Mark Meeker

UI Architect at Orbitz Worldwide

Mark Meeker is the Principal UI Engineer for Orbitz Worldwide. At Orbitz, he leads the development of the presentation layer for their family of travel websites around the globe. He focuses on building interactive and usable interfaces which follow web standards and are accessible. He is a client-side developer at heart, but spends a lot of his time finding better ways for the presentation layer to play well inside large web applications.

Previously, Mark was Technology Director for Critical Mass where he led site development and architecture for numerous clients. He got his start on the web at Encyclopaedia Britannica by helping to launch Britannica.com. He has an undergraduate degree from St. Norbert College and earned a Masters in Software Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology.



Presentations

Going Global

We live in a global economy. One of the most logical ways for a site to expand is to market their services to users in other countries. But moving into new countries and markets means supporting multiple languages and multiple currencies, with each offering their own unique set of challenges. Localizing (or localising) isn't as simple as swapping translated text. From managing content of different lengths to displaying that text right-to-left, making your site work around the globe offers unique challenges.

This session will look at the impact of internationalization on the client-side and what it takes to make your user experience a global one.

Front-End Craftsmanship

Front-End developers face challenges unique to their field, so how do the best practices from other software disciplines apply to the worlds of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript? The introduction of Ajax and the capabilities its brings has caused the presentation code of web applications to grow at a rapid pace. What should we be doing to insure that our code can be as clean and maintainable as possible while still doing everything that is needed?

This session will cover how to tackle the presentation layer's unique challenges, look at ways to avoid code rot and keep the code clean and maintainable, and find ways to apply these tips to your code today.

Moving Forward with Progressive Enhancement

The new browsers on the block have all the bells and whistles you want to take advantage of today. That is, if it weren't for those old decrepit browsers (and some mobile devices) that never seem to go way. By leveraging Progressive Enhancement you can start using those new features and still deliver a working site to everyone.

In this session, we will learn about the principles behind Progressive Enhancement, apply it on some popular Ajax patterns, see some unexpected benefits including improved code quality, and look at support among popular JavaScript libraries.

The Reality of Third-Party JavaScript

It sounds too good to be true and probably for good reason. You add a single line of code to each of your pages and it will magically do anything including serve ads, providing user and marketing analytics, displaying a widget, or even go so far as handling some major site functionality. But what impact does this "simple" script include have on your site's performance, security or user experience?

This session will look at the benefits and the risks with including third-party JavaScript, provide a checklist to identify and address such risks, and look at what the future holds in this area.

Making the View Layer Presentable

With the introduction of Ajax and the improved capabilities of web browsers, the view layer of today's web applications are becoming increasingly complex. In a Java application, this can make the JSP layer a brittle integration point that both presentation and application developers look to avoid.

This session is targeted at web application developers who want to make their view layer easy to develop in and maintainable. In this session you'll learn how to best separate your application and presentation code, how to structure your view layer to support rich applications and tips to help presentation layer developers work better on the server side.