Doug Marttila, Lead Visualization Engineer at PatientsLikeMe ( PatientsLikeMe.com ) will talk about the importance of patient reported data in healthcare; the user experience and architectural challenges that PLM faced in creating a platform for all diseases; and the design and code used in creating the patient charts.

For more details go to patientslikeme.com, search for patients with specific conditions, or, click below to see two examples of public patient charts:

http://www.patientslikeme.com/patients/view/96179

http://www.patientslikeme.com/patients/view/faeroe347

PatientsLikeMe is the leading user-reported medical site in the world. With over 110,000 members, they have enormous amounts of patient reported data. In April of 2011, they released an updated version of their site which can support all of the approximately 3,500 diseases in the world.

Doug Marttila is Lead Visualization Engineer at PatientsLikeMe where he makes many of the user facing charts. He's been building charts for the web (mostly in Flash) for the past 12 years. His rarely updated blog is forestandthetrees.com.

Please join us after 6:30pm for discussion and refreshments. Talk begins promptly at 7pm.

 

 

Date & Time: May 10th, food & networking at 6:30pm, talk at 7pm
Location: Adobe's offices in Waltham - directions - mapi
Door Prizes: Many!
Dinner: Refreshments provided by Adobe. Please RSVP.
Cost: Free

Christophe Coenraets, a leading Adobe Evangelist, will be discussing and showing off the latest capabilities of the new release of Creative Suite 5.5 which includes Flash Builder 4.5, Flash Catalyst 4.5 and Flex SDK 4.5. This event will have detailed information for Designers and Developers. All are welcome.

Although FB4.5 is a point release, there are some major changes, including much more powerful cross platform development and very significant amounts of optimization for target platforms, including Android, Blackberry and iOS devices.

There are also lots of workflow and SDK changes that affect Developers and Designers. There will be ample time for questions and demonstration. Christophe is a very hands on presenter with deep knowledge of the product. He frequently answers questions by building an example on the spot.

Christophe's Bio: Christophe Coenraets is a Technical Evangelist for Adobe where he focuses on Rich Internet Applications and Enterprise Integration. He has been working on Flex since the early days of the product in 2003. In his previous role at Macromedia, Christophe worked on JRun, the company's J2EE application server. Before joining Macromedia, Christophe was managing Java, Internet, and PowerBuilder evangelism at Powersoft/Sybase. Christophe has been a regular speaker at conferences worldwide for the last 15 years. He blogs at http://coenraets.org.

 

 

Speaker: Michael Labriola at BFPUG

This month we are joining up with the Boston Flash Platform User Group which is hosting an event with Michael Labriola on Wed, March 16th.

Michael Labriola is a Senior Consultant at Digital Primates and the Lead Developer for FlexUnit 4. He has been developing Internet applications since 1995 and working with Flex since its 1.0 beta. Michael is an Adobe Certified Instructor, Community Professional, and co-author of the Flex 2, 3 and 4 Training from the Source books and Breaking out of the Browser with Adobe AIR.

As an international speaker and team mentor on Flex and AIR projects, he has consulted for many of the world’s most recognized brands. His free time is spent escaping from technology through wine and food.

Michael's agenda has not yet been announced, but the audience's interests will be a definite factor in topical focus. So come on by and bring your questions for Michael.

 

 

Speaker: David Coletta

Title: Adobe's Packager for iPhone: First Impressions

Description: Back in March 2010 it was looking like Adobe had assembled an intriguing strategy for writing an app once in Flash and publishing it everywhere from desktop to web to mobile, including the iPhone via some seriously cool technology called Packager for iPhone ("PFI") that translates Flash SWF bytecode to native ARM code. Then Apple forbade third-party dev tools, striking a serious blow to that strategy. Six months later Apple reversed that decision, revised the developer agreement, and started approving applications built with PFI for the App Store. Recently David attempted to port the ActionScript3-based core music notation engine of Noteflight to the iPad using Packager for iPhone. The short story is that, like the dancing bear, it's amazing that it can dance at all. To hear all the gory details, come to the talk!

