Bleh. I have been sick for the last week and have spent a lot of time away from the keyboard and from blogging. But I was able to give both of my presentations at the MN Government IT Symposium last week and they both wen toff excellently. I got a lot of good feedback for both. Even my application security presentation, which was the last session on the last day managed to draw 20 attendees, which, I understand, is pretty good.

Anyway, here are my presentations in their original formats and in PDF format.

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Last year I spoke at the Minnesota Government IT Symposium on application security, and I thought it went really well. I ended up with 75 or so attendees (for a 2.5 hour presentation), which I thought was fantastic.

This year I have been honored with being selected to speak again on application security (this time for only one hour) and also on Adobe AIR.

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I found out late last week that I am one of several people to have had a presentation topic selected for CFUnited 2010. This is very exciting for me and is a great honor.

The selected topic title is "Understanding Security in Adobe AIR Applications" and here is the description.

Wait... You mean AIR applications have different security concerns than regular web applications? Yes, they do. Since Adobe AIR applications are desktop applications we have new security considerations to think about. Come learn how to ensure that your AIR applications are secure. In this presentation we will go over the Adobe AIR security model and some security best practices in Adobe AIR for both Flex and Ajax applications.

I am really looking froward to putting together this presentation and presenting it to one of the many fantastic conference audiences in the best developer community in the world.

Getting back on track with projects I have already started, I want to finish up this series of posts of using SQLite databases with Adobe AIR. This last section will be on using Encrypted SQLite Databases.

Why use Encrypted Databases?

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So while searching for some Adobe AIR information the other day, I came across the PDF of a book that I have been using to help me learn AIR with JavaScript. I thought maybe it would come in handy for some others, as it has for me.

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This is something I came across at work that I thought I would share, because at first, it had me scratching my head.

Internally, Adobe AIR uses webkit as a "browser" which is great, and as expected, it actually behaves like a browser, including cookie support for access to external resources. Which means that when you are making remote calls to resources, you can use cookies to maintain sessions, or for information tracking.

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Last night we did a hands-on Adobe AIR session at the Twin Cities ColdFusion User Group meeting. We had a great turnout of about 18 people and I was very happy to see so much interest in Adobe AIR. I think it is a lot of fun to work in and I am glad I piqued the interest of so many others.

As promised at the meeting, I am posting the source code of the completed application.

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I think that I have neglected to cover one of the most important parts of working with SQLite databases in Adobe AIR, and that is how to get the results out of the query. We talked about making queries, parameterizing queries, using transactions with queries. But I don't think we have covered getting the data out of the queries.

So let's do that.

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Transactions is SQL statements are something that I have come to love. I'm sure you have too. But for those that don't know what transactional control in a database management system is, we'll start with a definition.

Usually, when doing multiple SQL statements in a row in an application, each SQL statement is handled as a atomic unit and is committed permanently to the database before the next one is run. This can be very problematic when those queries depend on each other to work properly to maintain data integrity.

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On Wednesday, September 2nd, I will be presenting at the Twin Cities ColdFusion User Group meeting. At this meeting we are going to be trying something new (at least for me since I have been going to the CFUG). We are going to do some hands-on work with the technologies we love instead of just doing a lecture-style presentation.

The work we will be doing is with Adobe AIR, JavaScript, jQuery, and SQLite. Here is the description for the session:

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