
• Building Live Documents – An online Office suite leveraging RIA technologies by Sumanth Raghavendra and Adarsh Kini, InstaColl
• Optimizing Flex and AS3 – Mrinal Wadhwa, SAP
• Developing Flex RIAs with Cairngorm Microarchitecture Debabrata Acharjee, CapGemini
• and a Birds of a feather session

What really cheered me up was that people had flown down from Mumbai, Pune & Hyderabad for the event. We even had a couple of students coming from Tanjaore, TN. It was a platform to meet the most passionate of Flex developers in India.

The early birds..

We even had some FlashLite folks coming down. Both Vivek & Mariam are very well known people in the FlashLite Community.

Me with Vivek & Mariam

I opened the sessions with a talk on “Data Visualization in Flex 3“. If you missed it, you can catch it in the following links…

The SlideShare version of my PPT

• My AdvancedDataGrid App
• My Charts App
• You can get the source in a zipped format here…

The sessions I personally was looking forward to were the ones on Performance Tuning in AS3 by Mrinal, the Flash for Flex Developers talk by Bhavin & the talk on Cairngorm by Debabrata.

Me during my session

Mrinal in deep thought

Deb on Cairngorm

But the highlight of the day was the presentation by the InstaColl guys, where they demoed their new (and much talked about) online suite called LiveDocuments. Sumanth did an awesome job in the demo and we were all excited to see LiveDocs in action. I had heard a lot about the company and the product before the day, in connection with the famous Sabeer Bhatia. The fact that it was built in Flex made it extra sweet for us 🙂

Sumanth Raghavendra (CEO, InstaColl – Live Documents)

Live Documents in Action

I also met some very interesting people and had some very exciting discussions in the birds of a feather session. I can safely say that this was probably one of the most enjoyable conferences that I have attended… Thanks for Mrinal & Saurabh Narula (from Honeywell) for making this happen and to Abdul for the photos 🙂

Me at SAP TechEd

Today I was at SAP India for the SAP TechEd 2007 Bangalore, Community Day. I know that SAP enjoys a huge community base in India and this event was a testimonial to that. Me, Anirudh & Sunil from the Flex Team where there at “RIA Innovation Track”, which was one of the Breakout Sessions at the Commuity day. We were joined by Aravind from ZOHO, Craig Cmehil, Abesh Bhattacharjee, Thomas Jung and our very own Mrinal Wadhwa from SAP.

I started with an introduction to RIA and to the Flex Technology and its advantages. The Mrinal took over and did an introduction to AIR. What I really liked about his presentation is the fact that it was done in AIR 🙂 We showed some cool demos and I think we really captured the audience’s attention.

What happened in between was that we overshot our time and spilled into Craig’s Session. But Craig generously asked us to continue and said that his session on “Twitter meets NetWeaver” could be found on SAP Dev Net or SDN. Then, Thomas Jung just came in and stole the show after that. He introduced FLOB. FLOB or “Flex On BSP” project represent a library of SAP BSP Extension Elements that generate Adobe Flex instead of the standard BSP Extension output of HTML and JavaScript. It is really awsome and you had to be there to see it. What makes it even more impressive is that his idea is very simple.

An empty, compiled SWF file is loaded into the Flash Player within the Browser. UI elements are then added to the framework via JavaScript and the Adobe Flex/AJAX bridge (FABridge). This allows for a simple interface relying only on JavaScript to manipulate the User Interface. To make the process even easier, these BSP Extensions encapsulate the JavaScript and map concepts to BSP friendly constructs. BSP Server Side Eventing and Data Binding are both supported even with the Flex User Interface Elements. This is available as an open-source project on Google Code.

Aravind also introduced the cool ZOHO APIs that you can play around with. Then it was Abesh’s turn to show a cool demo of how to “Jazz up your xMII UIs using Flex“. It was a neat demo with him connecting to an SAP backend to get data into a Flex DataGrid and then into a LineChart.

We then ran short of time and so I promised to share my code and do a e-seminar of how to write it. Here’s fufilling the first part of the promise. Here’s the application code of the Flex App…

Application | Code

Assets: data.xml | background Image

I will ask Mrinal to post his AIR Code too. I will try to record the eSeminar asap and get it out to you guys…

 

Manipal Flex Workshop…

I did a 2 day workshop on Flex at Manipal Institute of Technology, my own alma mater. It was fun to go back to Manipal after all these years and to do a workshop. The students were very enthusiastic (as always) and had a great 2 days at the workshop.

Day1 started off with Flex Basics of MXML & AS and then went onto talk about controls/ containers and how to design your app. We did a mockup of the Orkut.com UI and then talked about styling the application and using states to enhance them.

Day 2 was all about Data. We talked about the event model and how to display and manipulate data using ArrayCollections. There were hands on sessions on ItemRenderers and I introduced ItemEditors to them. The fag end of the workshop was how to get data into your app, so that you can complete your application. They also played around with CSS and Debug modes in FlexBuilder.

The workshop ended on a high note where I put a challenge before them to create a picture viewer, complete with states and itemRenderers. An Adobe T-Shirt was in the offing. People took onto the task with immense interest and in the end there was a close finish between two guys. The winner got the TShirt and also got to explain his code to the audience.

The only downside of the whole workshop was the connectivity (which sucked to say the least) and the bus journey (for me) to and fro Manipal -Bangalore, which was a back-breaking exercise due to bad roads. I then roamed around the campus, reliving memories and eating at those favourite joints from my college days.

Nostalgia is so sweet 🙂

Lets look at the code now 🙂

 

The winner explaining his code

 

 

You could alter your code like this

 

 

With some of the workshop attendees

 

 

The football ground at Manipal

 

 

At End Point – The Quintessential Manipal snap