Session Descriptions

Douglas Crockford - Creator of JSON

JSON

JSON is quickly becoming the world's most popular data interchange format. It is simple, textual, and is able to represent the data structures used in modern programming languages.

JavaScript: The Good Parts

Hidden deep inside of JavaScript is an elegantly beautiful programming language.

With Ajax, a name was given to immediately interactive distributed applications, and the focus of innovation has moved from the browser makers to the web developers. We are seeing now an explosion of application patterns and styles.

Bill Scott - Creator of Rico & Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo!

Anti-Patterns - Designing for a Poor Web Experience

Sometimes it is most instructive to look at design patterns in reverse-- as a set of anti-patterns. In this new talk, Bill Scott will explore the common mistakes that designers & developers make when attempting to craft a rich web experience.

Prototyping the Rich Web Experience

In this talk, Bill Scott will first survey a range of tools & techniques for prototypying. Then getting inspiration from his work on Design Patterns, Bill will introduce a new toolkit focused solely on prototyping. Protoscript is a simplified scripting language for creating Ajax style prototypes for the Web. With Protoscript you can easily connect interface elements to to behaviors (think patterns) and wire them to events to create complex interactions on the fly.

Bill will walk through how to prototype with protoscript and discuss future directions for this open source project.

Aaron Gustafson - Principal - Easy! Designs, LLC

Learning to Love Forms

In this session, we will explore forms from top to bottom, examining how they work and how their components can be incorporated with other elements to maximize accessibility, improve semantics, and allow for more flexible styling.

Ruining the User Experience

When JavaScript and Ajax go bad, your users aren't the only ones who lose out... Every descision we make in the process of building our websites, applications, and interfaces contributes to the overall experience a user has. Sometimes, in our rush to ride the latest wave in interaction design, we miss the mark and end up doing more harm than good.

Alex Russell - Project Lead, Dojo Toolkit & Director of R&D, SitePen

Dojo Cookbook

Recipes for developing and optimizing large applications with dojo.

Dojo's Standards Heresy and the Rise of Pragmatism on the Open Web

The web standards crowd is hurting you, your users, and the Open Web. While other speakers will paint a rosy picture of standards, this talk will explore the dark side of standards and explain why Ajax (nee DHTML) developers have long chuckled quietly when well-meaning developers explain how semantic markup and CSS will save us.

Aza Raskin - President and Co-founder of Humanized

Workshop #5: Design - Websites more User-centric

To err is human. We make mistakes. Our users make mistakes. It's a fact that our interfaces must handle gracefully. The first law of interface design is that "A computer shall not harm your work or, through inaction, allow your work to come to harm", yet the interfaces we design routinely ignore this idea. Is it possible to design interfaces that are so fault tolerant that no matter how many mistakes we make, that our work will never got lost?

Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Consultant

Data Integration Part I : Beyond Cutesy Mashups

Ever since we started doing relational joins, we've looked for ways to tie data together. When all we had were databases, our integration strategies were simple. The web has given us no end of new data sources to integrate but the strategies to do so are less clear. Where we can glue data together, it seems like the best we can come up with is locating Starbucks stores on Google Maps.

We want control of our data and our mashup results. We want ever more ways to view, explore and requery them in multi-faceted ways. We want data processing to be as simple as word processing has become. We want our data integration strategies to be less Vanilla Ice "Ice-Ice Baby" and more Nine Inch Nails "The Hand that Feeds" with the fluidity of a Phish tease (trust me, it makes sense).

Data Integration Part II : The Future, Today

Following on the overview of part I, we will introduce a slew of emerging technologies that are starting to make tomorrow's integration strategies available today. Come explore technologies that allow real mashups to function on both the web and the Enterprise. We can use a variety of languages and tools to link legacy data and modern content sources. We will explore resource-oriented computing as a new way of building systems that manage information spaces, not code.

