Speaker Biographies

Brendan Eich, CTO of Mozilla; Creator of JavaScript

Brendan is responsible for architecture and the technical direction of Mozilla. He is charged with authorizing module owners, owning architectural issues of the source base and writing the roadmap that outlines the direction of the Mozilla project.

Brendan created JavaScript, did the work through Navigator 4.0, and helped carry it through international standardization. Before Netscape, he wrote operating system and network code for SGI; and at MicroUnity, wrote micro-kernel and DSP code, and did the first MIPS R4K port of gcc, the GNU C compiler.

Kevin Lynch, Senior Vice President Platform Business Unit and Chief Software Architect, Adobe

Kevin leads Adobe’s Platform Business Unit, which is focused on advancing the company’s software platform for the creation and delivery of engaging applications and content to any desktop or device. Lynch is responsible for the company’s ubiquitous Portable Document Format (PDF), Adobe® Reader®, Adobe Flash® Player, and the new cross-operating system application runtime code-named "Apollo," as well as alignment of Adobe’s servers and tools with the company’s technology platform. Lynch also oversees Adobe’s developer relations program, including the integration of customers and partners in the development process through Adobe Labs and customer advisory councils.

Lynch joined Adobe through the company’s 2005 acquisition of Macromedia, Inc., where he served as chief software architect and president of product development. He headed up the creation of the company’s mobile and devices group, and served as general manager of the web publishing group. Lynch also oversaw the initial development of Macromedia® Dreamweaver®, a leading web development product.

Chris Wilson, Internet Explorer Platform Architect, Microsoft

Chris Wilson is the Internet Explorer Platform Architect at Microsoft. He began working on web browsers in 1993 when he co-authored the first Windows versions of the NCSA Mosaic web browser. This was also when he inflicting overlapping and tags on the world. After leaving NCSA in 1994 and spending a year working on a web browser for SPRY, Inc., he joined Microsoft's Internet Explorer team as a developer in 1995.

In the course of five years on the IE team, Chris has participated in many standards working groups, in particular helping develop standards for Cascading Style Sheets, HTML, the Document Object Model and XSL through the W3C working groups. He also developed the first implementations of CSS in Internet Explorer. Beginning in 2001, he spent a few years working on the Avalon project, but rejoined the IE team in 2004 to lead the IE Platform and Security team.

In his free time, he enjoys photography and hiking with his wife and one-year-old daughter, and scuba diving in the chilly waters of Puget Sound as a PADI Assistant Instructor. With any free money, he replaces the cameras he's destroyed by taking them underwater for dive photography. Occasionally he remembers to share his thoughts on his blog.

 

Breakout Session Speakers

Dion Almaer, co-founder of Ajaxian.com

Dion is the co-founder of Ajaxian.com, the leading Ajax community, and "Audible Ajax" the popular podcast. He is a columnist on Enterprise Java topics at openxource.com, onjava.com and of course his blog at almaer.com/blog. He enjoys writing, and speaking at events such as JavaOne, JavaPolis, TheServerSide Java Symposium, and the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium tour. He also participates on JCP expert groups, and the open source community as a whole.

Brent Ashley, Ajax Pioneer
Presenting: Ajax Transport Layer Alternatives

Brent is recognized as a pioneer in Ajax tools and techniques, having authored and promoted popular web remoting libraries as far back as 2000. He was the first guest speaker at O'Reilly and Adaptive Path's Ajax Summit in May 2005, and remains active in the Ajax community, encouraging vendors to work towards improving the fundamental browser features available to developers for making web applications.

Ryan Breen, Vice President, Technology, Gomez
Presenting: Ajax Performance Analysis, Employing the Latest Tools to Get the Job Done

Ryan runs the blog AjaxPerformance.com and is the Vice President of Technology at Gomez, where he spends his time building web performance management products and working with customers to develop performance management strategies. Prior to joining Gomez, Ryan was co-founder and primary system architect for Porivo Technologies. While at Porivo, Ryan oversaw the development of breakthrough Internet performance monitoring technology that revolutionized the measurement of customer experience at the last mile. Ryan leveraged his experiences with Porivo's performance monitoring technology to create Gomez' Universal Transaction Agent (UTA). Ryan is also a regular contributor to various open source software projects.

