Speakers

Brad Abrams was a founding member of both the Common Language Runtime, and .NET Framework teams at Microsoft Corporation where he is currently the Group Program Manager for the UI Framework and Services team which is responsible for delivering the developer platform that spans both clients and web based applications as well as the common services that are available to all applications. Specific technologies owned by this team include ASP.NET, Atlas, and Windows Forms.

Brad has been designing parts of the .NET Framework since 1998 when he started his framework design career building the BCL (Base Class Library) that ship as a core part of the .NET Framework. Brad was also the lead editor on the Common Language Specification (CLS), the .NET Framework Design Guidelines and the libraries in the ECMA\ISO CLI Standard. Brad has been deeply involved with the WinFX and Windows Vista efforts from their beginning

Brad co-authored Programming in the .NET Environment, and was editor on .NET Framework Standard Library Annotated Reference Vol1 and Vol2 and the Framework Design Guidelines

Tom Ball is a distinguished engineer with the Developer Products Platform at Sun Microsystems, Inc., working on JavaFX tools. He has presented advanced technical talks at several JavaOne conferences, including the first JavaOne in San Francisco.

Previously, Tom spent two years as part of the NetBeans team, integrating Java modeling technology researched while at Sun Laboratories. He also served as the Tools Architect for Sun's iPlanet division, and spent seven years as a key member of JavaSoft's core, AWT and Swing teams. He designed the first Java debugger API, rewrote the Windows AWT for JDK 1.1, and helped design Swing and the 1.1 AWT event model.
-Nandini

Tom has over twenty-five years industry experience; eighteen years experience with object-oriented languages and tools, the last twelve focused primarily on Java (starting when it was still called Oak).

David Boloker is a Distinguished Engineer and Chief Technical Officer for Emerging Internet Technologies in IBM Software Group. Previously, he held the position of Chief Technical Officer for Java Technologies in Software Group. David is recognized in and outside IBM as a technical leader in the Internet software space guiding IBM's investments as well as internal product development. David's responsibilities include building IBM's technical Internet strategy, working with internal IBMers to develop the appropriate products for the Internet space, researching new areas in software design as well as guiding a group of researchers. Additionally, he spends about a third of his time working in the venture capital and startup communities partnering and discussing various trends and directions in the internet and gaming areas. Previous to joining Software Group, David worked at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center and the Cambridge Scientific Center doing research in the area of remote distribution and control of hardware and software systems, dynamic I/O configuration of mainframe operating systems and secure internet gateways.

Ryan Breen is the Vice President of Technology at Gomez, the leading provider of Internet application performance information. After graduating from Duke University with computer science and economics degrees in 2000, he led a team creating a suite of web performance management technologies, including a Java-based web browser emulation platform.

Using these tools, Ryan has worked with hundreds of top Internet companies to measure and manage the performance of their web applications. As more customers have moved to Ajax technologies, Ryan has helped them define performance best practices applicable to the new development style.

Bob Byron works for NeXplore Corporation, a corporation dedicated to radically improve the online experience. He has been using AJAX technology in development of NeXplore's innovative social search engine. A veteran of client and server side development, Bob has an extensive background in the various techniques involved in bringing an application through the entire life cycle to get it to market.

Bob is a current contributer to the Dojo Toolkit. He has been coding in Java since soon after its release in the mid 1990's. In 2006, Bob was the President of the Java Metroplex Users Group in Dallas, preceding that by two years as Vice President. He ran the Java Developer's Group for 5 years bringing bringing the latest techniques and expertise to attendees.

Max Carlson first began programming at age six, writing his first game in BASIC at age eight. Max currently teaches at the San Francisco Multimedia
Studies Program and is Lead Runtime Architect for the OpenLaszlo group at Laszlo Systems, a San Francisco software company he co-founded five years ago. Before that, he worked for a series of startups and at Excite@Home where he pioneered the use of dynamic Flash content for the broadband portal and worked on DHTML and Flash applications for broadband customers.

Ludovic Champenois is a Technology Director and Senior Architect at Sun Microsystems, and has been with Sun and Java for the last 11 years. He is one of the tech lead and architect on Sun's Application Server and is responsible to ensure best in class developer experience for Java EE programmers with Sun Application Server and tools. (NetBeans and Eclipse). Ludovic is also heavily involved in leading Sun's open source initiative (Projects GlassFish, Ajax jMaki, Phobos, OpenSolaris and SAMP).

