Bangalore FUG meeting on 23rd Aug

The next Bangalore Flex User group is meeting is going to be held this Saturday, 23rd August, 2008 at the Adobe Campus terrace near Diary Circle [here is the map]

The meeting starts at 11:00 am… See you all there 🙂

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

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 🙂

initRIA: 15 more seats added on public demand, 12 available as of now

 

 

I was talking to Mrinal and he mentioned we will be adding some more seats due to public demand for the initRIA conference and now he’s blogged about 15 seats being available.

Hurry, grab your seat, if you haven’t done so already. Looks like India is really taking big strides in the RIA domain. I was really happy to see Ryan Stewart blogging about the conference. Its going to be an awesome sunday.

Lastly, even I wanted to make an appeal to the people who earlier registered and now cannot attend due to some unforeseen reason. Please un-register so that someone else could attend in your place.

InitRIA Conference in Bangalore on 16th Dec 2007

initRIA is a day long developer conference of Rich Internet Applications enthusiasts, at HoneyWell Technology Solutions (opposite IIM Bangalore), Bannerghatta Road, Bangalore. The conference is on 16th of Dec 2007 (Sunday).

Please register if you have not done so already. There are limited number of seats and registrations will be closing soon..

I am speaking at the conference , hope to see you all there… If you are the venue, do come and chat with me. I look something like this 🙂

Flex India is going great guns

Flex India is going great guns… Gone are the times when I, Mrinal & Abdul, among others were plotting how to get Flex to take off in India. It seems like ages back when we had the first Flex Developers meeting at Bangalore to brainstorm with John Koch, about the future of the Flex Community in India. Flex India today is not only up on its feet, but its ready for the race. Here are some stats that prove it…

FlexCoders is the grapewine for all Flex Community. Its a thriving group which has more than 7500 ( 7518 to be precise) people registered. This group has earned its reputation as a prime point where people can get their questions answered. Now lets compare it with the nascent group that is Flex-India.

Flex-India started off in July 2006 (while FlexCoders has been around from March 2004). It already has 430 people registered on it. This might look like a small number, but is sizable considering the fact that flexCoders is an international congregation of Flex developers, while Flex-India is regional. Just last month, we had more than 30 people joining the group, which is a very encouraging sight.

Another exciting factor is the traffic on flex-india. Take a look at the statistics below.

I tried to compare these monthly figures as a percentage of the corresponding traffic on flexcoders. This is what came out of it (I know i could have done these charts much better in Flex, but I just wanted to learn how to create charts in Excel 🙂 )

Click on the graph to see the full stats

I couldn’t believe that the average traffic on flex-india in the last 3 months has been around 20% as much as that on flexcoders. The fact that flexCoders is about 60 times the size of flex-india, just adds to the pride. I realize that these figurers are powered by the Services Companies in India and their clients abroad, but still the fact that the Flex Developer base in India is on a steady rise is a very heartening fact.

Additionally, it is personally gratifying to see that this rise began after March 2007, when we all got together and decided to do something about the Flex Community in India. Kudos to Mrinal who has been the cornerstone of community development in India from outside of Adobe. Being a flex developer himself for SAP, his passion for Flex matches that of any engineer on the Flex Team.

The flex developer community in India is getting stronger by the day. We now have active communities in Mumbai, Pune, Chennai and Bangalore and many more mushrooming by the day. Flex is Rocking India and India is Rocking Flex… This achievement is remarkable and I congratulate everyone who have been involved. Way to go 🙂

Chennai FUG on 8th June – Pics

Being my usual self… I forgot to take pics at the Chennai FUG (same thing happened to me at Bangalore). Thanks to Uday, who rounded up who ever was left and clicked some photos…

 

We at Hey Math

After the FUG meeting with Anantaraman,

Uday & Others…

Chennai FUG on 8th June

I couldn’t write this earlier because of project deadlines… we finally have Flex 3 Beta 1 out on Adobe Labs… Go try it out.

Anyway… On June 8th,  I was in Chennai, talking in the BEA Dev2Dev Conference there on integrating Flex with BEA’s Web Logic Portal Server. I addressed a crowd of about 100 people and had a wonderful time spreading the “Flex Cheer”.

Once this finished… I headed to HeyMath Inc, where we had the first Chennai FUG. It was a pleasure meeting Mr. Anantaraman and his colleagues at HeyMath as we prepared for the FUG. While that, he showed me the work HeyMath is doing and boy, was I bowled over or what? I would definitely recommend the parents of kids between 5th and 12th classes  to take a look at HeyMath and how it would help your kid… Kudos guys.

The Chennai FUG had about 20 guys (and ladies… a sizable number at that), and I was pleasently surprised by the construction of the core. While Bangalore saw people mostly from Java, C++ & .NET background walking in… Here what we had was Flash Designers, Ruby Users along with the Java crowd.

People were talking of AS2 -AS3 differences and we had a ball of a time discussing Flex. This really seems to be an FUG that’s gonna go really well 🙂

Chennai FUG Meeting – June 8th 2007 (fixed)

I will be in Chennai on 8th June 2007, talking at the BEA Dev2Dev Techday there. Hopefully we can schedule the Chennai FUG on that day. I’m still trying to get in touch with the people there and work out the details.

I’m really excited about meeting the Chennai Flex Community….

Addendum (4th June 2007):

I have fixed the itenary with Anantaraman, who is arranging the first Chennai FUG. Here are the details…

Date: 8th June
Time: 3 pm
Location: HeyMath Inc
Century Center, #75 T.T.K Road
Alwarpet, Chennai – 600 018

You can find the Google Calender entry here…. Looking forward to meeting all 🙂

BFUG 01

Today, we had the first Bangalore Flex User Group (BFUG) meeting at Aztechsoft office near Diary Circle (in our own office building). We had, in all about 20 people (of which 9 were Adobe guys).

It started off with introductions and the usual “chit-chat” by Prayank. I pleasently surprised that most of them knew me thru my blog. It was a small group but a good start. We went around trying to get a sense of people’s expectations from the user group and the kind of interactions that we can have to make this UG a success.

Most people had just started off with Flex (as I expected to be the case). The major part of the meeting was to know opinions, pain points, concerns, reflections about Flex as a technology. Though the crowd was small we had the whole hog of people there… guys from Java background, .NET, Freshers, J2EE et al.

The rest of the time,we introduced the resources available online about Flex, places where they can get answers to their questions and concerns, how to find custom components, open source Flex initiatives. Things that came up in this regard were…

• FlexBox
• FlexLib
• MXNA
• flex.org
  
• FlexCoders Yahoo Group
• FlexIndia Google Group
• SearchCoders

Watch FlexIndia for news of when & where the next meeting will be. Mean while Harish will be doing the next APAC Wednesday eSeminar on the topic of “ActionScript 3” on next Wednesday, 6th June 2007. Will keep you guys posted on that too. You can find details of the same again on FlexIndia and possibly here on my blog too… If you have suggestions on how the UG should take shape, drop me a line… I’m more than interested in hearing your views on this 🙂