Tim Buntel, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, ColdFusion, Adobe
Presenting: ColdFusion-Powered Ajax Applications

Tim has been part of the ColdFusion product team since 2000, previously as Sr. Product Manager, and has been developing with ColdFusion since version 1.5. Tim has been a presenter and keynote speaker at Macromedia DevCon and Adobe MAX since 2000, and is a regular speaker at user groups and events worldwide such as WebDU, MX Europe, CFUNITED and many more. He is a co-author with Ben Forta of the third-edition of the award-winning "Advanced Macromedia ColdFusion Application Development" and has written numerous articles for industry publications and the Adobe/Macromedia Development Center.

James Burke, Dojo contributor, AOL
Presenting: Achieving a runtime CPAN with Dojo's xdomain resource loader

James has worked at AOL for 11 years and is an active Dojo contributor. He built Dojo's xdomain loader and has assisted AOL teams that use Dojo for high traffic AOL web destinations. Visit http://tagneto.blogspot.com for more information.

Max Carlson, Co-Founder, Laszlo Systems & OpenLazlo.org
Presenting: OpenLaszlo 4.0 - Java ME, Ajax and beyond

Max first began programming at age six, writing his first game in BASIC at age eight. Max currently teaches at the San Francisco Multimedia Studies Program and is Lead Runtime Architect for the OpenLaszlo group at Laszlo Systems, a San Francisco software company he co-founded five years ago. Before that, he worked for a series of startups and at Excite@Home where he pioneered the use of dynamic Flash content for the broadband portal and worked on DHTML and Flash applications for broadband customers.

Roberto Chinnici, Sr. Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Presenting: JavaScript on Client and Server with Phobos

Roberto works on the Java Platform, Enterprise Edition, with particular focus on Web Services and Ease of Development. He is the specification lead for the JAX-RPC 1.1 and JAX-WS 2.0 technologies and an active participant in W3C and WS-I working groups.

Paul Colton, Founder, Aptana
Presenting: Aptana as a killer Ajax IDE

Paul founded Aptana in 2005. Prior to starting Aptana, Paul founded several technology companies including Live Software. At Live Software, Paul helped define the Servlet API specification and also created JRun, the leading commercial Servlet and JSP engine. After Live Software was acquired by Allaire Corporation (and subsequently by Macromedia and Adobe, which now sells JRun), Paul took time to explore new technical opportunities — Aptana is the result of that exploration.

Douglas Crockford, Creator of JSON
Presenting: JSON Overview and JavaScript: The Good Parts and Ajax Security

Douglas is an Evangelical Architect at Yahoo! Inc. He discovered JSON while he was CTO of State Software. Previously, Doug was Founder and CEO of Electric Communities, Director of New Media at Paramount, Director of Technology at Lucasfilm Ltd., and a Researcher at Atari, Inc.

Andreas Ecker, Project Lead of qooxdoo
Co-presenting qooxdoo with Derrell Lipman

Andreas is the project lead and co-creator of qooxdoo (http://qooxdoo.org), a comprehensive and innovative Open Source Ajax framework. At 1&1 Internet AG (http://1and1.com), one of the biggest Web hosts worldwide, he leads a team of engineers who are dedicated full-time to qooxdoo development. Andreas has over twelve years experience developing professional Web applications. With a strong background in Web technologies and as a long-time JavaScript enthusiast, he enjoys leveraging and promoting the power of browser-based Ajax applications.

Jon Ferraiolo, Web Architect, IBM Emerging Technologies and manager of operations, OpenAjax Alliance
Presenting OpenAjax Alliance - OpenAjax Hub (And more!)

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.

Pete Forde, Unspace Interactive
Presenting: Custom DOM Attributes for Fun and Profit & Building Rich JavaScript Database Applications with Jester

Pete is a partner with Unspace, a small team of Rails experts in Toronto, ON. He may have also written some Javascript.