These days Patrick's main interests are Google AdWords, Google APIs, REST and SOAP, Javascript, Ruby and Ajax. Previously he's bee working on portals, blogs and syndication feeds at Sun Microsystems, AOL and Netscape. He's the co-founder of ROME - Atom and RSS utilities in java, an open source library designed to make writing syndication applications in java easier.
More on his blog at http://blog.chanezon.com/

Scott Davis is the founder of ThirstyHead.com, a training company that specializes in Groovy and Grails training.

Scott published one of the first public websites implemented in Grails in 2006 and has been actively working with the technology ever since. Author of the book Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java and two ongoing IBM developerWorks article series (Mastering Grails and in 2009, Practically Groovy), Scott writes extensively about how Groovy and Grails are the future of Java development.

Scott teaches public and private classes on Groovy and Grails for start-ups and Fortune 100 companies. He is a regular presenter on the international technical conference circuit (including No Fluff Just Stuff). In 2008, Scott was voted the top Rock Star at JavaOne for his talk "Groovy, the Red Pill: How to blow the mind of a buttoned-down Java developer".

Prior to Zimbra, Scott was CTO of BEA Systems where he was the principal architect of the technology strategy for the WebLogic product family, which drove the company from $61 million in revenue for the year prior to WebLogic's acquisition to over $1 billion. He was also one of BEA's top spokespersons with customers, business partners, analysts, and the press. Scott came to BEA in 1998 via the $200+ million acquisition of WebLogic, a pioneer in Java and web application technology. He is widely credited with helping put together the J2EE standard, launching the Web application server category, launching the Java Community Process, and driving the web services collaboration with Microsoft and IBM. Prior to WebLogic, Scott was Principal Technologist for Transarc (acquired by IBM), a developer of distributed transaction and information sharing systems. In addition to working on Internet infrastructure since 1991, Scott has managed teams focused on sales, marketing, product management, and standards. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science and B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Keith Donald is a principal and founding partner at SpringSource, the company behind Spring and a division of VMware. At SpringSource, Keith is a full-time member of the Spring development team focusing on web application development productivity. He is also the architect behind SpringSource's state-of-the-art training curriculum, which has provided practical Spring training to over 10,000 students worldwide.

Over his career, Keith, an experienced enterprise software developer and mentor, has built business applications for customers spanning a diverse set of industries including banking, network management, information assurance, education, retail, and healthcare. He is particularly skilled at translating business requirements into technical solutions.

Nicholas Eddy has spent several years working in various facets of software engineering ranging from development of mobile client to server applications. Nicholas Eddy began his career in mobile application development after obtaining his degree in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University. He later moved to Yahoo! where he helped architect the server component of their videogames site. Nicholas Eddy is currently an application architect at Electronic Arts where he has built a robust JavaScript framework founded on the principles of Object Oriented design patterns to support Electronic Art's digital downloader application.

Many moons ago, at the tender age of 14, Cal touched his first computer. (We're using the term "computer" loosely here, it was a TRS-80 Model 1) Since then his life has never been the same. He graduated from TRS-80s to Commodores and eventually to IBM PC's.

For the past 8 years Cal has worked with PHP and MySQL on Linux OSX, and when necessary, Windows. He has built on a variety of projects ranging in size from simple web pages to multi-million dollar web applications. When not banging his head on his monitor, attempting a blood sacrifice to get a particular piece of code working, he enjoys building and managing development teams using his widely imitated but never patented management style of "management by wandering around".

These days, Cal's hobby is photography. As a photographer, Cal is a pretty good programmer. He continually tries, none-the-less, to improve his skills.

Cal is currently based in Nashville, TN where is the full-time father of two and fills the rest of his day as the Editor of DevZone, for Zend Technologies.

Cal is happily married to wife 1.23, the lovely and talented Kathy. Together they have 2 kids who are infinitely more intelligent but not nearly as entertaining as his two dogs, Sparky and Linus.

Cal blogs at http://blog.calevans.com.

Jon Ferraiolo is a member of IBM's Emerging Technologies group where he manages operations and leads various activities in the OpenAjax Alliance. Before joining IBM, Jon worked at Adobe for 13 years where he was an architect, engineering manager and product manager on multiple products and where he participated in various standards activities.

Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery.
Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis.
He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

Thomas Fuchs is a software architect from Vienna, Austria. He's been building web applications since 1996. Thomas is the author of script.aculo.us, a cross-browser JavaScript framework featuring advanced Ajax UI controls, visual effects and other niceties, and a core development team member of the influential Ruby on Rails web development framework. He's also a contributor to Prototype, an object-oriented Ajax/JavaScript framework.

He wrote the "Web 2.0" chapter on Ajax development with Rails for the best-selling Agile Web Development with Rails (Pragmatic Programmers) book.

Next to writing about web application development on his blog mir.aculo.us, he currently is busy building fluxiom, an ajaxy web application, as a member of wollzelle, a Viennese design and programming shop.

Jesse James Garrett is the Director of User Experience Strategy and a founding partner of Adaptive Path, the world's premier user experience consulting company. He is author of The Elements of User Experience (New Riders), and is recognized as a pioneer in the field of information architecture. Jesse's clients include AT&T, Intel, Crayola, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, and National Public Radio. Since starting in the Internet industry in 1995, Jesse has had a hands-on role in almost every aspect of Web development, from interface design and programming to content development and high-level strategy. Today, information architects around the world depend on the tools and concepts he has developed, including the widely acclaimed "Elements of User Experience" model. He is co-founder of the Information Architecture Institute, the only professional organization dedicated to information architecture. He is also a frequent speaker and writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including New Architect, Digital Web, and Boxes and Arrows.

Nate Grover has spent nearly a decade building rich, dynamic web interfaces, including Ajax-style components on platforms where it should not have been attempted but somehow they worked anyway. In 2004 he founded his own consultancy Simple Dynamics, specializing in building rich-client interfaces.

Nate enjoys camping with his sons who are not yet old enough to appreciate getting away from it all but he hopes someday they'll see that Spiderman cartoons just don't compare. Actually, Nate also enjoys watching Spiderman cartoons with his sons ...

After getting hooked on the web in 1996 and spending several years pushing pixels and bits for the likes of IBM and Konica Minolta, AARON GUSTAFSON founded Easy! Designs, LLC, a boutique web consultancy. Aaron is a member of The Web Standards Project (WaSP), serves as Technical Editor for A List Apart, is a contributing writer for Digital Web Magazine and MSDN, and has amassed a library of writing and editing credits in the print world, including AdvancED DOM Scripting (Friends of Ed, 2007) and Web Design in a Nutshell (3rd Edition, O'Reilly). In addition to
appearing at Rich Web Experience, Aaron is a regular on the web conference circuit and is frequently called upon to provide web standards and JavaScript training in both the public and private sector. He blogs at easy-reader.net.

Photo by Cindy Li.

Kevin Hakman, author of The Four Quantum States of AJAX, is product director for TIBCO General Interface, the award winning Enterprise AJAX and Rich Internet Application framework and toolkit. Kevin Hakman pioneered AJAX in the enterprise co-founding General Interface in 2001. Since that time General Interface (a.k.a. “GI”) has been powering Web applications that look, feel and perform like desktop applications, but run in the browser at Fortune 500 and US Government organizations. General Interface was also the first to use its own toolkit to provide full visual tooling for AJAXsolutions when it released it’s 2.0 version in 2003. TIBCO Software Inc. acquired General Interface in 2004 to extend its vision for service oriented applications to the end user. Kevin is a contributing author to the Web Services Journal and the AJAX Developers Journal.

Clint Andrew Hall is a Presentation Architect at Cerner Corporation in Kansas City. He is currently the lead prototype engineer for web solutions following several years as the Presentation Architect for ePrescribing (eRx) and the Community Health Record (CHR). He spends what little spare time he has on various web gadgets, photography and blogging random thoughts. His website is located at http://www.clintandrewhall.com.

Stuart Halloway is the CEO of Relevance, Inc. (www.thinkrelevance.com). With co-founder Justin Gehtland, Stuart helps companies adopt agile, as well as innovative technologies such as Clojure and Ruby on Rails. Stuart is the author of Programming Clojure, Rails for Java Developers, and Component Development for the Java Platform. Prior to founding Relevance, Stuart was the Chief Architect at Near-Time, and the Chief Technical Officer at DevelopMentor.

Josh Holmes is an Architect Evangelist with Microsoft. Prior to joining Microsoft last October, Josh was a consultant working with a variety of clients ranging from large Fortune 500 firms to smaller sized companies. Josh is a frequent speaker and lead panelist at national and international software development conferences focusing on emerging technologies, software design and development with an emphasis on mobility and RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Community focused, Josh has founded and/or run many technology organizations from the Great Lakes Area .NET Users Group to the Ann Arbor Computer Society and was on the forming committee for CodeMash. You can contact Josh through his blog at http://www.joshholmes.com.

