Session Descriptions

Molly Holzschlag - Co-author of "The Zen of CSS Design"

CSS for Developers

While CSS might be the Web's Lingua Franca of presentation and design, it's
the Front End Developer who finds that he or she has to optimize CSS
documents, manage multiple CSS documents across any number of actual Web
pages, ensure that conflicts and errors are properly addressed and
effectively work with multiple browser hacks, conditional comments and
scripts related to browser compatibility.

IE8: Ready, Set, Standards?

IE8 brings with it some very interesting history as well as current realities of which we as developers must be aware.

Social Software as a Platform for Human Advancement

As we enthusiastically embrace the many technologies that come together to create Web applications, it's important to also stay aware of the societal impact our software offers. In particular, social applications offer a foundation for improvements in all kinds of relationships. Spanning from business-oriented apps that enhance networking and economic opportunities to the more personal social applications that allow for myriad interaction, the social application deserves our attention not just as technologists, but as individuals and communities, too.

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.

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

Crafting Rich Web Interfaces

In every field of design one of the first things students do is learn from the work of others. They study and break down real-world examples in order to understand the underlying principles and patterns that make for successful design. Then they learn to apply these to their own set of problems. The real trick is to apply them in a nuanced manner. To be nuanced is "to be sensitive to delicate differences of style." Most of the art in crafting a rich experience on the Web can be summed up with this one word -- 'nuance'.

Over the last 24 years Bill has been involved in the study of nuanced design in crafting rich interfaces. Prior to joining Netflix, Bill led the effort to launch the public Yahoo! Design Pattern Library where he cataloged many examples of common design patterns. More recently Bill has been working on an upcoming O'Reilly book on design that explores the nuance of rich Web interfaces.

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

Dojo Cookbook

Recipes for developing and optimizing large applications with dojo.

Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Consultant

Rich Clients, Rich Data Part I : Linking

You hear a lot of talk about rich clients, but the richness they purport to provide is predicated on having access to rich data as well as a rich user interaction style. Without the right levels of abstraction, it is hard to address and link all of the data we have to care about these days. Additionally, the web sites that do support the notion of linking require you to publish your data into TheirSpace. Forget that. You want to be able to link publicly available information to sensitive information in YourSpace.

Ever since we started doing relational joins, we've looked for ways to tie data together. The problem is, the relational model is a bit tired and doesn't move at the speed of the Net. We need schemes that integrate relational data, web pages, XML files, RSS feeds and various other sources of information.

Rich Clients, Rich Data Part II : Consuming

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?

Sketching in Code: Using Prototypes to Visualize Interactions

With Ajax, RIA's and agile development, we increasingly hear about the value of prototypes. In this session we will survey several different types of prototypes and the correct audience for each before discussing the advantages and disadvantages of incorporating interactive prototypes into your development process.

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

Deploying Scalable Comet Applications

The core concepts of Comet (Ajax Push) applications are not complex and most Ajax applications can be simply converted to demonstrate comet abilities. Comet applications are easy to write, but can be very hard to test, debug, scale and deploy. But for comet, demonstrating a chat room
on a test server is a long way from having a robust scalable production ready application.

Jason Harwig - Senior Software Engineer at Near Infinity

Advanced Web Graphics with Canvas

I hate images. Not pictures or icons, mind you, but user interface graphics. I think that small gradient PNGs that web developers set to repeat are the spacer gifs of today. Images are hard to change, and slower to download.

Canvas is an HTML 5 standard for drawing bitmap graphics. It was created by Apple Inc, for drawing dashboard widgets. Since then all other browsers have added support (it works in IE with a JS library).

JavaScript Security - Seeing the possibilities of a sand-boxed scripting language

JavaScript's popularity in recent years has brought with it the attention of hackers, white and black. Both sides looking for ways to do things that weren't intended with the scripting language.

Object-Oriented and Functional Programming in JavaScript

Like it or not, JavaScript is the language used for any kind of web development. Since it's the only supported language of the browser, and customers demand rich web experiences, JavaScript is the king of the web. But, increasingly complicated user interfaces require a more disciplined approach to coding in the scripting language.

JavaScript's malleable nature allow it to be used in different programming paradigms including procedural, functional, and object-oriented. Unlike Java's class-based structure, JavaScript has a prototype inheritance structure that gives it great flexibility.

Kris Zyp - Development Associate with SitePen

Applied JSON: HTTP REST, Ajax databases and beyond

In this session, we will examine several powerful forms of JSON including REST JSON, JSPON, and JSONPath, to achieve powerful capabilities with JSON. We will explore the capabilities of Ajax-accessible REST databases. The dynamic nature of non-relational databases can provide significant benefit in rapidly developing applications, and providing JavaScript object persistence. Client-side code can directly participate in database interaction with systems like CouchDB, Persevere, and ActiveResource.

