Raleigh-Durham Adobe User Group (RDAUG) Meeting Recap

This month's meeting was small (nine people) but friendly and featured two speakers. The first presenter, Eric Coker of PStrat, spoke about PHP services for Flex. Eric discussed BlazeDS, an open-source, fast, scalable, Java-based remoting and web-messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time. He strongly emphasized the cheapness of an open-source technology. He also spoke about AMFPHP, PDO or PHP Data Objects and their roles, and light-weight messaging and remoting technologies. John Scalco gave the second presentation titled "Unit Testing with Flex Builder." The goal of his presentation was to show the importance of "isolating each part of the program and show that the individual parts are correct." He came prepared with examples of how to incorporate this into your Flex code. While the topic of the night was Flex, RDAUG leader Ben Farrell of 360Kid assured some of the newer members that they cover the entire range of Adobe products. Since the group is small and personal, topics are decided as needed. Some suggestions for future topics included more discussions on Photoshop design, the benefits of Adobe Contribute, and using 3D Swift with Flash. My overall opinion of the meeting and the group in general was a positive one. As a Flash developer I am always looking for peers to share information with as well as local contacts in the area. Information sharing is the bread and butter of a group like this. As a representative of our local Durham Digital Agency, I will be coming back for next month's meeting where the topic will be "Designing for Developers." If you are interested in more information, see the RDAUG website.