 

Ben Galbraith, co-founder of Ajaxian.com

Ben is a frequent technical speaker, occasional consultant, and author of several Java-related books. He is a co-founder of Ajaxian.com, was recently Chief Technical Officer for Amirsys, and is presently a consultant specializing in enterprise architecture and Swing/Ajax development. Ben wrote his first computer program when he was six years old, started his first business at ten, and entered the IT workforce just after turning twelve. For the past few years, he's been professionally coding in Java. Ben presides over the Utah Java User's Group, is active in the Java Community Process, and tinkers on various open-source projects from time to time. He delivered over eighty technical presentations in 2004 at venues including JavaOne, O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), and the No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposiums.

Joshua Gertzen, Primary Architect, ThinWire Ajax RIA Framework
Presenting: Case Study: Dodging the Pitfalls of Enterprise Ajax Applications

Joshua is a software developer with over ten years experience building software of various kinds.  His knowledge and experience range from utilizing differing programming languages, development frameworks, and architectural patterns to programming language and AI research.  Over the last six years, he has played a key role in building the technology infrastructure at Custom Credit Systems, a Dallas-based software company.  One of his main focuses over that time has been building web architectures that utilize DHTML / Ajax programming techniques.  Additionally, he is the primary architect behind the open source ThinWire Ajax RIA Framework, which came about as a result of his extensive work in the area of dynamic web technologies.  Recently he has been speaking at a number of different conferences about the challenges faced by trying to build a enterprise class Ajax applications.  For those who are interested, Joshua posts various musings to his blog at http://www.truecode.org.

Matt Gibbs, Development Manager, UI Framework and Services team, Microsoft
Presenting: Building Silverlight Applications with .NET & Go Deep with ASP.NET Ajax

Matt Gibbs is a Development Manager in the UI Framework and Services team at Microsoft. His team is responsible for ASP.NET and AJAX as well as parts of Silverlight. Matt has been working on the web development platform since joining Microsoft in 1997. He has received degrees in Computer Science from the University of Utah and the University of Washington. He has co-authored books on ASP, ASP.NET and the ASP.NET Mobile Controls. He lives in Redmond, Washington with his wife and three children.

Jeremiah Grossman, Founder and CTO, WhiteHat Security, Inc.
Co-presenting Advanced Web Application Security with Joe Walker

Jeremiah, considered a world-renowned expert in Web security, is co-founder of the Web Application Security Consortium, and recently named to InfoWorld's Top 25 CTOs for 2007. Mr. Grossman is a frequent speaker at industry events including the BlackHat Briefings, ISACA, CSI, OWASP, Vanguard, ISSA, OWASP, Defcon, etc. He has authored dozens of articles and white papers, credited with the discovery of many cutting-edge attack and defensive techniques, and co-author of XSS Attacks. Mr. Grossman is frequently quoted in major media publications such as InfoWorld, USA Today, PCWorld, Dark Reading, C- Net, SC Magazine, CSO, and InformationWeek. Prior to WhiteHat he was an information security officer at Yahoo!

Aaron Gustafson, Founder, Easy! Designs LLC.
Presenting: Learning to Love Forms and Ruining the User Experience

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 his own web consultancy: Easy! Designs LLC. Aaron is a member of the Web Standards Project (WaSP) and the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS). He also serves as Technical Editor for A List Apart, is a contributing writer for Digital Web Magazine and M SDN, and has built a small library of writing and editing credits in the print world. Aaron has graced the stage at numerous conferences including An Event Apart, COMDEX, SXSW, The Ajax Experience, and Web Directions and is frequently called on to provide web standards training in both the public and private sector. He blogs at easy-reader.net.

Kevin Hoyt, Platform Evangelist, Adobe Systems, Inc.
Presenting Taking your Web Dev. skills to the desktop Using Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)

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.