Having achieved a modicum of balance after her midlife crisis, Molly decided to finally get a job. She is now a Web Evangelist focusing on developer relations for the upstart Norwegian browser company, Opera Software.

Earlier in life, Molly avoided a regular job including those silly start-up ventures and chose instead to write a lot of books and articles and stuff on Web standards, and talk a lot about them, too. She now avoids the former, while the latter is an ongoing inevitability.

To learn more about Molly and her work, you can check out her blog at http://molly.com/ or interact with her on Twitter @mollydotcom. Better yet, come have a chat F2F at RWE Orlando 2009!

Kevin Hoyt is a Platform Evangelist with Adobe Systems, Inc. Passionate about engaging user experiences, you'll most often find him meeting with customers, speaking at conferences, presenting online seminars, or just enjoying the chance to share ideas and brainstorm with other developers. When not on the road, Kevin enjoys spending time with his family, photography and general aviation.

CTO / Founder of Mochi Media LLC, creator of MochiKit.

Bruce Johnson is Tech Lead of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). He joined Google in 2005 as a founding member of Google's engineering office in Atlanta, Georgia. Prior to Google, Bruce was Director of Engineering at AppForge, specializing in cross-platform mobile development tools.

Sean Kane is the Director of User Interface Engineering at Netflix, where he leads the development of Netflix's pioneering and award-winning web UI, and overall UI development strategy. During his tenure, the Netflix website has been rated #1 in customer satisfaction by independent researchers five consecutive times.

Prior to joining Netflix in 2002, Sean led the UI engineering team for the Kleiner Perkins ebusiness startup Bigvine.com. Bigvine's UI was recognized in Forbes 2000 "Best of the Web", Inc. Magazine, and in Newsweek's "Top 103 Web Sites". Previously, Sean developed leading-edge web interfaces at internet search pioneer AltaVista, and developed web applications for AllBusiness.com and the first online education application for the California State University, Chico.

Nik Krimm is a Senior Architect at Orbitz Worldwide. He has spent five years driving the UI Engineering team, building world class user experiences and the technology that powers them, for Orbitz and CheapTickets in the US and ebookers throughout Europe. His passion is empowering developers building high-quality, standards-based rich user interfaces.
Prior to Orbitz, he cut his teeth at spectacular web flameout marchFirst, and built advanced SVG applications at eMac digital.

Howard Lewis Ship is the creator and lead developer for the Apache Tapestry project, and is a noted expert on Java framework design and developer productivity. He has over nineteen years of full-time software development under his belt, with over ten years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java. Lately, he's been dipping his toes into alternate languages, including Clojure.

Howard is the author of Tapestry in Action for Manning Publications (which covers Tapestry 3.0). He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, a novelist.

Howard is an independent consultant, offering Tapestry training, mentoring and project work.

As senior vice president and chief software architect, Kevin Lynch leads Adobe's Platform Business Unit, which is focused on advancing the company's software platform for the creation and delivery of engaging applications and content to any desktop or device. Lynch is responsible for the company's ubiquitous Portable Document Format (PDF), Adobe® Reader®, and Macromedia® Flash® Player, as well as alignment of Adobe's servers and tools with the company's technology platform. Lynch also oversees Adobe's developer relations program, including the integration of customers and partners in the development process through Adobe Labs and customer advisory councils.

Dustin Machi is Director of Training & Development at SitePen, a consultancy focused on the development of web applications, exceptional user experience, and pushing the limits of the web. In addition to leading the charge on SitePen's high profile client development, he also plays the primary role in Dojo training & education for SitePen's private and publicly held workshops. Dustin is an active contributor to the Dojo Toolkit and Operations Lead for the Dojo Foundation's many
projects. Prior to signing on with SitePen, Dustin was the Planning and Development Lead at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech. A software developer since youth, Dustin's career been spent focused on systems administration and high performance computing.

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 12 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is a member of the JCP, reviewer for technology publishers including O'Reilly, author of the DZone Maven RefCard, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His experience includes successful J2EE, SOA, and Web Service implementations for real estate, financial management, and telecommunications firms, and several published open source libraries.

Matthew jumps at opportunities to evangelize and educate teams on the benefits of open source. His current interests are Cloud Computing, Maven, iPhone, Distributed Version Control, and OSS Tools.