David Coletta:

David Coletta joined Noteflight LLC in February 2010 to help build the world's only online music writing application that lets you create, view, print and hear music notation with professional quality, right in your web browser. Previously he co-founded Virtual Ubiquity, Inc. in 2006 to build Buzzword, a cloud-based online word processor on the Adobe Flash Platform that was acquired by Adobe Systems in 2007. While at Adobe David held positions as Senior Computer Scientist and Senior Engineering Manager on the Acrobat.com team where he helped build out Buzzword into an online productivity application suite. Earlier in his career he was an old-school C++ developer who built user interfaces for both desktop and web-based applications. David graduated from Amherst College in 1986 with a B.A. in Music while logging thousands of hours in the college computer center, and is very happy to finally be putting that music degree to use. David blogs at The Joy of Flex (www.thejoyofflex.com) and tweets as david_coletta.

 

 

Duane Nickull on Building Service Clients with Flex 4 (FB4)

Read the writeup of this event at http://www.irahochman.com/content/bostonfug-may-duane-nickull-service-clients-flex-4-flash-builder.

This is a hands-on coding session. Duane Nickull will take us through the ins and outs of Building Service clients with the latest Flex SDKs.

Bring your laptop!

Coverage includes the following types of service clients:

 

• simple html client
• http client
• web services client
• basic AMF clients (RemoteObject)
• basic PHP client
• advanced PHP client with Data paging enabled
• Model driven development with LC DS 3

We will also have a software drawing at this event.

**

Presenter: Mr. Duane Nickull

Duane Nickull works as a senior technical evangelist for Adobe Systems, Inc. The main focus of his professional career (http://www.nickull.net) has been to work for both the United Nations CEFACT committee and OASIS for the purposes of writing and building new architectures for global integration of multiple systems.

Since 1996, he has worked on multiple enterprise architectures including many service oriented architectures (SOA) within various standards bodies including W3C, UN/CEFACT, OASIS and others. He has also contributed to many SOA papers and articles on service oriented architecture. His focus has shifted towards many web service standards in recent years.

He has worked on many other interesting technologies including the first contextual XML Search Engine, an Alternative fuel hydrogen project and the new UN/CEFACT eBusiness Architecture and related technologies.

He is also a self-described lifelong musician, cynic, traveler, athlete, author and first class antagonist who exclaims that "Punk lives through ideas and actions, not looks."

 

 

Chris Allen on Brass Monkey, Seriously Fun Control

Writeup of the event can be found at http://www.irahochman.com/content/bostonfug-april-writeup-chris-allen-brassmonkey-wifi-game-controller

Infrared5 President and CEO, Chris Allen will show their new cutting edge Brass Monkey SDK for creating cross platform experiences. Brass Monkey is at its core a networking library for interconnecting mobile devices and computers over a local WIFI. Brass Monkey's primary use is as a controller, where a mobile device, say an iPhone, uses its built in controls like an accelerometer to communicate to a web based experience (Flash/Flex, Unity3D). Chris will show how to use the SDK, and demonstrate many of the possibilities this new technology opens up to developers.

Presenter: Mr. Chris Allen Chris Allen is president and CEO of Infrared5 and is co-project manager and a Java developer for the open source Red5 project. He has extensive experience developing for the Flash platform and java. In addition to his heavy involvement and leadership in the open source Flash community, he has been a software architect and developer for major enterprises including Cambridge Technology Partners, Mass General Hospital and Scholastic.

Dan Rinehart on AIR 2.0

At this talk Daniel Rinehart will discuss his experiences and insights into developing for the 2.0 release of the Adobe AIR player. Daniel is known for his programming and architectural skill and his talk will be dense with worthwhile nuggets.

