Flash in the Peg

Our next meeting is all set: Thursday, January 24 at 7:00 p.m. We’ll be meeting in our usual location, room W411 of Red River College, Princess Street Campus.

At this meeting we’ll take our first look at the Spry framework for developing Ajax-powered web pages. Ajax is a way of method of developing responsive, interactive web sites using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s the backbone of a lot of those fancy new Web 2.0 sites you’ve been visiting.

Spry is an Ajax framework. It simplifies the process of building Ajax-powered sites by proving a set of ready-to-use widgets, visual effects, and data APIs to greatly improve the speed with which you can develop a web site.

We’ll jump into Spry by looking at some of the widgets and visual effects available (at a later meeting we’ll take a look at the data APIs). I’ll show you some of these elements in action and walk through the process of implementing Spry elements on a web site.

(If you already have Dreamweaver CS3, the Spry widgets are built in. You can also download them from Adobe Labs.)

Also, as I mentioned in an email before our previous meeting, we’ll be holding our biannual software draw. The winner gets the Adobe software package of their choice valued at up to US $2100! If you’ve attended one of the last three meetings, wrote a book review, or presented at one of those meetings, you’ve earned raffle tickets. But remember: you have to be present on January 24 for the draw in order to win!

(You may recall that back in September I sent out an email with the rules for these raffles; if you’d like another copy of that, let me know. Since those rules weren’t established until September, I’m only counting meetings held after that email towards the draw. If you’re interested in how many raffle tickets you may have earned, send me a private email and I can let you know.)

In addition to the software raffle, we’ll have our usual draw for books, shirts, and other goodies.

As always, please drop me a note to let me know if you plan to attend.