Clint Hall - Presentation Architect - Cerner Corporation

CASE STUDY: Prototyping and Component Rendering at Cerner

With more than 1,500 clients worldwide, Cerner is the leading supplier of healthcare information technology. With over 57 solutions, deep knowledge and functionality, delivering an effective experience through the web is imperative. This case study will describe how our approach to rich web solutions has evolved, and will demonstrate a web prototyping approach that simulates not only server-supported AJAX, but also graceful degradation and even platform and browser independence. The goal of this session will not only be to share the unique experience, but to explore how this approach contrasts with those of the attendees as well.

David Geary - Author of Graphic Java and co-author of Core JSF

Ajaxian Faces

JavaServer Faces, with a mature component model and flexible lifecyle, is a perfect platform for implementing Web 2.0 user interfaces with Ajax. This session explores how you can use JSF and Ajax to create applications that act like desktop applications but run in a browser.

We'll start with a quick look at implementing basic Ajax in a JSF application. Then, once your bloodthirst has been slaked, we'll dive deeper into Ajaxian Faces dynamics with a form completion demo that requires its implementor to understand two simple, but vital facts about JSF.

If you're savvy, you probably use client-side validation to augment your server side validation logic, which parenthetically, is no no-brainer in either of the leading web application frameworks, JSF or Rails. But anyway, client-side validation is old school. All the cool developers nowadays use Ajax to implement realtime validation, where you sneak a trip to the server as an unwary user types into your input fields. But to accomplish that, we'll have to dive even deeper into JSF, with concerns such as accessing view state and accounting for client-side state saving.

All of this Ajax development is great fun, but most of it is best relegated to components and frameworks, which are the topics that will wrap up our session. We'll see how to keep your JavaScript separate from your JSF components and how to pass JSP tag attributes all the way through to JavaScript. Finally, we'll take a quick look at the Ajax support provided by the Struts Shale framework.

Filthy Rich Clients with the Google Web Toolkit, Part I

The Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is truly a revolutionary framework that lets you develop Ajaxified web applications without knowing anything about Ajax or JavaScript. But the GWT goes way beyond basic Ajax by letting you implement desktop-like applications that run in the ubiquitous browser.

Filthy Rich Clients with the Google Web Toolkit, Part II

In the second part of this talk, you will learn how to extend the GWT by implementing custom widgets, including a scrolling viewport and a drag and drop framework. After discussing custom widgets, you will see how to integrate database access into your GWT applications, and how to deploy your GWT applications to external servers.

Killer JavaScript Frameworks: Prototype, Script.aculo.us, and Rico

A spinoff of Ruby on Rails, Prototype is a JavaScript framework that makes it easy to implement Ajax functionality. Script.aculo.us and Rico are frameworks built on top of Prototype that provide high-level functionality, such as special effects and drag and drop.

David Verba - CTO of Emmett Labs

Practical Design for Developers

AJAX, new application frameworks and more iterative development processes means that many developers find themselves working more closely with designers or even being charged with design themselves. You know that a great user experience is key but how can make sure your project is a success?

Dean H. Saxe - Managing Consultant at Foundstone

Secure Application Development with Ajax

In this seminar we'll examine the security concerns around Ajax applications, how they are exploited and how developers can mitigate the risks to their applications. Ajax security begins with a discussion of the Same Origin Policy (SOP) of JavaScript, this is one of the key security features of JavaScript. Next, we'll examine authentication and authorization concerns with Ajax and how the developer can avoid common pitfalls.

Web Application Hacking for Web Developers

See the hacker's toolbox in action as various web applications are ripped open by exploiting simple software bugs. Common problems such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and SQL Injection will be demonstrated and explained, along with more subtle vulnerabilities including privilege escalation, data tampering, and Cross-Site Request Forgery. Even if you've seen XSS and SQL Injection before, advanced techniques will be presented that can slip through many protections.

Deryk Sinotte - Senior Developer @ ICEsoft

Ajax in Portals

While Ajax development can be challenging in its own right, incorporating Ajax techniques in a portal environment poses a host of additional challenges to the developer.