Matthew resides in Denver with his beautiful wife and baby daughter, who all are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado offers.

Steffen Meschkat joined Google in 2004 and currently works on maps. He earlier co-founded ART+COM AG and datango AG. At ART+COM, he worked on industry funded application research projects of Virtual Reality and, since 1993, the WWW. For datango, he built the client side components of the navigation suite, a technology that augments web applications by simulated user interaction fragments. He has an MSc ("Diplom") in Physics from Humboldt University in Berlin.

Eric Miller is the President of Zepheira which provides solutions to effectively integrate, navigate and manage information across boundaries of person, group and enterprise. Most recently, Eric led the Semantic Web Initiative for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT. During his work at the W3C, Eric's responsibilities included the architectural and technical leadership in the design and evolution of the Semantic Web. Responsibilities also included working with W3C members to develop global Web standards and conventions that support Semantic Web requirements and to establish liaison with other technical standards bodies and related industries to ensure compliance with existing Semantic Web standards and collect requirements for future W3C work in this area. Eric was instrumental in connecting organizations using Semantic Web technologies to allow them to collaborate on best practices in using these technologies.

Eric Miraglia has been authoring social web applications since 1995, when he began developing interactive writing spaces for universities; his Speakeasy Studio & Cafe was used by more than 100 universities between 1997 and 2004.

Since 2003, Eric has been a part of Yahoos web development community. In 2005, he joined the newly formed YUI team where he serves as an engineering manager. In a few short years, YUI has come to underpin some of the most trafficked websites in the world, including among many others Yahoo's front page, Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo, and Yahoo Finance properties. Eric has led the effort to make YUI the best-documented open-source JavaScript library and founded the YUI Theater to help provide worldwide access to many of the great events and speakers who come to Yahoo from around the world of web development.

William Morris has over 15 years of experience in the software industry, delivering products to both developer and consumer audiences. As vice president of Products and Technology at AOL, Morris oversees products including AOL Blogs, AOL Pictures, AOL’s Webmail, as well as core infrastructure products.

Prior to working on AOL consumer products, Morris worked in various positions at the Sun | Netscape alliance, focusing on Identity Management Services, including LDAP Directory Servers. Before joining Netscape, he worked at Borland International, focusing on international expansion and delivery of the RAD developer products and Borland Database products.

Morris attended Amersham College in the UK before starting his software career and joining Ashton-Tate Europe.

Aaron Newton is a product manager, developer, interface designer, and writer. He is a contributor to the MooTools Javascript framework - where he writes code, the documentation, free online tutorials and the first Mootools book published by Apress. His experience includes founding music startup, Epitonic.com, launching CNET's Download.com Music, and several years product managing application development for various projects at CNET Networks. He is currently the lead User Experience at Cloudera in San Francisco, CA.

Vic has an extensive background in computer applications that include markup languages, document management and workflow systems. Vic has spent over 20 years developing mission critical applications and solutions in industries such as aerospace, legal and transportation. Over the past several years, Vic has been a valuable resource to developers with expert advise, practical tips and tutorials in TIBCO's General Interface RIA suite.

TIBCO provides software and services that help companies orchestrate assets across their enterprise in real-time. TIBCO General Interface leverages the asynchronous communications, javascript, XML and DHTML ("AJAX") capabilities present in the ubiquitous Web browser so that you can deliver rich internet applications (RIAs) with no applets, plug-ins or installation of client/server frameworks.

Nandini Ramani is the Community Leader for openjfx and was actively
involved in launching JavaFX in May 2007. She is involved in the
development of XML based standards, as Co-Chair of the W3C Scalable
Vector Graphics working group and as a member of the W3C Compound
Document Formats working group. She is also a member of several graphics
and UI related expert groups in the JCP. Prior to joining the CTO
office, Nandini worked in the Graphics and Media team in the JavaME
group and hardware Architecture and Simulation team in the Accelerated
Graphics group.

Aza has over six years of professional interface design and consulting experience. He is the son of Jef Raskin, the inventor of the Macintosh project, and so has 22 years of informal interface design training. Aza gave his first talk on interface design at his local San Francisco chapter of SIGCHI at the age of 13, got hooked, and has been speaking ever since. By the age of 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; by age 19, he was coauthoring a physics textbook because he was too young to buy alcohol; and at age 21, he started drinking alcohol and co-founded Humanized. Aza has also done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated in math and physics. For recreation, he does Judo, speaks Japanese, and invents in his lab. He also enjoys playing the French Horn, which has taken him all over the world. Be warned: Aza is an incorrigible punster, so please do not incorrige.