Daniel Rinehart is a software architect at Allurent, where he is helping to build a new generation of innovative online shopping experiences using Flex. He has worked in the field of software development as an engineer and architect for the past eight years. Prior to joining Allurent, Daniel worked at Ruckus Network, Towers Perrin, and BiT Group. While at BiT Group he worked for clients, including Cisco and Dell Financial Services, among others. He can be reached online at http://danielr.neophi.com.

Libby Freligh on This Business of Flex

This talk is a departure from our usual technical focus, and we think it will be an especially exciting one. Our speaker, Libby Freligh, was a key player in the original definition, creation and launch of the Macromedia Flex platform, and our talk will take a fascinating look at the genesis of the platform from a business and product management angle, as well as a look at the present and the future.

Libby will start with a perspective on the early history of Flex platform, discussing how Flex evolved from an initial concept into the major force in RIA development that it is today. The rest of the talk will provide a business perspective on current RIA development, looking at how the landscape has evolved and how Flex and other platforms have essentially changed the terms of how software gets built now. Libby will also talk about her experience since Macromedia in designing and developing RIA products that successfully address the online market.

Libby Freligh is a passionate, customer-focused business and product development manager with 17 years experience in the software industry. Her work revolves around business results, new market development, customer-centered product development and an intense enthusiasm for exciting technology and engineering. She was Senior Product Manager for the Flex platform at the time of its launch by Macromedia. After that, Libby worked developing the European market for Brightcove, and most recently was VP of Products for Internet Broadcasting Corporation.

Jeffry Houser, creator of Flextras

Jeffry Houser,creator of Flextras, will walk through the process of optimizing a Flex component for re-use by other developers. He will discuss the component lifecycle, metadata, ASDocs, custom styles and events, and other very useful things.

**

Jeffry Houser is the creator of Flextras, a set of interface Flex Components that save you time and help you create better Flex interfaces. He has a Computer Science degree from the days before business met the Internet and has solved a problem or two in his programming career. In 1999, Jeffry started DotComIt, an Adobe Solutions Partner specializing in Rich Internet Applications with Flex and ColdFusion.

Jeffry is an Adobe Community Expert and produces The Flex Show, a podcast that includes expert interviews and screencast tutorials. He also hosts the Flextras Friday Lunch Podcast, a weekly live Q&A session where you can get your questions answered. Jeffry has spoken at user groups and conferences all over the US, is the co-manager of the Hartford CT Adobe User Group, author of three technical books, and over 30 articles.

Christophe Coenraets of Adobe on the New Flex Release: Flash Builder & Catalyst 4

Christophe Coenraets will be discussing and showing off the latest Flex stuff just released from Adobe. The topics will include, at minimum:

• Flash Catalyst
• Flex 4 (Flash Builder 4)
• Building Data Centric Apps with Flash Builder 4
• New Model Driven Development in Flash Builder 4 and LCDS 3

To get a taste of the epic scope of this new release, watch this Catalyst demo by Kevin Lynch during his Web 2.0 keynote:

Christophe Coenraets is a Technical Evangelist for Adobe where he focuses on Rich Internet Applications and Enterprise Integration. He has been working on Flex since the early days of the product in 2003. In his previous role at Macromedia, Christophe worked on JRun, the company's J2EE application server. Before joining Macromedia, Christophe was managing Java, Internet, and PowerBuilder evangelism at Powersoft/Sybase. Christophe has been a regular speaker at conferences worldwide for the last 15 years. He blogs at http://coenraets.org.

Alex Barnett of Intuit on SaaS Models: What does this mean for Flex developers

Today, millions of Small Businesses are adopting the SaaS model. These businesses need their data to connect, synchronize and interoperate across the multiple back-office and front-office applications and services they use to run their business. How will this work? How can the cloud help Small Businesses get more out of their data and leverage the functionality of the cloud? What are the opportunities for ISVs and SaaS providers and Flex developers to connect and program against the Small Business data cloud? This presentation will describe how Intuit�s PaaS offering: the Intuit Partner Platform, is enabling a brand new class of cloud connected services, SaaS and RIA offerings for Small Businesses and partner with ISVs and SaaS providers to solve real problems for millions of Small Businesses. In this session we�ll also be demonstrating how Flex developers can use their skills to take advantage of this huge opportunity.