Eric Miraglia - Engineering Manager, YUI Team

YUI: A Foundation for Rich Web Experiences at Yahoo and Beyond

Yahoo! released the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI) as a free, open-source JavaScript and CSS library eighteen months ago along with a commitment to the developer community: We'll share with you our best frontend tools, engage with you about how they're built and why, and we'll document them fully. In that short time, YUI has become one of the best-regarded frontend libraries and has been adopted by individuals on their blogs, startups who are going all-in with YUI as the foundation of their frontend architecture, and Fortune 500 companies using YUI as a trusted, tested, long-view toolkit for creating great user-experiences on the web.

Etienne Studer - Sr. Java Developer @ Navis

Productive Web Development with Pleasure

Productivity is about more than just hard work. It's about using tools that intelligently amplify your abilities, speed up your progress, and handle time-consuming tasks for you, so you can focus on the work ahead while having great pleasure writing high-quality code.

Greg Murray - Ajax Architect @ Sun and Project jMaki Lead

Project jMaki - Enabling Web 2.0 Application Developers

Creating a breathtaking user interface requires that you and your team are skilled in JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and Ajax interactions. This session will discuss how you can use Project jMaki (or just the ideas behind it) to create JavaScript-centric user interfaces that are developer and designer friendly. Project jMaki is an open-source client/server framework hosted on java.net that is focused on creating JavaScript-centric web applications. jMaki promotes a clean separation of JavaScript, CSS, and template code following the web design approach widely known as ?unobtrusive JavaScript?. This session will include a technical discussion of the architecture and features of jMaki including JavaScript toolkit interoperability, widget design, using layouts, wiring JavaScript functionality together, and service/data integration.

Web Design for Server-Side Developers

As server-side developers developing Ajax applications we are finding ourselves dealing with more CSS and JavaScript, a role generally handled by a web designer. This session will focus on the underlining principles of web design from the perspective of a server side application developer.

Greg Wilkins - Lead Developer of the Jetty Open Source Servlet Server

Ajax Comet Communications

Subtitle: The Bayeux protocol and standardization efforts from the Open Ajax Alliance.

Communication for Comet (or Ajax Push) remain a problematic issue for deploying scalable Ajax applications. This talk looks at two related efforts to deal with the many concerns of Ajax Comet communications. The Bayeux protocol from the Dojo foundation is multi channel event bus that spans client and server over a variety of Ajax transports. The
protocol has multiple implementation and aims to become a defacto standard for Ajax push communications.

James Ward - Technical Evanglist for Flex @ Adobe

Porting from Web 1.0 to RIA in the Enterprise

With so much invested in their established Web presence, enterprises may
be reluctant to change the status quo. Nevertheless, enterprises face a
growing need to engage meaningfully with their customers ? to build and
maintain brand recognition, to strengthen customer loyalty and
satisfaction, and to drive competitive differentiation in today?s
crowded markets.

Can you create more meaningful engagements with your customers and
constituents with minimal disruption to your business? Yes. In this
session, you will learn practical ways to port traditional Web and
desktop applications to the kinds of rich Internet applications that
create engaging user experiences.

Workshop #4: Rich Internet Applications with Flex

This workshop is hands-on coding where you will learn how to build Rich Internet Applications for the web and for the Desktop. Attendees should bring their laptops loaded with the Flex Builder 3 Beta from labs.adobe.com.

James Williams - Solutions Architect with RedHat

Rapid Application Development with JSF, using Seam, Facelets, and Ajax4jsf

Build rich-client user interfaces with Ajax, and get Ruby on Rails-like productivity with Java's standard web application framework, JavaServer Faces (JSF). In this session you will learn how to use the Seam framework,
which combines the JSF and EJB3 component models, with Facelets and Ajax4jsf.

Jesse James Garrett - Father of Ajax, Adaptive Path

KEYNOTE -Beyond Ajax

Having trouble separating hype from reality? Where is the Web really headed?