As Director of User Experience and the first employee of SitePen, Torrey oversees all UI and visual design and has been at the core of SitePen's success since the beginning. Self-taught, Torrey has a keen understanding of both development and interaction design. His ability to assess and design for technical limitations makes him an invaluable asset to the SitePen team. Torrey's previous stints include work with Renkoo, ActiveGrid and Loomia.

Tom is a founder and developer at 280 North, a company dedicated to advancing the state-of-the-art of rich web applications. He's one of the creators of the Cappuccino framework and Objective-J language, as well as the Narwhal server-side JavaScript project.

President at DZone, Inc

Alex Russell served as Project Lead for the Dojo Toolkit from 2004 to 2008 and is Director of R&D at SitePen, a consultancy focused on the development of web applications, exceptional user experience, and pushing the limits of the web. Currently, he serves as President of the Dojo Foundation, an organization that supports development of several high-quality, open source, JavaScript projects and distributes them under liberal terms. Prior to joining SitePen, Russell was a senior engineer at JotSpot and Informatica where he helped both companies build highly interactive, web interfaces. His earlier, open source involvement included stints as editor of the OWASP Guide to Building Secure Web Applications and primary author of the netWindows DHTML toolkit.

Christian Schalk is a Developer Advocate and works to promote Google's APIs and technologies. He is currently engaging the international Web development community with Google's new OpenSocial API. Before joining Google, Chris was a Principal Product Manager and technology evangelist at Oracle in the Java development tools group. Chris also co-authored the book: "JavaServer Faces, The Complete Reference" published through McGraw-Hill-Osborne. Chris was also one of the original members of the Open Ajax alliance and helped Oracle and later Google join the alliance. Chris has spoken on Web, Java and Ajax development at numerous Oracle, Java and Ajax conferences, as well as Google related events including Google Developer Day and recently at Google IO.

Dylan Schiemann is CEO of SitePen and co-founder of the Dojo Toolkit, an open source JavaScript toolkit for rapidly building web sites and applications, and is an expert in the technologies and opportunities of the Open Web. Under his guidance, SitePen has grown from a small development firm to a leading provider of inventive tools, skilled software engineers, knowledgeable consulting services, and top-notch training and advice. Dylan is a contributing author to the O'Reilly book "Even Fast Web Sites". Dylan's commitment to R&D has enabled SitePen to be a major contributor to or creator of pioneering open source web
development toolkits and frameworks like Dojo, cometD, DWR, and Persevere. Prior to SitePen, Dylan developed web applications for companies like Renkoo, Informatica, Security FrameWorks and Vizional Technologies. He is a co-founder of Comet Daily, LLC, a board member at Dojo Foundation and a member of the Advisory Board at Aptana. Dylan
earned his Masters in Physical Chemistry from UCLA and his B.A. in Mathematics from Whittier College.

Vice President of DZone, Inc.

Nathaniel T. Schutta is a senior software engineer focussed on making usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written two books on Ajax and speaks regularly at various No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, universities, and Java user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages.

Bill Scott is the Director of User Interface Engineering at Netflix, the world's largest online movie rental service. At Netflix Bill is guiding the UI Engineering team's efforts to continue Netflix's excellence in user experience, improve client performance and refactor the presentation tier to use the latest best practices for both the DHTML layer as well as the Java tier.

Bill is the co-author of the O'Reilly book Designing Web Interfaces: Principles and Patterns for Rich Interaction. The book covers 75+ interaction design patterns, several anti-Patterns organized into six design principles for designing rich interfaces.

In addition, Bill is a frequent speaker at conferences and workshops around the world discussing the nuances of good design and the challenges of great engineering.

Previously, Bill led engineering for Yahoo! Teachers, a web 2.0 community allowing teachers to gather, organize & share web resources and lesson planning. In addition, as an Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo! he focused on spreading the goodness of "rich and sane" Ajax design & development. At Yahoo! Bill was also the Design Pattern curator where he launched the public version of the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library (http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns).

Before Yahoo! Bill led User Experience at Sabre Airline Solutions and co-founded Rico (an open source Ajax framework, openrico.org.) For 20 years Bill has bounced back and forth between design and engineering projects, creating products in areas as diverse as video games, widget libraries, war gaming, IDE tools, airline management and Web consumer sites. His musings can be found at http://looksgoodworkswell.com.