JSON SOA-based Client/Server Application Development

In this session we look at how we can use the tools of JSON web services including Service Mapping Description (SMD) to quickly integrate JSON sources and rapidly develop applications using decoupled services for scalable high-performance standards based client server applications. We show how to use the Dojo library to easily connect to web services and build client/server applications.

Persistent Computing on the Web with JSON Schema and Referencing

With the emergence of JSON Schema and Referencing conventions, there is new potential for true distributed computing paradigms in the web by leveraging portable type definitions in combination with persistence and referencing techniques. These capabilities can be brought together for a powerful new paradigm of interoperable data and web services with coherent remote method interaction using JSON-RPC. We will see how applications can be expressed as portable persisted object graphs, and how referencing capabilities can provide a foundation for cross-site persisted object graphs and well-defined distributed applications. Mashups can be built with higher levels of coherency in a distributed persistent environment.

Mark Meeker - UI Architect at Orbitz Worldwide

Coding the UI: Lessons Learned from ebookers and Orbitz

When Orbitz Worldwide released a new generation of its global technology platform there were some lofty goals for the UI. They wanted to build a presentation tier (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) that would meet the goals of internationalization, accessibility, have rich Ajax interactions, and be faster and easier to develop in. This session will explore the key challenges in achieving these goals, including what worked, what didn't, and what's next.

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. But, by embracing some new development approaches they can end up being complementary. We will look at how best to tackle making Ajax-based features accessible and point out some of the added benefits that come with taking such approaches.

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

Designing for Ajax, part 1

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? This talk will give a plain old boring "web 1.0" an Ajax facelift with a focus on improving the user experience providing you with a game plan for introducing Ajax to your world.

Designing for Ajax, part 2

We'll pick up where Part 1 left off working in even more advanced approaches such as offline support with Google Gears.

Dojo: Getting Started

So you want to do some Ajax and you've rightly concluded that you don't want to build your own library. After some thought, you've settled on using Dojo - but you're not sure how to get going.

Ext JS: Getting Started

Ext JS is an amazing JavaScript library that's filled with customizable widgets; if your customers have ever asked for "Excel in the browser," you need to look at Ext.

JavaScript: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Thanks to Ajax, JavaScript is cool again and developers are taking a second look at this much maligned language. This session will give you an overview of this misunderstood language as well as opening your eyes to some of the excellent tools available to ease the pain of developing in this dynamic language.

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.

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

Building the Front End

A common step that is missing from front end development is a build step. Developers have become accustomed to the code-run two-step process that, at first, introducing a build step seems like a time sink. However, when done correctly, a adding a build step into the development process can actually improve productivity, free the developer from mundane tasks, and aid in deployment.

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.

Extreme JavaScript Compression using the YUI Compressor

The YUI Compressor does a lot of things to make your code smaller, but it's still based on a series of rules to ensure that it doesn't break your code. Understanding how the Compressor works makes it easy to write your code in particular ways to squeeze out every last byte of optimization. You can help the Compressor to do its job by using a few simple techniques.

Test Driven Development with YUI Test

Learn how to apply the fundamental concepts of Test Driven Development (TDD) to JavaScript using YUI's unit testing framework, YUI Test. The session explores the capabilities of YUI Test in achieving good TDD practices, including the use of assertions, organizing test suites and test cases, and testing JavaScript-specific features (such as XHR and DOM events).

Nik Krimm - Senior Architect with Orbitz Worldwide

Clean code in the UI : Tools for managing code quality

Effective testing is key to professional software development. Static code analysis is an often neglected at the UI, but can eliminate whole classes of defects and regressions, and increase confidence when refactoring. Learn how to author and use scripts to automate CSS validation, find defects in JavaScript, identify dead or missing code, and enforce global coding standards. These techniques are especially valuable for large or distributed teams.

Industrial Strength JavaScript

Modern JavaScript libraries help abstract away cross-browser issues, and make hard things easy. However, performance is often an issue, and design choices by library vendors may have unexpected consequences downstream.

Richard Monson-Haefel - VP of Developer Relations, Curl Inc.

The Grand Convergence: Web + RIA + Widgets + Client/Server

For the past ten years, application developers have been stuck with only two desktop client choices: a very thin Web-client technology implemented in HTML and CSS, or a very heavyweight thick client experience implemented using traditional client/server (C/S) technologies (e.g. Java Swing, MFC). It wasn’t until the introduction of Rich Internet Application technologies (e.g. Ajax, Adobe Flex, Curl and Silverlight) and widget engines (e.g. Yahoo! Widgets and Google Gadgets) that we were given more options.

