Peerglobe Technology Inc.

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