Joe Walker - Creator of DWR

Advanced Web Application Security

The security landscape has changed dramatically in the past 12 months. Unless you are aware of CSRF, Javascript Highjacking, and the many ways to fool an XSS filter, it's likely that your web application will not be secure. Attackers used to concentrate on ActiveX, but now Javascript, CSS and even simple HTML elements have are used against websites.

Hands On DWR

This presentation digs into many advanced DWR features such as Reverse Ajax and the JavaScript proxy APIs. We start with a simple web-based multiplayer game, and illustrate how straightforward it is to create advanced effects with minimal coding. By demonstrating advanced page manipulation and server-based control of browsers, the game shows how to update any web application to react to server changes.

Jon Ferraiolo - Web Architect, IBM Emerging Technologies and manager of operations at OpenAjax A

OpenAjax Alliance - Driving Ajax Standards and Interoperability

Jon will provide an update on the latest news from OpenAjax Alliance, an organization of more than 80 leading companies and open source projects that are working together to define Ajax standards that promote Ajax interoperability and customer success.

Josh Holmes - Microsoft Architect Evangelist based in Michigan...

Groking Silverlight

Silverlight is the latest in the continuum of technologies from Microsoft to help you create differentiated user experience in the supplemented web space. Based on XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) for its UI and backed by a number of different options for logic including JavaScript, C#, Visual Basic, IronPython or IronRuby- it's a exciting new tool in the back of tricks for any web developer.

Keith Donald - Lead of Spring Web and Creator of Spring Web Flow

Rich Web Applications in a Spring Environment

Gone are the days of page-centric web UIs that look like they were written in 1994, making the user "click and wait" repeatedly. To compete today, techniques should be used judiciously to deliver interactive, responsive, task-oriented web applications that look-and-feel like desktop applications.

Kevin Hoyt - Platform Evangelist w/Adobe Systems

Defining Rich

The term "rich" has numerous definitions and is highly subjective when the topic is user interface design.

Spry: Ajax for Designers

In this session, designers will learn first hand how to navigate the Ajax world with ease.

Ludovic Champenois - Technology Director/Senior Architect @ Sun Microsystems

Project jMaki - Enabling Web 2.0 Application Developers

Mark Meeker - UI Architect at Orbitz Worldwide

Merging Ajax and Accessibility

Can't we all just get along? Introducing Ajax and making a site accessible each present their own unique challenges to development teams. Most see these as being in direct competition with each other.

Microformats: The What, Where, Why, and How

Microformats may be small, but they are starting to appear everywhere. You can use them to expose all types of information on your site and turn each page into an API.

Matt Schmidt - Vice President of DZone, Inc.

CASE STUDY: DZone - 4 Million Clicks Later

DZone is a social bookmarking community focused on developers and has tried to use the latest in web development strategies and standards. In this case study, the DZone team will share their insight and experience with building a large scale Web 2.0 community. .

Nandini Ramani - Co-Chair, W3C SVG Working Group

JavaFX: Evolution of the Java Client

The talk will provide an introduction to GUI development with
JavaFX Script, a new object-oriented, declarative programming language
for the Java Platform. JavaFX Script is a statically-typed language,
with compile-time error reporting and has type inference, declarative
syntax, and automatic data binding with full support for 2-D graphics
and standard Swing components as well as declarative animation. You can
also import Java classes, create new Java objects, call their methods,
and implement Java interfaces. IDE plug-ins are available for both the
NetBeans IDE and Eclipse. Both plug-ins support as-you-type validation,
code completion, syntax highlighting, and hyperlink navigation (with
Control-mouseover).

Nate Grover - Javascript enthusiast

Architecture for the Rich Web

Learn how to build components that persist easily and evolve well. Architectural and design considerations for building rich web components. Ensuring that the components are agnostic about the data source.

Nathaniel Schutta - Author, speaker, software engineer focused on user interface design.