Ryan Johnson, LivePipe Founder
Presenting: Prototype Patterns

Ryan Johnson is the founder of LivePipe LLC and is an active developer of web applications and components for Fortune 500 companies, and the open source community. An industry veteran of 14 years, he was a key influencer in terms of development and design at several leading dot com companies in the late 90s in the Seattle area. Ryan is a self-taught programmer and a formally trained graphic designer. 

Sean Kane, Director of User Interface Engineering, Netflix
Presenting: Developing a Great User Interface - A Netflix Case Study

Sean is the Director of User Interface Engineering at Netflix, where he leads a team of developers to create the rich web experience that Netflix is known for. Sean's responsibility for the Netflix presentation-layer framework has included developing several of the Ajax interactions and features on the Netflix web site in addition to guiding the strategy for developing the presentation framework architecture.

During his tenure, the Netflix website has been rated by independent researchers as number one in the world for customer satisfaction for three consecutive years.

Roger Kitain, Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems
Presenting: Dynamic JavaServer Faces

Roger is the co-specification lead of the JavaServer Faces specification. He started working on JavaServer Faces in 2001 as a member of the Reference Implementation team. Roger has worked with non-HTML rendering and Ajax techniques for JavaServer Faces, including contributions for Project Dynamic Faces. He has been involved with server side web technologies and products since 1997.

 

Brian Leffler, Consultant and Software Developer
Presenting: What Can You Do Using Amazon EC2?

Brian has led many successful software projects for both large (Goodrich, Rossignol, Primedia) and small corporations, living and working as a consultant and software developer in the rural state of Vermont. He currently is working with a small company which has a successful B2B and B2C e-commerce platform, as well as with Ronald McDonald House developing a Web application for volunteer scheduling. Brian is interested in using the internet to solve everyday problems. Currently exploring Amazon.com’s new Web services, Brian is presenting a session on Amazon EC2.

Patrick Lightbody, QA Solutions Product Manager, Chief Open Source Evangelist, Gomez Inc.
Presenting: Testing Ajax Applications Made Easier with Selenium

Patrick leads product management for quality assurance solutions and directs open source strategies at Gomez Inc., the leader in web application experience management. Prior to joining Gomez, Lightbody launched Autoriginate, the creator of a hosted QA solution, and managed the professional services team at collaboration software provider Jive Software. At Jive, Patrick managed accounts for some of the biggest companies in the world, including Oracle, Sun Microsystems, EMC and PriceWaterhouse Coopers. Patrick also serves as the CEO and Chairman of OpenSymphony Group, Inc, a non-profit open source group dedicated to the creation of high-quality, open source Java-based components. Additionally, he is the founder of OpenQA, an open source group dedicated to bringing quality open source testing tools to market.

Glen Lipka, UX Architect, Marketo
Presenting: jQuery for Designers

Glen is a UX Architect in Silicon Valley , currently leading UX at Marketo, a RIA marketing automation company.  Pioneering UX Design since 1995, Glen has been at the forefront of rich internet experiences for over a decade.  His early internet design company Koko New Media developed the first web animation, the first all-Flash e-commerce site, the ground-breaking e-commerce work with Grainger and the award-winning business extranet Hotkoko, which was one of the first RIA applications.

Not a programmer, yet more technical than a designer, Glen has always had a passion for enabling designers to take control of the User Experience.  In addition to designing the Marketo Application, Glen is writing a designer revolution book called, jQuery for Designers.  He blogs frequently at http://www.commadot.com.

Derrell Lipman, qooxdoo Team Member
Co-presenting qooxdoo with Andreas Ecker

Derrell is a qooxdoo team member with a keen interest in software design which enables ease of use for the end user. He has 25 years of software engineering experience in areas ranging from graphical user interface design to network protocol development. He maintains much of the Ajax and communication layer code in qooxdoo, as well as the virtual table and tree classes. Derrell is the CTO for Backlot Technologies (http://BacklotTech.com). When he's not working with high technology, you might find Derrell flying high in his Grumman Tiger airplane.