Scott Shattuck is the Architect and lead developer of TIBET™, a "100% pure JavaScript" Client/SOA framework.

His first AJAX application was written in 1997 using form-based REST, JSON, and 50,000 lines of JavaScript to drive 100 screens in Nav4 and IE4.

In 1999 he began work on TIBET and, over the past 7 years, has helped TIBET grow into an application platform that includes everything from a full meta-object system to XML standards support for XMPP, XForms, XML Schema, XInclude, XML Base, and more.

Prior to his work on TIBET Scott developed commercial software for the NeXT platform including the products DBCommander™, Dataspace™, and LiquidData™ for DBSA Inc. and served as the lead system/network administrator for the Human Genome Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Deryk has been involved in the IT industry for 20 years teaching, writing documentation, and programming. His experience ranges from designing and building large distributed systems to assembling technology stacks for mobile devices for companies of all shapes and sizes. Currently a Senior Developer at ICEsoft, he's working on the open source ICEfaces product, concentrating his efforts on AJAX push, scalability, and portlets.

Ken Sipe is a Technology Director with Perficient, Inc. (PRFT), IBM's largest service partner, where he leads multiple teams in the development of solutions in the SOA, Web 2.0 and portal domains, on both the Java and .Net platforms.

Ken was the founder of CodeMentor, where he was the Chief Architect and Mentor, leading clients in the execution of RUP and Agile methodologies in the delivery of software solutions.
Ken has a deep need to be highly diversified. Ken often works with IT executives on high-level strategic roadmaps, currently geared around service oriented architectures (SOA). Ken also likes to keep his hands "dirty" in the code, which has him on a regular basis, pairing or otherwise producing code. Ken is regularly requested by clients that know him to "rescue" projects, either through the streamlining of processes or the rapid production of code.

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a mentor and a trainer. His experience has spanned the online games, defense, finance and commercial domains with security consulting, network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary. He is President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

Steve works at Google on Web performance and open source initiatives. His book, High Performance Web Sites, explains his best practices for performance along with the research and real-world results behind them. Steve is the creator of YSlow, the performance analysis extension to Firebug.

Steve previously worked at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he blogged about Web performance on Yahoo! Developer Network. He was named a Yahoo! Superstar. Steve worked on many of the platforms and products within the company, including running the development team for My Yahoo!.

Prior to Yahoo!, Steve worked at several small to mid-sized startups including two companies he co-founded, Helix Systems and CoolSync. He also worked at General Magic, WhoWhere?, and Lycos. In the early 80's, Steve caught the Artificial Intelligence bug and worked at a few companies doing research on Machine Learning, including several publications and conference appearances. He received a B.S. in Systems Engineering from the University of Virginia and a M.S. in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University.

Etienne Studer is a Senior Java Software Developer at Navis LLC, world-wide market leader of Marine Terminal Operating Systems, based in Oakland. Starting his Java developer career at Canoo in Switzerland, he joined Navis three years ago and has been working on architectural decisions, framework infrastructure, and application development for Navis' next-generation products. Etienne is an expert in UltraLightClient (ULC), IntelliJ IDEA, and TeamCity and has spoken at various conferences and JUGs in California on behalf of JetBrains.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. He is author of ".NET Gotchas," coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer," author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" and "Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

Tenni Theurer manages the Yahoo! Exceptional Performance team, making products faster, better, and more efficient. She speaks regularly at conferences and recently published a series of performance blogs on Yahoo's User Interface Blog. Prior to Yahoo!, Tenni worked in IBM?s Pervasive Computing group involved in developing high performance enterprise mobile solutions. She worked directly with customers on large-scale deployments and was involved in marketing and competitive research, as well as performance development. Tenni holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego.

David Verba is the Technology Advisor for Adaptive Path and the Chief Technical Officer of Emmett Labs. His many years of technical leadership and architecture experience cover a broad range of projects and strategies, including Sun, Java, Oracle, and a variety of open source technologies.

David served as Director of Technology for WholePeople.com, a large e-commerce initiative by Whole Foods, Inc., and was a core developer for CodeZoo.net, a web site for programmers sponsored by O’Reilly Media. He also provided essential technical leadership to Measure Map, a free web service (now part of Google) that tracks blogs’ traffic stats.

