Event Details

Location

Sheraton Premier Hotel
8661 Leesburg Pike
Vienna, VA 22182
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Event Management

  • The Rich Web Experience is a production of the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium Series. Since 2002, NFJS has produced over 130 technical events with over 22,000 participants. Be sure to attend The Rich Web Experience and find out what the NFJS experience is all about!
  • No Fluff Just Stuff - The Premier Java / Agility Event Series

Session Descriptions

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

Molly Holzschlag

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.

The Broken World: Solving the Browser Problem Once and For All

The Web was meant to be interoperable, but as every web designer and developer knows, interoperability is the very thing we lack. As we build standards-based, flexible, accessible, well-designed sites, we find it?s the browser that gives us most of our headaches. In this session, you?ll learn to take better control not through hacks and filters, but through an understanding of why browsers work the way they do.


Douglas Crockford - Creator of JSON

Douglas Crockford

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.


Christian Schalk - Developer Advocate and works to promote Google's APIs

Christian Schalk

Google Ajax APIs

The Google AJAX APIs let you implement rich, dynamic features on your existing web sites entirely in JavaScript and HTML. Using this family of APIs you can add a map to your site, include dynamic search controls, or download and mashup feeds with just a few lines of JavaScript.

Integrating OpenSocial into your Ajax applications

This session starts with a full review of OpenSocial technologies starting with client development with its JavaScript API followed by technical coverage of OpenSocial's server reference implementation, Apache Shindig.


Brian Sletten - Forward Leaning Software Consultant

Brian Sletten

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

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.


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

David Geary

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.


David Verba - CTO of Emmett Labs

David Verba

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.


Jason Harwig - Senior Software Engineer at Near Infinity

Jason Harwig

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.


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

Jon Ferraiolo

Interoperable Ajax Tools and Mashups

This session will describe current work at OpenAjax Alliance around Ajax tooling and Ajax mashups. Ajax developer tools have been hampered by lack of interoperability among various IDEs and Ajax toolkits. This session will introduce a new XML industry standard, OpenAjax Metadata for Ajax Libraries, designed at OpenAjax Alliance's IDE committee by representatives from Adobe, Aptana, Eclipse/ATF, and Microsoft Visual Studio. This standard will result in plug&play between Ajax IDEs and toolkits. The second major topic in this session focuses on mashups. Mashups have the potential for revolutionizing the way Web applications are developed where users create their own applications, but there are interoperability challenges and security risks. In order to unleash the industry, OpenAjax Alliance has developed an open source secure mashup framework as part of OpenAjax Hub 1.1 (leveraging a set of techniques called "SMash" that were originally developed by IBM Research and allows for secure mashups that run in today's browsers) and a companion set of widget standards (OpenAjax Metadata for Widgets).


Ken Sipe - Technology Director, Perficient, Inc. (PRFT)

Ken Sipe

Keys to the Kingdom

When it comes to security, the general rule is that the enemy should be in possession of your security schema / algorithm, yet due to the strength of the key, he still is denied access.

Security Code Review

Security concerns abound... According to Gartner 75% of all attacks are at the web application tier. There has never been a more urgent time to understand the security concerns and how to apply solutions to our web applications.


Kris Zyp - Development Associate with SitePen

Kris Zyp

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.

Secure Mashups

This session will cover emerging technologies for secure cross-site mashups. We will look at new transport technologies including W3C's Access Control for Cross-site Requests, HTML 5's postMessage API, and Microsoft's XdomainRequest, and how to leverage these new features, and see how we can combine leverage new security mechanisms with the new dojox.secure framework.


Mark Meeker - UI Architect at Orbitz Worldwide

Mark Meeker

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.

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.

Microformats: The What, Where, Why, and How

Microformats may be small, but they are starting to appear everywhere. You likely visit sites daily that are enabled with microformats. They are used to make contact details, events, reviews, and other everyday data more available to you as both a user and as a developer.

Learn what sites are already using of microformats and how you can take advantage of them. Also learn how easy it is to enable your site with microformats for others to use by making each page of your site an API with only minor markup changes.


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

Nathaniel Schutta

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. This talk will introduce Dojo and discuss several ways that Ajax can improve your new or existing application.

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.