Craig McClanahan, co-leader, JSF project, Sun Microsystems
Presenting: Tooling for Ajax-Based Development

Craig is a Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems, the architect of the Sun Java Studio Creator developer tool. He co-leads the JavaServer Faces project at Sun, and was technical lead for the Sun Microsystems team working on the Tomcat servlet container. Craig is perhaps best known as the primary developer of the Apache Struts Framework, an MVC architecture for creating web applications.

Mark Meeker, Architect, UI Engineering team, Orbitz Worldwide
Presenting on: Merging Ajax and Accessibility

Mark is an architect on the UI Engineering team at Orbitz Worldwide. While developing the presentation-layer of the online travel platform at Orbitz he helps his team strive for an innovative UI that is standards-based and accessible. Previous to Orbitz, he helped develop Britannica.com and earned a masters in software engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Dan Morrill, Developer Programs, Google, Inc.
Presenting: Fast, Beautiful, Easy: Pick Three -- Building Ajax Applications with the Google Web Toolkit and Beyond XHR: Taking Ajax Offline with Google Gears

Dan joined Google Developer Programs in 2006 to help developers become successful with the Google Web Toolkit and other products. Before joining Google, Dan was a computer scientist at GE Research, where he gave himself headaches by switching between web development in JavaScript and circuit design in Verilog. Dan lives in Atlanta with his wife, two cats, and lots of video games.

Greg Murray, Ajax Architect, Sun Microsystems
Presenting: jMaki: Creating Ajax Application Made Easy

Appointed as Ajax Architect for Sun Microsystems, Greg 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.

David Négrier, Lead developer, Xaja (first open-source PHP reverse Ajax framework)
Presenting: Xaja–A Server-Side PHP Reverse Ajax Framework

David graduated from the diploma in Computer Science at Cambridge, UK, and worked as a consultant in IBM Global Services and Accenture in Paris. He co-founded The Coding Machine, a start-up that provides IT services through community driven development. David is currently CTO at The Coding Machine and takes interest in developing frameworks that help the community improving its efficiency. Two of those frameworks have been released in open-source: TDBM - a PHP ORM framework -, and Xaja, that will be presented during The Ajax Experience.

 

Brad Neuberg, Core developer, Dojo; Code contributor to Mozilla, JXTA, Jakarta Feed Parser & more
Presenting: Creating Offline Web Applications with Dojo Offline

Brad Neuberg is a leader in pushing web browsers in new directions. Previous projects include: Dojo Offline, a JavaScript library and runtime focused on bringing web applications off the network; the HyperScope project with Douglas Engelbart (inventor of the computer mouse), which brings groundbreaking hypertext ideas to the contemporary web; Dojo Storage, a breakthrough library that delivered megabytes of client-side storage for the web years before others; the Really Simple History framework, one of the first Ajax frameworks that reliably provided back button and bookmark support for DHTML applications; and the Internet Archive's web-based book reader for an open, digital library.

Brad has extensive experience in the open source community, contributing code to Mozilla, JXTA, the Jakarta Feed Parser, and more. His experience includes developing distributed systems on Wall Street, working with Java for over ten years, and being one of the main developers on the Dojo project. As Senior Software Engineer at Rojo Networks, Brad focused on next-generation blog aggregators, MySQL, and Lucene.

Brad has also explored blowing up the browser itself and going in new directions. The Paper Airplane research project, for example, explored the possibilities of a two-way web with deep collaboration and next-generation editing support, while P2P Sockets developed a web service stack and Domain Name System ported to run on a peer-to-peer network.

Jonathan Phillips, Software Designer, Engineer and Researcher, Me.dium
Presenting: Me.dium: Mapping the Internet and Its Users in a 208 Pixel Wide Sidebar

Jonathan is the lead sidebar developer, responsible for design and implementation. Prior to joining Me.dium, Jonathan was employed at several commercial and research institutions in the Denver/Boulder area. He has participated in the development of a web based virtual agent, an end user programming environment, and two online communities. He is also published in IEEE Computer. Jonathan has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Christophe Porteneuve, Prototype Core team member and CTO, Ciblo
Presenting: Discovering Prototype, Advanced Prototype & script.aculo.us

Christophe Porteneuve has been doing Web-related Research & Development for over 10 years. In 1999, he developed a successful intranet framework entirely based on XML data queries and XSLT component libraries, then went on to create Europe's first JSP-based production portal.

