Peerglobe Technology Inc.

I’ve uploaded the photos of Joomla Doc Camp. You can see them at Peerglobe profile here. The event was finished with almost 17 participants at NetworkHub.

The camp event was very open and the people attending it were from different venues. In fact most of people attending were not developers, and merely web users who were interested in learning how to create dynamic web sites using Joomla.

Rastin from RMDStudio did great as usual. By creating a friendly environment, he made the participants feel comfortable so they can focus on documenting their learnings.

As the camp moderator, Rastin did not enforce rules and objectives by telling the participants what features or what sections to work on. But rather he told the participants to feel free and just play around with a Joomla-based sandboxed website. That way the participants can choose to work and document features and sections of Joomla with which they are most comfortable.
Now we are looking forward for the next Joomla event sometime in February. This one would be a bug squashing event. Checkout RMDStudio Blog to get more information on the list of participants and the interview of Bruce Byfield with the rastin.

Here we are back at the Network Hub writing user documents for Joomla! 1.5. This event follows a series of events sponsored by RMDStudio and Peerglobe Technology and Joomla! community in Vancouver. We had our first event in early December. That was a bug squashing event.

Today we are about 10 people gathered at Network Hub in Vancouver plus other Joomla! users in different cities around the world connected through IRC. We are writing documents on how to use Joomla! from a non-developer perspective. This event spans three days from 19 to 21 of January.

The purpose of the doc camp is to allow non-developer Joomla! users share their insight on how to use Joomla! with the Joomla! community. This event contributions will be documented in the Joomla! wiki at http://docs.joomla.org.

If you need more information on this event check out the Joomla! news here. If you are a Joomla! user or just interested in learning Joomla! don’t hesitate to drop a line on how to use a specific feature in Joomla! in your own words. Definitely your contribution will be useful to other Joomla! users.

I will be posting the pictures of this event later. stay tuned.

On Wednesday night we had our first Adobe AIR/Rails Workshop at Network Hub. The night was great. Everyone loved it. We had about 20 developers and designers attending the workshop. The good thing about this workshop was that the speakers were giving practical and hands on training with AIR,Flex and Rails.
There were two great speakers, Atul Nagpal from Lambda Solutions and Doug Schmidt from EffectiveUI. The night was split into three segments and a break time when people had coffee and doughnuts.

Atul showed how easy it is to get started on developing in flex. Its like HTML but with different markups and ActionScript instead of JavaScript. He also demoed some AIR applications. AIR apps are basically written in Flex but compiled to be run in Adobe Runtime on the desktop.

After that Doug took over and went over the ebay AIR app. the ebay AIR app was developed by EffectiveUI in collaboration with adobe. It’s currently in the beta version. you can download it at AIR ebay showcase

Also, Doug showcased his famous AIR Dryerfox app, a rotating browser window wrapped by a dryer image. Its really cool and funny but contains a lot of good pointer to help you learn AIR. You can download the app from Doug’s blog

Before the the night ended I went over my own flex app that I did the night before for the first time. Its a rails app with a flex front. I showed how easy it is to create a rails app from scratch in a matter of minutes. Download the source code and start hacking it away. I also lightly touched on some REST stuff and how rails can support Restful API with aid of a plugin (Simply Restful). In addition the Flexible Rails plugin made by Peter Armsrong made it possible for a Flex app to talk with a rails back-end in REST protocol. If you like to know more about Rails/Flex come to the ruby camp 2008 on January 26 and Peter Armstrong’s Flexible Rails seminar the next day on January 27 at BCIT.

Moreover Doug brought some cool giveaway prizes. a couple of flex licenses ($250 each), a couple of flex development training DVDs ($150 each) and two company novelty underwears. That’s right underwears !!. There was a funny statement on the back of the underwears. I don’t remember the exact saying but it was something in the line of “Don’t focus on the back-end too much”. Thank you Doug.

After the workshop we headed down to Steamworks where had beer and socialized. Doug paid for the beer. Thank you doug again.

I would like to thank you all for coming to this event. Thank you Atul and Dough for sharing your insight and experience in AIR/Flex development. Thank you NetworkHub (Robert, Ellissa and Minna) for giving us the space, as usual you are guys are great, and thank you <a href=”http://www.rmdstudio.com”>rastin</a> for taking so many wonderful pictures.

I’ve uploaded the pictures to the Peerglobe facebook profile. You can view them at Peerglobe Technology facebook profile

Here is a source code of a simple rails/flex application. railsflexsample.zip

Basically the app consist of

1. A DB tables users with name and email field
2. a wrapper user model
3. a user controller that performs CRUD operation on the user model
4. flex client that sends action performed to the back-end server

Download the zip file and unzip into a folder.

John Paul Young felt the love in the AIR in 70s and now 30 years later we can all feel the love in the air once again. That is Adobe AIR. Peerglobe Technology joined with RMDStudio is throwing a Vancouver AIR/Flex Workshop to show you how cool AIR is ? The event is scheduled for Wednesday January 16th at the NetworkHub. So join us for this enchanted evening.

AIR is a new tool developed by Adobe that lets you create desktop application using existing web technologies. That means no more AWT or all that stuff. You just use your existing client side knowledge in Flex/Flash or just plain HTML and Javascript with your favorite choice of back-end (mine is ruby on rails) to create an application that runs on desktop, not within the browser. How cool is that ?

We will have two AIR/Flex speakers. First Atul Nagpal, a young AIR enthusiast and developer who will go through steps of creating an AIR app from scratch. He’ll be covering the interaction of AIR with server-side applications written in both PHP and Ruby On Rails. I will post the source code in the blog later. Don’t forget to bring a pen, pad and your laptop.

Next we will be hearing from Doug Schmidt from EffectiveUI. Doug already was a presenter at the AIR Camp, showcasing his famous DryerFox application. Doug will be going over his application and the development framework in AIR and more.

Also we are giving some snacks and coffee to make your stay more enjoyable. So sign up now.

You can do that either through eventbrite at http://vancouverair.eventbrite.com or if you are a facebooker you can register to the event facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=7390018276&ref=share.

Even though Peerglobe has been there for ages (2 years wow) . We don’t know why we never bothered with blogs. Probably because everybody here can only write in ruby or php and not in english. So now that we hired a writer, we can make blogs as well.

Why do we have a blog, you ask? We don’t yet but our research department is working on the case and we’ll release a statement as soon as they came up with a result.

If you like what you see here, become a fan at Peerglobe Technology profile page at http://sfu.facebook.com/pages/edit/?id=19109439944.