Pragmatic Usability (aka, Software Engineer's Guide to Usability)

While some companies have the luxury of a full time usability team, most of us have to make do on our own. Sure, it might be easier (and more comfortable) to focus on all the hip back end goodness, but if your user interface makes users yack, your product is doomed.

YUI: Getting Started

When Yahoo! released their User Interface Library (YUI), many designers rejoiced - one of the internet's leading properties was sharing their vast wealth of knowledge in a convenient open source package. This talk with show you how to get up and running with one of the finest libraries you'll find in the Ajax space. We'll also explore the incredibly useful Yahoo Design Pattern Library.


Neal Ford - Application Architect at ThoughtWorks, Inc.

Neal Ford

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.

Web 2.0 Punchlist: Making Your Web Applications Suck Less

Provides a punchlist to ensure your shiny new web application is up to spec.


Nik Krimm - Senior Architect with Orbitz Worldwide

Nik Krimm

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.

Richard Monson-Haefel

Choosing the right RIA platform for your project

With literally hundreds of RIA products (e.g., Adobe Flash, Nexaweb, Backbase) and open source Ajax projects (e.g. Dojo, GWT, Prototype) to choose from. Picking the right RIA technology for the job requires months of research. Richard Monson-Haefel has been researching and writing about RIA alternatives for three years and has already done the research so you don't have to.

Rise of the Fit Client

The world of desktop and web client software is about to change and for the better. Fit Clients, application platforms that combine the capabilities of Web 1.0, RIA, desktop widgets, and client/server technologies, are gaining mind share quickly and for good reason. Fit Client platforms such as Adobe AIR, Curl Nitro, Google Gears, and Mozilla Prism promise web developers the power of client/server applications, the ease of management and access of Web 1.0 applications, the cross-platform capabilities of RIA, and the holistic environment of desktop widget platforms.


Richard Worth - Sr. Developer of jQuery UI

Richard Worth

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.



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

Scott Davis

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.


Rapid Web Development with Grails and Ajax

Grails is a Java- and Groovy-based web framework that is built for speed. First-time developers are amazed at how quickly you can get a page-centric MVC web site up and running thanks to the scaffolding and convention over configuration that Grails provides. Advanced web developers are often pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to break out of that coarse-grained navigation model using the native Ajax support baked into the framework.

Real World JSON

JavaScript Object Notation is becoming a familiar delivery platform for Web 2.0 content. JSON gives you all of the flexibility of a RESTful web service without the hassle of trying to deal with deeply nested, complex XML in a language that is conspicuously lacking in native XML support. In this talk, we look at popular websites (like Yahoo!) that offer JSON output. We look at client-side JavaScript code that effortlessly consumes JSON in the browser. We even look at ways to easily generate JSON from Java Servlets (using JSON.org libraries) and the native support for JSON that Grails offers out of the box.

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

Shashank Tiwari

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.


Stuart Halloway - CEO of Relevance

Stuart Halloway

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.





Molly Holzschlag

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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

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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!.


Christian Schalk

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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.



Brian Sletten

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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 Geary

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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 TheServerSide Symposium, 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

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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.


Jason Harwig

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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.


Jon Ferraiolo

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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.




Ken Sipe

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

Ken was the founder of CodeMentor, where he was the Chief Architect and Mentor, leading clients in the execution of RUP and Agile methodologies in the delivery of software solutions. He is a former trainer for Rational in OOAD and RUP, and a CORBA Visibroker trainer for Borland. He continues to enjoy providing training and mentoring in all aspects of software development.

Ken has a deep need to be highly diversified. Ken often works with IT executives on high-level strategic roadmaps, currently geared around service oriented architectures (SOA). Ken also likes to keep his hands "dirty" in the code, which has him on a regular basis, pairing or otherwise producing code. Ken is regularly requested by clients that know him to "rescue" projects, either through the streamlining of processes or the rapid production of code.

Ken is a certified JBoss developer and is a frequent participates on open source projects. Ken is currently interested in the growing maturity of SOA solutions in the open source space, such as the ESB solutions like ServiceMix and Mule, or rules engines such as JBossRules.



Kris Zyp

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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

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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

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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

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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.


Nik Krimm

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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

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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

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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.




Scott Davis

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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

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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).


Stuart Halloway

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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.