Alex Barnett leads the developer relations team at Intuit, responsible for Intuit Developer Network (IDN) and developer engagement and evangelism for Intuit Partner Platform (IPP). Previously Alex was VP, Developer Community at Bungee Labs after spending five years at Microsoft Corp. in various community program management and marketing positions. Before joining Microsoft, Alex was at a director at a leading digital marketing and Web development agency (Bluewave) for seven years. Alex played professional cricket for eight years (Middlesex and Lancashire). He blogs at http://alexbarnett.net/blogand Twitters at http://twitter.com/alexbarnett

Mansour Raad on Building a Flex Apps with ArcGIS

Mansour Raad will talk about using the Flex API for ArcGIS. This session will be very hands on where he will show you how to build mapping applications to thematically render parcel and other info. He'll also show you how to extend the api for other mapping features such as clustering, labeling, and heat maps.

You can check out his blog here: http://thunderheadxpler.blogspot.com/

Building a Flex-based Music Notation Editor

Joe Berkovitz, founder of music software startup Noteflight, will talk about the technical underpinnings and lessons learned in building a full-fledged music notation editor on the Flex/Flash platform. Topics covered will include: MVCS architecture, audio synthesis, non-linear visual layout algorithms, and automated testing. A short excursion covering the new Moccasin open source framework for graphical editors might be worked in. And be sure to bring your Zippo lighter so you can hold it up and request "Free Bird"!

Prior to founding Noteflight, Joe Berkovitz was a Chief Architect at Allurent, Ruckus Network and Unveil Technologies. Even earlier, he was part of ATG for eight years developing many core components & originating a number of key ideas with patents granted or pending. Prior to ATG, Joe worked at Houghton Mifflin; Stratus Computer; and Bolt, Beranek and Newman, among others.

Using the Flex Automation Framework

Eric Hilfer, Director of Software Engineering at Tom Snyder Productions, will speak about testing with the Flex Automation Framework. Automated testing is an essential component of developing and maintaining software applications created by large teams. Flex Builder Professional provides an extensive framework for recording and replaying GUI-level user interactions for automated testing of Flex applications. Although the documentation mostly references using HP Quick Test Pro as the recording and playback agent, the framework can be used by other commercial testing agents, like RIATest, or agents that you can build on your own. Eric will describe his own journey of adapting the automation framework for testing Timeliner® XE, a massive AIR application, and will share some best practices (and some not-so-best practices) for extending the framework beyond the core Flex components. Some powerful examples will be shown of using RIATest to run data-driven regression testing of Timeliner® XE.

Building an application for both Flex and AIR

David Coletta from the Buzzword group at Adobe Systems will be talking about how to build applications that run in both the Flex and AIR runtime environments, using substantially the same codebase.

What happens when you take a large, complex codebase like Buzzword that was originally targeted for web browsers, and adapt it so it can also run as an AIR application? In this talk, David will address the technical and architectural challenges of adapting a codebase so that SWF binaries can be shared between the browser version and the AIR version. First, UI considerations: for example, the browser environment favors everything happening inside a single window, while AIR supports multiple document windows. Then, technical and architectural issues: for example, the Singleton pattern works better in a browser environment where every window is its own instance of the Flash Player, but not so well in a multi-window AIR environment. He will cover techniques for abstracting areas of the code that must call AIR-only APIs. And he'll also talk about packaging code into modules that load over HTTP in the browser version and load from the file system under AIR.