In 2002, Christophe began to: take Web standards to heart, migrate his company's 200+ seats to Firefox, and teach semantic strict XHTML markup, CSS 2.1, etc. at a leading IT college.

Involved in Ruby on Rails since 2005, and in Prototype and script.aculo.us since 2006, Christophe contributes heavily to them all, is one of the driving forces behind Prototype's official website, a prominent voice on the support mailing list, and a member of Prototype Core.

He's an IT best-selling author in France, and currently wraps up his second book, the authoritative and comprehensive “Prototype and script.aculo.us,” already available in Beta from the Pragmatic Programmers.

John Resig, Creator of jQuery
Presenting: Intro to jQuery, Advanced jQuery, and Client-Side Framework Overview

John is a programmer, working for the Mozilla Corporation, who's the author of the book Pro JavaScript Techniques. He's also the creator and lead developer of the jQuery JavaScript library. When he's not programming, he enjoys watching movies, writing in his web log, and spending time with his girlfriend, Julia.

Dylan Schiemann, CEO, SitePen Inc., co-creator of Dojo Toolkit
Presenting: Comet: Low Latency Data Transit, or Really Bad Pun? and
Dojo 0.9: Faster, Leaner, and Dijit?

It all started in 1999 when Dylan dropped out of the PhD program at UCLA and left the fascinating world of statistics of shear-induced rearrangements in a two-dimensional model foam and the accumulation of glucosaminyl(acyl)phosphatidylinositol in an S3 HeLa subline expressing normal dolicholphosphomannose synthase activity to refocus his efforts on the future of the web. As CEO of SitePen and co-founder of the Dojo Toolkit, Dylan is best known for building web applications that make use of JavaScript/Ajax, Dojo, and other standard web development technologies. He has helped develop web apps for companies including Renkoo, Informatica, Security FrameWorks, and Vizional Technologies.

Dylan is an avid Oakland A's fan, a lover of the hammer throw, devoted husband, father to three obnoxious dogs and resides on JetBlue Airways.

Bill Scott, Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo!
Presenting: Anti-Patterns: Designing for a Poor Web Experience and Prototyping the Rich Web Experience

Bill 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.

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.

Steve Souders, The Chief Performance Yahoo!
Presenting: Performance Analysis with YSlow for Firebug

Steve works at Yahoo! as the Chief Performance Yahoo!, where he has developed a set of best practices for making web sites faster. He builds tools for performance analysis and evangelizes these best practices and tools across Yahoo!'s product teams. Prior to that he ran the development team for My Yahoo!. He's been at Yahoo! since 2000 working on many of the platforms and products within the company, including the scalability challenges of Yahoo!'s large number of users and page views. He's currently writing a book entitled High Performance Web Sites, to be published by O'Reilly in Summer '07.

Geoff Stearns, Flash Engineer, YouTube
Presenting: Flash: Strengths vs. Weaknesses and How to Best Utilize it in Projects

Geoff is author of SWFObject, a Flash detection and embedding script. Before Google, Geoff worked on websites for Adobe, New York's MoMA, XM Radio, Comcast, MTV, and Sony Pictures Classics and taught front-end Web development at The Cooper Union in New York.

David Stewart, Senior Development Lead, Microsoft's Virtual Earth project
Presenting: Virtual Earth: A Real-World Performance Exercise

As development lead for Microsoft’s Virtual Earth Project David’s primary responsibility for the past nine months has been the AJAX-based shell of the application.

An 11-year veteran of Microsoft, Stewart has worked as a developer, program manager, and tester. Before Virtual Earth, he worked on Windows Mobile's Inbox and Pocket Internet Explorer, various versions of desktop Windows, and Windows Media Player.