Deconstructing Prototype

By now, most developers have (re)discovered the much maligned JavaScript language and the plethora of top notch libraries have helped make this grey beard of web programming accessible to a new generation of developers. While many are content to simply rely on others, we can learn an awful lot about how to write better JavaScript by taking a look under the hood.

Designing for Ajax

So you've convinced the boss that your new web application just has to have Ajax...but now what? With dozens of libraries making even the most blinkish of interactions trivial, how do you decided where to sprinkle the magic Ajax dust?

Neal Ford - Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.

Advanced Selenium

This session discusses advanced Selenium techniques for testing web applications. It discusses techniques for both TestRunner and Remote Control Selenium, including data driven tests, creating branch points, testing Ajax applications, creating flexible tests, integration with continuous integration, and tons more.

By now, just about everyone has heard of Selenium, the revolutionary open source testing tool for web applications. This session takes Selenium to the next level, showing how to handle complex, real world scenarios in Selenium. It discusses Selenium setup for both TestRunner and Remote Control.

Debugging and Testing the Web Tier

As out applications have spilled from the server across the wire to the web tier, we increasingly must debug and test in the browser. This session covers debugging and testing tools for clients, JavaScript, and Ajax. As the browser has become important again, our applications have spilled out of the server side to the web tier, and now we have to debug and test there. This session is all about debugging and testing the web tier.

Workshop #2: Testing Rich Internet Applications

Back in the Web 1.0 days, we had it lucky: the browser was our pretty green screen, and we didn't have to worry about what we put there. It was pretty and dumb. Then, the guys at Google ruined it all. Now, we have to make our web applications actually do stuff. And anytime software does stuff, it needs to be tested.

Nicholas C. Zakas - Author of "Professional Ajax, "Professional JavaScript", Engineer at Yahoo!

Enterprise JavaScript Error Handling

With tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of JavaScript in modern web applications, there's a lot that can go wrong. Is your application prepared for the errors that may happen when your users login? Have you properly anticipated weak points in your code as well as problems with network connections?

Although error handling is typically part of traditional server-side architectures, it is often overlooked when dealing with the client-side world of JavaScript. Learn where to anticipate errors, how to determine if they are fatal, and what to do when they occur.

Maintainable JavaScript

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. Learn the techniques and pitfalls of architecting your JavaScript code for posterity in an enterprise environment. There is a huge difference between what works on your personal web site and what your employer has hired you to write. The code you create today could be touched by dozens of people tomorrow and hundreds by next month. Making sure that it can be understood, updated, and debugged is part of the value you add as a frontend engineer.

Nicholas Eddy - Application Architect - Electronic Arts

Beyond The Browser: Higher Abstractions to Enable Rich, Easy Development

This presentation will look at the use of new technology that enabled developers to create sophisticated web applications with unprecedented control over rendering, the event model and abstraction. Current frameworks smooth out inconsistencies between browsers to allow cross-platform development, but none provide developers with capabilities to develop in higher abstractions. My discussion would focus on how this new tech allows developers to create rich applications with complete control over look-and-feel without ever dealing with elements or browser events directly. This means applications created using these design principles can be written once to run everywhere. In addition, developers can have control over domains that have traditionally been owned by the browser, like scrollbars, mouse and keyboard/focus handling. Developers are able to create completely unrestrained applications when giving this level of control. Designers have more control since applications can be skinned on a deeper level than currently available. UI developers are now able to complete change look-and-feel (change DOM structure freely) without ever consulting an application developer.

Rick Ross - President at DZone, Inc

CASE STUDY: DZone - 4 Million Clicks Later

Ron Bodkin - Chief Software Architect, Quantcast

Managing Client State Across Domains

Rich Web apps often need to combine information from different DNS domains, though needs vary from visual mash-ups to deep integration.

Rich Web Application Performance and Scalability

You know AJAX can improve Web application usability, but only if designed properly.

Ryan Breen - Vice President of Technology at Gomez

Ajax Performance Analysis: Employing the Latest Tools to Get the Job Done

Ajax continues to raise user expectations for interactivity and performance, and developers are increasingly treating Ajax as a must-have component of their web applications. As more code is moved client-side and the network model changes, the community is responding by building open source and commercial tools to address the unique performance challenges of Ajax .