Now, these four desktop client options are beginning to converge into a single form - the Fit Client (It's not too thick and not too thin). Each of the options that preceded the Fit Client have their own benefits and are well suited for specific scenarios - the Fit Client represents the best of all these technologies. This session examines the strengths of the Fit Client and the shift in industry focus to a platform that provides the best of thin and thick client technologies.

The Grand Convergence: Web + RIA + Widgets + Client/Server

Richard Worth - Sr. Developer of jQuery UI

jQuery

jQuery is one of the most popular and easy to use JavaScript frameworks. jQuery is an open source library that simplifies DOM manipulation, event handling, Ajax, and animation. The jQuery core is lean and light, while having the power and extensibility to support a rich plugin ecosystem. It also sports a concise and elegant API that is a joy to behold and use.

jQuery UI: Rich Interactivity Simplified

jQuery UI, built on top of jQuery, is a complete set of behaviors and components that can be used in building Rich Internet Applications. Behaviors and components included in jQuery UI include drag-and-drop, resizing, mouse-sorting, mouse-selecting (click-select, shift-select, ctrl-select, lasso select), dialogs, sliders, tabs, trees, grids, toolbars and menus. Each component adheres to a consistent standard across API, design, behavior and theming. This minimizes the surprise and makes learning all of them as easy as learning one. Just as with jQuery, there is a plugin system in jQuery UI that allows users to easily modify/extend existing components, as well as create your own. jQuery UI is also built with themes and supports custom themes, for consistency with existing sites/applications.

Roman Hustad - Software Security Consultant at Foundstone

Security Challenges - Ajax Applications

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

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.

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.

GIS for Web Developers: Adding Where to Your Application

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. The Portland, Oregon Transit Authority recently migrated from a proprietary web mapping solution to the suite of 100% free and open source software discussed in this book. We look at Java-based clients, Java-based servers, and everything in between. 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.

YSlow: Building Your Website for Speed

How optimized is your website? YSlow, a FireFox/FireBug plugin, doesn't pull any punches. It gives any website an A, B, C, D, or F rating based on 14 individual analysis points. You'll be amazed (or depressed) at what YSlow thinks of your site. In this talk, we'll walk through these points step by step, learning what Yahoo! (the creator of this utility) does to keep its web properties running as quickly as possible.

Shashank Tiwari - Chief Technologist at Saven Technologies

Driven by Events

Real-time event driven highly responsive systems are replacing their legacy pull based counterparts in many application scenarios. Driven by the need for faster and better decision making such applications are seeing rapid adoption in many disparate domains, including financial services, healthcare, telecom and transportation. Such systems have two main elements: (1) a fast event stream processing and complex event processing engine and (2) a highly interactive and engaging user interface, which gets updated as the underlying data evolves.

Flexing Up Fast

A brief but thorough introduction to the Adobe Flex and AIR technologies.

Steve Souders - Author of "High Performance Web Sites"

Even Faster Web Sites

Steve's book, High Performance Web Sites, describes the 14 best practices he developed while working as the Chief Performance Yahoo!. YSlow, the Firebug extension he created, codified those best practices.

Stuart Halloway - CEO of Relevance

Proto/taculous 1: Building Ajax Applications

Prototype and Scriptaculous may be the most popular combination in the Ajax world. In this presentation, you will learn to simplify Ajax development with Prototype and Scripty as we work through a series of examples.

Proto/taculous 2: Tips and Tricks

Prototype and Scriptaculous provide great functionality out of the box, but once you use them for a while you will probably want a little more. In this talk, we will look at tips and tricks for getting the most out of Prototaculous, plus some other libraries that can play nicely.

Refactoring JavaScript

The rise of Ajax and Rich Web Applications, plus the success of dynamic languages, has caused people to revisit the JavaScript language. Now that we take JavaScript seriously as a language, it is time to get serious about the quality of JavaScript code, through refactoring. In this talk, we will approach refactoring JavaScript in three phases:

Test first, then refactor. Bring JavaScript code under test, so that you can refactor with confidence.
Refactoring 101. Explore some important refactorings: composed method, extract method, introduce named parameter, and extract object
Common problems. Work through three problems endemic to legacy JavaScript code: making JavaScript unobtrusive, refactoring to prototype-based inheritance, and refactoring to functional style.

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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.

Christian Schalk

Developer Advocate and works to promote Google's APIs
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.

Alex Russell

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.

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 the President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc., a professional services company focused on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

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.

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.

Jason Harwig

Senior Software Engineer at Near Infinity
Jason Harwig full-time job is a senior software engineer at Near Infinity Corporation, an enterprise software development and consulting services company headquartered in Reston, Virginia. In his spare time he runs Pine Point Software LLC, writing Mac OS X applications in Cocoa/Objective-C.