Rich Waters is a senior software architect at Ext JS (http://extjs.com). He is a frequent presenter at Web 2.0 and Ajax technical conferences. He brings over 10 years of experience building web sites and applications, on a wide range of back-end systems from Ruby on Rails to Lotus Notes/Domino. He spends much of his time providing Ext services such as onsite training and development assistance.

Dustin Whittle spends most of his time creating web based solutions that streamline business processes. He has been working with PHP for over six years, and is an active part in the PHP community. He is currently focused on helping develop the symfony project by contributing new features, bug fixes, and plugins. Dustin Whittle is currently a technology consultant based out of the United States.

Mike Wilcox is a software engineer for of one of the top AJAX companies in the United States, SitePen Inc., which is comprised of the original contributors of the Dojo Toolkit and other open source technologies. As co-founder of the JavaScript user group in Dallas, Club AJAX, Mike is a regular speaker with presentations that include "The JavaScript Programming Primer" and "'That's not Flash?' Native Browser Vector Graphics".

Mike is a key developer for the new Deft project in Dojo that implements most of the Flash-based components used in DojoX, like the File Uploader and the Video and Audio controls. He is also a primary contributor of the Dojo extensions for Adobe AIR. His latest project is a vector-based drawing library, which he hopes can be used to push the boundaries of browser user interfaces.

For more information, read Mike's blog at http://www.sitepen.com/blog/author/mwilcox/ and visit http://clubajax.org/

Greg is the lead developer of the Jetty open source servlet server and a member of the experts group for the servlet specification from the Java Community Process. Greg has contributed to Geronimo, JBoss, activemq, DWR and other open source projects. Born in Sydney in 1964, Greg graduated from Sydney University with an honours degree in Computer Science in 1986. Since then he has worked as developer, designer, team leader and architect on varied problem domains including telecoms and WWW. Greg is the founder of Mort Bay Consulting and the CEO of Webtide.

James Williams is a Solutions Architect for the JBoss Division of Red Hat. He is an avid Open Source evangelist that just happens to make a living doing what he loves most, educating others on how they can better use Open Source to make all of their wildest dreams come true.

James is also an active Open Source contributor for several projects including Seam and JBoss ESB. He is a big believer in Open Source "chrome", often used as a term of contempt and sometimes used in conjunction with 'fluff'. He prefers to think of chrome as the shiny object that draws your attention to a truly wonderful work of art.

Chris Wilson is the group program manager of the Internet Explorer Platform at Microsoft. He's worked on web browsers since 1993, when he co-authored the first version of NCSA Mosaic for Windows. Since 1995, he's worked on Microsoft's web platform. In this 13-year-running saga, he's inflicted good (first implementation of Cascading Style Sheets in IE) and bad (overlapping <b> and <i> tags) on the world, and figures his karma will be even by 2012 the way he's going.

In his free time, he enjoys photography and hiking with his wife and one-year-old daughter, and scuba diving in the chilly waters of Puget Sound as a PADI Assistant Instructor. With any free money, he replaces the cameras he's destroyed by taking them underwater for dive photography. Occasionally he remembers to share his thoughts on his blog.

Richard D. Worth is a UI developer in the Washington, DC area. He is one of the lead developers of jQuery UI, a component framework built on top of jQuery, designed to make Rich Internet Applications as simple as jQuery has made Ajax. Richard is also a co-author of the upcoming book 'jQuery Cookbook'.

Nicholas C. Zakas is a principal front end engineer at Yahoo!, where he works on the Yahoo! front page. He is the author of two books, Professional JavaScript for Web Developers and Professional Ajax, (the latter is in its 2nd edition, the former will have a 2nd edition by the end of the eyar) as well as over a dozen online articles on JavaScript.

Nicholas began his career as webmaster of a small software company, transitioning into a user interface designer and prototyper before moving fully into software engineering. He moved to Silicon Valley from Massachusetts in 2006 to join Yahoo! Nicholas can be contacted through his web site.

Kris Zyp is a research and development associate with SitePen, a forward-thinking company that is committed to building and enhancing the open web. He represents the Dojo foundation on the EcmaScript 4 committee. Kris is the lead developer of the Persevere project and the JSON Schema format. He is actively researching and developing technologies in Ajax REST client/server architecture, JSON-RPC, JSONPath, JSON Referencing, and JavaScript persistence. He is also a contributor to Comet Daily and is working on RESTful HTTP Comet approaches.