How To Build Powerful Editing Apps Quickly With Degrafa And Object Handles

Marc Hughes, Manager of Software Engineering at Tom Snyder Productions, will show us two open source Flex libraries, Degrafa and ObjectHandles. Degrafa is a declarative graphics framework that lets you create graphical assets in MXML. He'll show us how to create some visuals without any bitmap or vector based art assets and then use those to skin Flex components. ObjectHandles is a library he wrote to allow developers to easily create a Flex application that allows movement & resizing of onscreen objects by users. Marc will give a quick introduction to that and show off a few examples of it in use. After the introduction of these two libraries, he will demonstrate how to build a basic diagramming application using Degrafa and ObjectHandles. You can see the application in action right below this paragraph:

Degrafa is intended to make Flash graphics features in Flex easier to use while increasing creative freedom. Delivering better designer and programmer collaboration & productivity, code reuse, development cycles, readability and optimization are all goals of the project.

Quoting www.degrafa.com: "The focus behind the Declarative Graphics Framework (Degrafa) is to bring the graphics classes up a level to provide a common ground between developer and designer within Flex, and enable the graphics classes to become first class citizens within the Flex framework."

In addition to his work at Tom Synder, Marc is also a winner of Adobe's AIR Derby with his Agile Agenda application. He is the creator of the ObjectHandles and Pulse Particles Degrafa libraries and you can read his blog at Marc's Musings.

The previously scheduled speaker, Eric Hilfer, will be back on a later date to speak about using the Flex Automation Framework.

Advanced CSS Techniques and Programmatic Skinning

TR Coffey, Design Lead at Allurent

At Allurent we're constantly being challenged to design and develop Flex components and applications that, frankly, don't look like Flex components and applications. With Adobe's out-of-the-box Halo theme and CS3 graphic skinning templates and ScaleNine's ever-growing library of downloadable skins, we have a lot of options and support to draw upon when defining the look and feel of our Flex applications.

But, sometimes we just have to build what we want from scratch. As a result, we've developed component skinning techniques and a Designer/Developer workflow that emphasizes Programmatic Skinning and some slightly unorthodox use of CSS. The result: applications that are visually rich, light-weight and easily customizable.

This talk will begin with a brief overview of Flex skinning followed by an in-depth discussion of programmatic skinning and advanced techniques for making CSS work harder for you.

George Weiss CTO, Albert Doolittle, and Universal Mind consultant, Kevin Kazmierczak, discuss Flex in Financial Services

Managing the increasing flows of market data being distributed worldwide has always been a challenge to financial institutions. Now, driven in part by expanding markets, regulatory requirements and the need to remain competitive, even small to medium sized firms have had to join the quest. One such firm, Weiss Special Operations, has found that a marriage of two nascent technologies, Complex Event Processing (CEP) and RIA development platforms, has created an application development environment capable of meeting this challenge while, at the same time, accelerating the overall application development process.

Adobe's David Coletta on Buzzword's Automated Testing Framework

Here's David's description of his talk:

Buzzword is a full-fledged word processor built in Flex, with a complete document and layout model that allows WYSIWYG document editing as you type. One of the first things we built in Buzzword was an automated testing framework that runs inside the application. Our testing framework can execute hundreds of tests that verify the correctness of the document and the layout model as each word processing command is executed. Over the course of developing Buzzword, we have invested much time and energy maintaining and enhancing this automated testing framework. In its current incarnation, it is possible to record, edit, train, and execute tests by operating Buzzword.

In this talk I will review the document and layout models and explain how they fit into the architecture of the product, demonstrate the test recording and training functions, and go under the hood to show how it was built and how it works.

The Boston Flex User Group's first event will be held on the evening of Tues, April 8, 2008 at Adobe Systems' Newton office at 7 pm.

Developer Peter Farland of Adobe Systems will be giving us the inside scoop on the new Open Source Flex SDK, which not only includes the Flex 3.0 Framework but also the entire set of SDK tools, exposing a lot of source code and internal tooling that has never been publicly released before.

Did you ever want to change the Flex Framework and rebuild your own distribution? Do you ever wonder what the Flex compiler is up to when it's chugging away? Are you just plain curious? Please join us!