If you’re in Orlando this week there’s a lot of cool stuff going on. Monday is our monthly Adogo meeting with a very interesting talk on Ajax by Brian LeGros. He’ll be going over some Ajax basics and move onto some “push” Ajax, a topic that’s extremely useful but rarely covered. A majority of ajax sites use polling to know when to retrieve data from the server, but with a push service, such as BlazeDS, you can cut out the polling altogether. It’s something I’ve been wanting to learn about for a while, so I’m looking forward to his talk. If you’re curious about the code, it’s available in the Adogo SVN repo, and a recording of the presentation will be available online shortly after.

Thursday is the monthly Orlando Ruby Users Group meeting, which this month will be taking a break from Ruby in favor of Seaside, a Smalltalk framework. There’s a famous quote (by DHH I believe) referencing Seaside: “I defy anyone to come up here and use any other framework to duplicate what we’re doing in Rails as quickly. Except Avi.” — Avi being the creator of Seaside. Although I haven’t messed with Seaside this looks like it’ll be an interesting talk. Don’t know if I’ll make it though, due to the BIG EVENT for the week.

Thursday night through Saturday night is IzeaFest, which is looking better and better. Aside from a fast growing list of attendees, there’s some exciting speakers including Merlin Mann from 43 Folders, Jeremy Shoemaker from ShoeMoney, John Chow a lots more. The scavenger hunt on Saturday night should make for some fun stories after the fact as well.

Even though BarCampOrlando is a few months behind us, there’s still plenty to do this summer for us developers. It seems like in the past 2 years or so more and more events are springing up in town — exciting stuff. Finding new events can sometimes be a little tricky though. There’s a few ways to make this a little easier.

Gregg Pollack from Rails Envy maintains a Google Calendar titled Central Florida Tech Events which is probably the easiest way to stay up to date. You can search for it within Google, or just add it there (or to iCal) and always know what’s coming up. For a one single stop for what’s on the agenda is does most the work for you. As the Orlando community is getting more organized though, there are a few other places that also have listings. Doterati, taglined Central Florida’s Click (I still stand by statement that you need more kerning in the word click), is was recently started as an open network for usergroups and various other IT and computer related groups in the Orlando to gather together. Florida Creatives has a wiki for some events and local resources that aren’t listed elsewhere, but overall it needs more adoption to make it work.

So what events am I looking forward to?

• Probably Orlando Ruby Users Group tomorrow with talks on Rails security and Git.
• Adobe Developers of Greater Orlando meeting on July 1st where we’ll be continuing the code session from last time which turned out to be a great success
• IZEA Devasaurus on July 2nd should be a lot of fun and hopefully bring a lot of passionate people together.
• IZEAFest 2008 should be another one just around the corner. It’s still a little ways off — Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 07:00 PM – Saturday, September 13, 2008 at 09:00 PM. 3 day conference for bloggers and advertisers with quite a few speakers I’d heard about.
• Ruby Conf has also been announced to be in November, and once again in Orlando. Not sure if I’ll be able to make it, but definitely going to try for that one. It’ll be

Know of any other big events in Orlando that are worth checking out? Or other places to find out what’s going on?

Interesting in going to an Adogo meeting? Tomorrow night we have two great talks — Maxim Porges with his cf.objective() talk, “Flex – No Frameworks Required”, along with Steve Gongage presenting a Flex ap he’s worked on with some tips and suggestions from his experience. It should be a fun, Flex filled night. If you’re going please do us a favor and register. Gives us a good idea of if there’s enough interest for the talks or if we should just skip them and meet up at BJs for some beers.