Session Descriptions

Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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).

Chief Software Architect, Quantcast
Ron Bodkin is the chief software architect of Quantcast, an open ratings service for Web sites. Ron is also the founder of New Aspects of Software, which provides consulting and training on aspect-oriented software development and effective architectures for Java. Ron is also the leader of the open source Glassbox application performance troubleshooting project.

Previously, Ron led the first implementation projects and training efforts for customers of the AspectJ group at Xerox PARC. Prior to that, Ron was a founder and the CTO of C-bridge, a consultancy that delivered enterprise applications using Java frameworks.

Vice President of Technology at Gomez
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.

Technology Director/Senior Architect @ Sun Microsystems
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).

Creator of JSON
Crock is a product of our public school system. A registered voter, he owns his own car. He has developed office automation systems. He did research in games and music at Atari. He was Director of Technology at Lucasfilm. He was Director of New Media at Paramount. He was the founder and CEO of Electric Communities/Communities.com. He was founder and CTO of State Software, where he discovered JSON. He is now an architect at Yahoo!.

Author of "Groovy Recipes" & TDD Expert
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".

SpringSource Principal & Founding Partner
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.

Application Architect - Electronic Arts
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.

Web Architect, IBM Emerging Technologies and manager of operations at OpenAjax A
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.

Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.
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.

Father of Ajax, Adaptive Path
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.

Author of Graphic Java, co-author of Core JSF, member of the JSF Expert Group
David Geary is the president of Clarity Training, Inc. (corewebdevelopment.com), where he teaches developers to implement web applications using JavaServer Faces (JSF) and the Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

A prominent author, speaker, and consultant, David holds a unique qualification as a Java expert: He wrote the best-selling books on both Java component frameworks: Swing and JavaServer Faces. David's Graphic Java Swing was the best-selling Swing book, and is one of the best-selling Java books of all-time, and Core JSF, which David wrote with Cay Horstman, is the best-selling book on JavaServer Faces.

David was one of a handful of experts on the JSF 1.0 Expert Group (EG) that actively defined the standard Java-based web application framework, and David is currently on the JSF 2 Expert Group, helping to vastly improve JSF in version 2.

Besides serving on the JSF and JSTL Expert Groups, David has contributed to open-source projects and he has written questions for two of Sun's Certification Exams: Web Developer Certification and JavaServer Faces Certification. He invented the Struts Template library which was the precursor to Tiles, a popular framework for composing web pages from JSP fragments, was the 2nd Struts committer and contributed to the Apache Shale project.

David has spoken at more than 100 NFJS symposiums since 2003, and he also speaks at other conferences such as TheServerSide Java Symposium, JavaOne, JavaPolis, and JAOO. David has taught at Java University for the past three years, and is a three-time JavaOne rock star.

Javascript enthusiast
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 ...

Principal - Easy! Designs, LLC
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.

Presentation Architect - Cerner Corporation
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.

CEO of Relevance
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.

Microsoft Architect Evangelist based in Michigan...
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.

Web Standards Evangelist
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!

Platform Evangelist w/Adobe Systems
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.

Director, User Interface Engineering at Netflix
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.

UI Architect at Orbitz Worldwide
Mark Meeker is an Architect on the UI Engineering team at Orbitz Worldwide. He leads the the UI Engineering team responsible for building the presentation tier of online travel sites Orbitz and CheapTickets in the Americas and ebookers in Europe. His focus is on building rich, interactive and internationalized sites that are standards-based and accessible. Previous to Orbitz, he helped develop Britannica.com and earned a M.S. in Software Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He rarely blogs, but when he does it is at http://markmeeker.com.

President of Zepheira
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.

Engineering Manager, YUI Team
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.

Ajax Architect @ Sun and Project jMaki Lead
Appointed as AJAX Architect for Sun Microsystems, Greg Murray is deeply involved in the Ajax movement through his participation in the OpenAJAX Alliance and promoting of Ajax throughout the world. Within Sun, Greg lead a grass roots effort advancing the integration of client-side scripting with Java technologies and is the creator and principal architect of Project jMaki. jMaki allows developers to create Ajax web applications . Greg recently contributed to the design and development of the Ajax-based Java Pet Store 2.0 Demo and helped create Java BluePrints solutions for using Ajax with Java and PHP technologies.

Co-Chair, W3C SVG Working Group
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.

President and Co-founder of Humanized
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.

President at DZone, Inc
President at DZone, Inc

Project Lead, Dojo Toolkit & Director of R&D, SitePen
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.

Managing Consultant at Foundstone
Dean H. Saxe is a Managing Consultant at Foundstone, A Division of McAfee, where he is responsible for conducting web application penetration testing, threat modeling, code reviews, secure software development lifecycle (S-SDLC) design and implementation, and project management. Prior to joining Foundstone, Dean spent more than 8 years developing web application in Java and ColdFusion in a variety of industries. While working in the banking sector, Dean's interest in application security was sparked and has grown steadily over the past five years. Dean also provides client education services as a lead instructor of these Foundstone courses: Building Secure Software, Writing Secure Code: Java/J2EE, and Writing Secure Code: ColdFusion. Dean holds the CISSP and Certified Ethical Hacker designations.

When not working, Dean enjoying hiking, cooking, homebrewing and traveling the world.

Vice President of DZone, Inc.
Vice President of DZone, Inc.

Author, speaker, software engineer focused on user interface design.
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.

Director of User Interface Engineering @ Netflix
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.

Senior Developer @ ICEsoft
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.

Forward Leaning Software Engineer
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.

Author of "High Performance Web Sites"
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.

Sr. Java Developer @ Navis
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.

Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.
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).

Manager of Yahoo! Exceptional Performance Team
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.

CTO of Emmett Labs
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.

Creator of DWR
Joe Walker is a developer and consultant working on advanced web development techniques like AJAX.

He recently developed Direct Web Remoting, (DWR) which has become the most popular Ajax toolkit for Java by making browser/server interaction intuitive for web developers. See http://www.directwebremoting.com

He currently works through his consultancy, Getahead (http://getahead.org/), which is supplying a growing number of customers with AJAX and advanced web solutions.

Technical Evanglist for Flex @ Adobe
James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe. Much like his love for climbing mountains he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places. Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including: Pascal and Assembly back in the early 90's; Perl, HTML, and JavaScript in the mid 90's; then Java and many of it's frameworks beginning in the late 90's. Today he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front ends for Java based back ends. Prior to Adobe, James built a rich marketing and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems.

Lead Developer of the Jetty Open Source Servlet Server
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.

Solutions Architect with RedHat
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.

Author of "Professional Ajax, "Professional JavaScript", Engineer at Yahoo!
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.