Scott Davis - Author of "Groovy Recipes" & TDD Expert

Ajax development with the Yahoo! UI Library and Grails

Yahoo! is a company that eats its own dog food. They open sourced the Ajax code that drives many of their own websites, including their eponymous homepage, Yahoo! Mail, and Yahoo! News. Come see first hand how the various pieces of the library work together as a seamless whole.

We'll look at some of the everyday useful widgets like the onscreen JavaScript logger (which effectively brings Log4J-style logging to JavaScript) and the calendar components. We'll see how event handling is managed in a cross-brower fashion. We'll look at tabbed interfaces, multi-level menus, and panels and dialog boxes that end up making your website look more like a OS-level desktop than a traditional webpage.

Workshop #3: GIS for Web Developers

Based on the book GIS for Web Developers, this talk demonstrates how you can build your own Google Maps in-house using nothing but open source software. We also discuss integrating free, public domain data from sources like the US Census Bureau and the USGS. If you're looking for real-world examples of AJAX in use, you'll find it here. If you're looking for real-world examples of web services in use, you'll find it here.

We'll start by exploring free datasets out there in the wild. They are stored in a myriad of file formats (some proprietary, some open) and projections. Free tools like GDAL and QGIS make it easy to convert them and visualize them. Once the data is normalized, we'll store it in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database. Not only does the database centralize the mapping data, it opens up quite a few interesting querying capabilities.

Sean Kane - Director, User Interface Engineering at Netflix

CASE STUDY: Developing a Great User Interface - A Netflix Case Study

This presentation will detail the innovative Netflix website features and how they came to be a part of the user experience. Following a handful of features, this will take you through the development process, from concept to qualitative and quantitative testing, out to launch. Including recent tests, this presentation will highlight design successes and give some insight to some of the ideas that were left behind.

Steve Souders - Author of "High Performance Web Sites"

Workshop #1: High Performance Web Sites

Yahoo!'s Exceptional Performance team has identified 14 best practices for making web pages faster through a series of research studies on Yahoo!'s properties. These guidelines focus on the front end, for example, why it's bad to use "@import" for including stylesheets and why ETags disable browser caching. These best practices have proven to reduce response times of Yahoo! properties by 25-50%. We focus on the front end because that's where 80-90% of the end-user response time is spent. This "80-90% front end" phenomenon is not isolated to just Yahoo!. It holds true for most web sites, including the ten most-visited U.S. web sites.

Stuart Halloway - CEO of Relevance

Advanced Prototype: Ajax and JavaScript++

Building on the in-depth examination of the Prototype library from Prototype: Ajax and JavaScript ++, this session delves into the corners of Prototype that modify the DOM API and JavaScript's built-in types.

JavaScript for Ajax Programmers

This presentation covers JavaScript from the perspective of an Ajax programmer. We assume that you may be using an Ajax toolkit, but still need to be able to read, modify, and test the JavaScript code in your application. You will learn the common idioms of JavaScript by looking at working code from the Ajax toolkits themselves.

Prototype: Ajax and JavaScript

Prototype deserves its fame for Ajax support, and for easy integration with the Rails platform. In this presentation, you will learn to simplify Ajax development with Prototype as we work through a series of examples that demonstrate:

* using Ajax.Request to manage XMLHTTPRequest
* automatically updating pages with Ajax.Updater
* polling with PeriodicalExecuter
* managing forms with Form.serialize
* responding to inputs with Event.observe
* simplifying DOM updates with Insertion

Scriptaculous - The Ins and Outs

Scriptaculous is one of the most popular JavaScript effect and widget frameworks.

Tenni Theurer - Manager of Yahoo! Exceptional Performance Team

Workshop #1: High Performance Web Sites

Tom Ball - Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems, Inc.

