2008 Speakers

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.

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!.

Chris 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 T. Schutta is a senior software engineer in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota with extensive experience developing Java Enterprise Edition?based Web applications. He graduated from St. John?s University (MN) with a degree in Computer Science and has a master?s of science degree in software engineering from the University of Minnesota. For the last several years, he has focused on user interface design. A long-time member of the Association for Computing Machinery?s Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group, Nathaniel believes that if the user can?t figure out your application, then you?ve done something wrong. Along with his user interface work, Nathaniel is the cocreator of the open-source Taconite framework, has contributed to two corporate Java frameworks, has developed training material, and has led several study groups. During the brief moments of warm weather found in his home state of Minnesota, he spends as much time on the golf course as his wife will tolerate. He?s currently exploring Ruby, Rails, and (after recently making the switch) Mac OS X. Nathaniel is the coauthor of the bestselling book, Foundations of Ajax.

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 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 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 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 is the Chief Technologist at Saven Technologies, 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.

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.