Joe Walker, Creator of DWR (Direct Web Remoting)
Presenting: Hands-on DWR and co-presenting Advanced Web Application Security with Jeremiah Grossman

Joe is a developer and consultant working on advanced web development techniques like Ajax . Joe developed DWR which has become the most popular Ajax toolkit for Java by making browser/server interaction intuitive for web developers. He currently works through his consultancy, Getahead Ltd, which is supplying a growing number of customers with Ajax and advanced web solutions.

 

Rich Waters, Lead Developer, Builders Resource Group
Presenting: Ext: Extend the Web

Rich has always been a programmer at heart, he began at a very young age programming for fun in his spare time. He enjoys hacking out web applications in a wide range of languages from Java to Perl to Ruby on Rails. He is the architect on the Ext.nd project, which is a version of Ext geared towards a Lotus Notes/Domino backend.

Dustin Whittle, Technical Yahoo!, symfony evangelist, Social Search Group, Yahoo!
Presenting: Diving into symfony

Dustin works at Yahoo! as Technical Yahoo! and is a contributing developer on the symfony project. Before joining Yahoo!, he was a self-employed technology consultant, working around the world to make the Web a better place for everyone. Previous to that, he was the lead developer at The Web Freaks, developing and contributing to sites like phpfreaks.com, ajaxfreaks.com, linuxforum.com, apachefreaks.com, and mysqlfreaks.com. As a consultant and trainer, Dustin has taught tutorials and given talks at many conferences and institutions on such topics as enterprise Web development and symfony.

Greg Wilkins, CTO and founding CEO, Webtide
Presenting: Ajax Comet Communications

Greg is closely involved with the open source movement, being the creator of the Jetty web container, a co-founder of Apache Geronimo, and a committer or contributor to a number of other open source projects. Greg sits on the JCP Servlet Expert Group and is active in the Open Ajax Alliance. Greg was also a founder and CEO of Mort Bay Consulting.

Greg has deep knowledge of all facets of software development. He has, 22 years experience as a software developer, team leader, architect, trainer, and technical mentor in industry sectors ranging from telecommunications, finance, realtime computing to internet applications.

Greg received his B.S. Computer Science Degree with 1st Class Honors from Sydney University, Australia.

Mark Wubben, Developer, Xopus
Presenting: sIFR: From Designer's Dream to JavaScript Nightmare

Mark is a web developer based in the Netherlands. He is currently obtaining his Bachelors in Computer Science and is the developer of the popular sIFR project. Besides that he works for Xopus where he helps build friendly web-based XML editors. You can find his weblog at http://novemberborn.net/.

Dan Yoder, CEO & CTO of ZeraWeb and Vixby.com, Author of Cruiser JavaScript Library
Presenting: Stylesheet-Based Behaviors: Motivation, Challenges and Implementation

Dan founded and runs ZeraWeb, a Web design firm out of Santa Monica, CA. Dan also started Vixby.com, a Rails-based hosted Web site creation service that spun out of ZeraWeb. He is also the author of the Cruiser JavaScript Library, which includes the Behavior Stylesheet implementation that is the subject for his session at the conference.

Dan brings over two decades of experience in all aspects of the software business, and has consulted for IBM, Dell, GE, and AT&T, as well as numerous startups. He has been working with Web-based application architectures since 1995 and began working with REST-style interfaces and rich client frameworks in 2001-2.

J.J. Zhuang, Zimbra; Telecommunication software design expert
Presenting: Case Study: Offline Ajax – Taking Large Browser-based Applications Offline

J.J. has a background in engineering and computer design. He was recognized for bringing CAD visualization technique to the bioinformatics field during the early genomic research boom. A veteran server software architect and an active member of the open source community, J.J. Zhuang is an expert in telecommunication software design. His latest passion is to bring complex Web 2.0 products "offline" thereby extending their lives beyond the Web.

Kris Zyp, Founder of Xucia
Presenting: Continuations in JavaScript

Kris developed Authenteo (an Ajax-based WCM), and has been innovating JavaScript technology in the area of persistence and data object mapping. He created the JSPON (JSON for persistent objects) data interchange protocol, as well open source tools for accessing JSPON sources. Kris also has been a contributor to the Narrative JavaScript continuation/coroutine project.