His interests include Cocoa, JavaScript, OpenGL and user-interface design.

Kris Zyp

Development Associate with SitePen
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.

Mark Meeker

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.

Nathaniel Schutta

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.

Neal Ford

Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.
Neal Ford is an Application Architect for ThoughtWorks. He is an architect, designer, and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, and video/DVD presentations. Neal is also the author of Developing with Delphi: Object-Oriented Techniques (Prentice Hall PTR, 1996), JBuilder 3 Unleashed (SAMS Publishing, 1999), and Art of Java Web Development (Manning, 2003). His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Object Pascal, C++, and C. Neal’s primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 30 developers’ conferences worldwide.

Nicholas C. Zakas

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.

Nik Krimm

Senior Architect with Orbitz Worldwide
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.

Richard Monson-Haefel

VP of Developer Relations, Curl Inc.
Richard Monson-Haefel is the author of Enterprise JavaBeans (Editions 1 - 5), Java Message Service and one of the world's leading experts and book authors on enterprise computing. He was the lead architect of OpenEJB, an open source EJB container used in Apache Geronimo, a member of the JCP Executive Committee, member of JCP EJB expert groups, and an industry analyst for Burton Group researching enterprise computing, open source, and Rich Internet Application (RIA) development. Today, Richard is the VP of Developer Relations for Curl, Inc. a RIA platform used in enterprise computing. You can learn more about Richard at his web site http://www.monson-haefel.com

Richard Worth

Sr. Developer of jQuery UI
Richard D. Worth is a Web developer in the Washington, DC area. He works for Fulcrum IT on Web services contracts, primarily for the government.

Richard 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 contributing author on dmxzone.com, writing regular beginner and advanced jQuery UI articles, and has been selected as a Technical Reviewer for a book on jQuery to be published in the fall.

Roman Hustad

Software Security Consultant at Foundstone
Roman is a Principal Software Security Consultant at Foundstone, a small division of McAfee that provides security assessment, training, and software design services to corporate and government organizations around the world. After spending most of his life building software, now he figures out ways to break it through penetration testing, threat modeling, and code review. On the proactive side, he leads software design sessions, teaches Java security courses, and participates in the Hacme Books open-source project. In his ever-dwindling spare time Roman enjoys mountaineering, scuba diving, and other outdoor pursuits.

Scott Davis

Author of "Groovy Recipes" & TDD Expert
Scott Davis is an internationally recognized author and speaker. He is passionate about open source solutions and agile development. He has worked on a variety of Java platforms, from J2EE to J2SE to J2ME (sometimes all on the same project).

Scott's books include Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java, GIS for Web Developers: Adding Where to Your Web Applications, The Google Maps API, and JBoss At Work.

Scott is the Editor in Chief of aboutGroovy.com, a news and information website that tracks the latest developments in Groovy and Grails. He also writes a regular column for IBM DeveloperWorks -- Mastering Grails.

Scott is a frequent presenter at national conferences (such as No Fluff, Just Stuff) and local user groups. He was the president of the Denver Java Users Group in 2003 when it was voted one of the top-ten JUGs in North America. After a quick move north, he is currently active in the leadership of the Boulder Java Users Group. Keep up with him at http://www.davisworld.org.

Shashank Tiwari

Chief Technologist at Saven Technologies
Shashank Tiwari is the Chief Technologist at Saven Technologies (http://www.saventech.com), a technology driven business solutions company headquartered in Chicago, IL. As an experienced software developer and architect, he is adept in a multitude of technologies. He is an expert group member on a number of JCP (Java Community Process) specifications, JSRs 274, 283, 299, 301 & 312, and is an Adobe Flex Champion. Currently, he passionately builds rich high performance applications and advises many on RIA and SOA adoption. Many of his clients are banking, money management, and financial service companies that he has helped build robust, quantitative, data-intensive, highly interactive, and scalable high performance applications. He writes regularly in many technical magazines, presents in seminars and mentors developers and architects. His book on Advanced Flex3 is due for release later this year. He is an ardent supporter of and contributor to open source software. He lives with his wife and two sons in New York. More information about him can be accessed at his website (http://www.shanky.org).

Steve Souders

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.

Stuart Halloway

CEO of Relevance
Stuart Halloway is the CEO of Relevance, Inc. (www.thinkrelevance.com). With co-founder Justin Gehtland, Stuart helps enterprises adopt emerging best practices such as Ruby on Rails. Justin and Stuart founded the Streamlined Framework (www.streamlinedframework.org), and authored Rails for Java Developers. Stuart is also the author of 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.

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