JavaFX: Evolution of the Java Client

Venkat Subramaniam - Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.

Workshop #2: Testing Rich Internet Applications

Debugging Ajax

Developing Ajax applications is a lot of fun, up until things stop working. In addition to the general programming complexities, you need to deal with browser differences, JavaScript and framework idiosyncrasies. Alerts often help only to get our blood pressure high.

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Molly Holzschlag

Co-author of "The Zen of CSS Design"
Molly E. Holzschlag is a well-known Web standards advocate, instructor, and author. She has served as Group Lead for the Web Standards Project (WaSP), has been an invited expert to the W3C, and has written more than 30 books covering client-side development and design for the Web.

Currently, Molly works to educate designers and developers on using Web technologies in practical ways to create highly sustainable, maintainable, accessible, interactive and beautiful Web sites for the global community. She consults with major companies and organizations such as AOL, BBC, Microsoft, Yahoo! and many others in an effort to improve standards support, workflow, solve interoperability concerns and address the long-term management of highly interactive, large-scale sites.

A popular and colorful individual, Molly has a particular passion for people, blogs, and the use of technology for social progress.

Douglas Crockford

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!.

Bill Scott

Creator of Rico & Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo!
Bill Scott leads engineering for a new & upcoming Yahoo! site... Yahoo! Teachers a web 2.0 community allowing teachers to gather, organize & share web resources and lesson planning. For the past 1.5 years Bill has been the Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo! where he focused on spreading the goodness of "rich and sane" Ajax design & development. Bill is a frequent speaker at conferences and workshops discussing the nuances of good design and the challenges of great engineering. At Yahoo! Bill was also the Design Pattern curator where he launched the public 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.

Aaron Gustafson

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.

Alex Russell

Project Lead, Dojo Toolkit & Director of R&D, SitePen
Alex Russell is project lead for the Dojo Toolkit and 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.

Aza Raskin

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.

Brian Sletten

Forward Leaning Software Consultant
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 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 and currently lives in Fairfax, VA. He is a partner in Zepheira, LLC, a new services company focused on using semantic-oriented technologies to solve architectural and data integration problems not handled by conventional tools and techniques.

Clint Hall

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.

David Geary

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

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 (JSF). David's Graphic Java Swing was 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 he's currently helping to define the next version of JSF on the JSF 2.0 EG.

Besides serving on the JSF and JSTL Expert Groups, David has contributed to open-source projects and co-authored Sun's Web Developer Certification Exam. 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 Shale.

A regular on the NFJS tour, David also speaks at other conferences such as JavaOne and JavaPolis. David has taught at Java University and was twice voted a JavaOne rock star, for presentations in 2005 and 2007.

David Verba

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.

Dean H. Saxe

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.

Deryk Sinotte

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.

Eric Miraglia

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.

Etienne Studer

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.

Greg Murray

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.

Greg Wilkins

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.

James Ward

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.

James Williams

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.

Jesse James Garrett

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.

Joe Walker

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.

Jon Ferraiolo

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.

Josh Holmes

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.

Keith Donald

Lead of Spring Web and Creator of Spring Web Flow
Keith Donald is a principal and founding partner at SpringSource, the company behind Spring. He is best known in the Spring community for creating Spring Web Flow. At SpringSource, Keith is the lead of the Web Products Team. His team, based in Melbourne, Florida, sustains the development of Spring Web MVC and Web Flow and their associated integrations, and is also responsible for future innovations in the domain of web frameworks.

Since the first Spring Experience in 2005, Keith, with Jay Zimmerman of NoFluffJustStuff Software Symposiums, has served as director of the popular conference series.

Keith is also the principal architect behind SpringSource's state-of-the-art training curriculum, which has provided practical training on Spring to over 3000 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, and retail. He is particularly adept at translating business requirements into technical solutions.

Keith's blog can be found at http://blog.springsource.com/main/author/keithd

Kevin Hoyt

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.

Ludovic Champenois

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).

Mark Meeker

UI Architect at Orbitz Wo

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