Rich internet applications seem to be all the rage these days, so after learning about JavaFX, it makes sense for us to check out how some of the more established technologies fulfill on the RIA promise.

For our April 14th meetup, we are fortunate to have Walt Schlender come and talk to us about Flex, a new platform for developing web applications built on top of the Flash.

"Flex may be the platform which drives the next wave of web-based applications. For Java developers, building views in Flex with Java on the back-end is particularly exciting since many of a Java developers' skills translate into Flex. Come see some Flex development in action - see how close it is to Java and how many of the techniques you already know can be applied to building applications which will give you a whole new set of exciting development opportunities."

Walt's presentation will be assisted by Chet Haase, from Flex SDK team at Adobe Systems, so you will also get to hear about Flex directly from the source!

Note that this event will be hosted at Google's San Francisco office (345 Spear St @ Folsom St). Thanks to Kevin Nilson, who put me in touch with his friends at Google, we now have a location that better suits our group's appetite for Java. No more waiting lists, sitting on the floor, and standing in the corners... so be sure to thank Kevin (our long-time member, and co-leader of SV-Web-JUG) and Ossama (who will be taking care of us from the Google's side) for making this happen!

Pizzas will be sponsored by Diana Henninger from TEKsystems and refreshments will be brought in by Thao-Linh Bui from Vircon!

Be sure to stick around until the end to get a shot at winning books and other interesting goodies from Sun and O'Reilly, as well as a copy of IntelliJ IDEA from JetBrains.

Special thanks goes out to Arnel Comiso for making this event a reality!

See you on April 14th at 6:30pm!

About Walt Schlender
Walt Schlender is an entrepreneur and self described "Flex Evangelist" living in Berkeley, CA. He has been working with Flash and Flex for the past 3 years building applications to help companies wow web site visitors with next gen tech. Over the past year, Walt was the CTO of Mousecloud, LLC and architected and built a HUGE web conferencing application in Flex. He now is spending time as a hired gun helping companies build Flash and Flex projects.

About Chet Haase
Chet Haase is a Senior Computer Scientist on the Flex SDK team at Adobe Systems, where he is currently working on animation functionality. In a former life, he worked on Java client technologies and co-wrote the book "Filthy Rich Clients" about graphical and animation programming techniques for better Java applications. You can find more from Chet at http://graphics-geek.... and http://chetchat.blogs....