The fine folks at SouthWest Signal will be hosting the next JaxFusion meeting. July's meeting will be covering how to integrate ColdFusion with Flex/Air applications.

We will be giving away a lot of goodies from Adobe. We hope to make this a regular occurrence again. We are also going to have a presence this year at the Jacksonville Code Camp.

Adobe released Air today, the Rich Internet Application runtime that lets run web application technology on the desktop.

I have written some flex apps that I am planning to release as Air apps. Adobe has lowered the price for Flex Builder to $249. You can upgrade for as low $99 if you have a license for Flex Builder 2.

I received the following message from Brian LeGros;

Hello everyone,

The Adobe Developers of Greater Orlando (Adogo) user group has been selected as a stop on Adobe's Flex 3 Pre-release Tour. We're fortunate enough to have Ben Forta, Adobe's Senior Technical Evangelist, speaking to the group for this leg of the tour. The meeting will be held on January 21st, 2008 @ 7:00 PM in the Oleander Room at Westgate Lakes Resort and Spa (located at 10000 Turkey Lake Road, Orlando , FL 32819, parking at The Smokehouse). We'll be giving away a copy of Flex 3 and CS3 Web Premium, a pass to CFUnited 2008, as well as lots of branded schwag from Adobe and CFUnited. Food and drink will be provided to all in attendance while it lasts. Registration for this event is available at http://adogo200801.eventbrite.com/. Additionally, more information can also be found on our website at http://adogo.us.

Since this will be the only stop on the tour in the state, we would like to extend an invitation to all of the Adobe User Groups in Florida to join us for our meeting. We are attempting to promote this event as much as possible, but our channels outside of the Orlando area are somewhat limited. If anyone is open to helping, we are definitely grateful for any cross promotions you and your groups can provide for this event.

I apologize if this email has reached you in error; I took these emails addresses from your user group's websites as well as the contact information from Adobe. If there are any questions we can answer for you, please don't hesitate to contact myself, Adam, or Max (see CC). Thanks for your time and we hope to see you all at the meeting.

-Brian LeGros

My software update feature on my older Mac showed that I had downloaded Java release 6 for Mac OS X 10.4. I got really exited until I read the release notes;

It looks like this is a series of security updates. Before Leopard was released Apple had a prerelease version of Java SE 6 on their developer site, which they took down earlier in the year. I had hoped that Apple would release Java SE 6 with Mac OS 10.5, but I was let down when it was released to find it only had Java SE 5.

Apple is known for its secrecy when it comes to releasing new products. I can understand that when it comes to certain products and software. The problem comes when you are trying to develop for a platform. Developers have to have SDKs, APIs and the other tools so they can start to develop for the platform before it is released.

Right now the silence coming from Cupertino is deafening. Apple should come out and say if they are going to continue to develop Java on the Mac so developers can start planning what technology they need to use in their future products.

I have liked Java because I could write applications that can run on any platform, whether it was Linux, Mac or Windows. If Apple is not going to develop Java on the Mac anymore, Sun needs to start developing future versions for the Mac like they do for Windows.

In the mean time I am going to start taking a harder look at Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight as alternatives.

Adobe has been up to trouble for the last three days. They have launched a new developer site, new updates to the AIR and Flex 3 betas.

I hope to have several presentations coming out based on these technologies future JaxFusion meetings.

About five months back I started working as consultant for a company called Idea Integration based here in Jacksonville. I have been doing SQL Server consulting since I arrived. The group I work in specializes in Microsoft technologies, including SQL Server, ASP .NET, BizTalk and Sharepoint. We also do consulting in legacy systems, network infrastructure and Java.

I just finished up a project, and I am available for consulting work. If you would like to contact me for consulting work, you can reach me be going to this link.