SPEAKERS AND TOPICS

DUANE NICKULL- Senior Technical Evangelist, Adobe Systems

Welcome and Keynote Address
Duane's morning session will cover Adobe's current strategy, overall roadmap and architecture. It will lay the foundation for Web 2.0, SOA and RIA for the remainder of the day.

About Duane
As Senior Technical Evangelist for Adobe Systems, Duane Nickull is responsible for Adobe’s messaging around enterpris solutions in the SOA and Web Services spaces plus other forward looking aspects such as the Web 2.0. Previously Mr. Nickull co-founded Yellow Dragon Software Corporation, a privately held developer of XML messaging and metadata management software, acquired by Adobe in 2003. He previously served as CTO and President of XML Global Technologies, acquired by Xenos Group in early 2003.

Duane has recently renewed his work in the theoretical field of computational intelligence and has recently spoken to the Ontolog Forum on a proposal to build an event-causality aware inference engine coupled to a query-able ontology. Such mechanisms may one day bestow true cognitive and reasoning capabilities upon applications. In the field of semantic reconciliation, Duane was a co-inventor of the first Context-sensitive XML Search Engine (www.goxml.com) and the first web based XML E-Commerce ASP. He is named on pending patents pertaining to XML indexing and retrieval covering 51 unique points. He also served as Technical Director for XSLT.com.

He lives in Vancouver, Canada with his wife and three children, plays in a rock band, actively snowboards, races Porsche 911’s and mountain bikes.

RYAN STEWART

Building your first AIR application with Flex

About Ryan
Ryan Stewart lives, eats, and breathes rich internet applications. He holds an economics degree from the University of Pennsylvania and is now a Rich Internet Application Evangelist for Adobe and blogger extraordinaire. After graduating from Penn, he spent two years developing applications for the Wharton School and pushing the idea of the web as a platform for learning. Ryan lives in Seattle with his wife, tracks the RIA world and climbs mountains when he can.

ANDRE CHARLAND- President and CEO, Nitobi

About Andre
Andre Charland co-founded Nitobi in 1998 after working for several other Internet start-ups. As President and CEO, he is directly involved in software development and has successfully excecuted over 100 development projects. Charland was also an early proponent of the building blocks of Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), the leading technology for web application development.

Charland has spoken widely on Ajax, blogging, and web usability and is currently co-authoring a book on Enterprise Ajax for Addison Wesley. He has been quoted internationally in the media on blogging for business, and maintains his own blog at http://captainajax.com.

A graduate of Simon Fraser University with a major in Business Administration and Computer Science, Charland is on the Board of BALLE BC and co-founder of the Social Tech Brewing Co.

PETER ARMSTRONG

Flexible Rails: An Introduction to Using Adobe Flex 2 with Ruby on Rails
The presentation focuses on the why and how of using Flex and Rails together, specifically focusing on HTTPService, XML, REST, Cairngorm and RubyAMF. There will be a short slide presentation followed by demos and code walkthroughs. For more information, please see http://www.flexiblerails.com.

About Peter
Peter Armstrong has been a full-time Flex developer since July 2004 (since Flex 1.0), and has been tracking Ruby on Rails since mid-2005 (since before Rails 1.0). Before switching to Flex, he spent over five years as a Java Swing developer, with a brief stint with PHP during the dotcom bubble in 2000.

ROSS LADELL

About Ross
Ross Ladell has been a Flash application developer for over 5 years. He organizes the Vancouver Flash/Flex User Group. When he's not writing code or talking about code, he tries to keep as far away from computers as possible. You can see some of his photos at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/69535620@N00.

STEVE BOND

Implementing Cairngorm For Traditional ActionScript RIA development
Description: For a number of years, Adobe Consulting has advocated a micro-architecture called Cairngorm as a solution for structuring complex RIAs built using Flex. Cairngorm successfully addresses a number of issues that arise when working with large MVC applications and is quickly gaining broad acceptance in the Flex community. Even though Cairngorm focuses on Flex 1.5+, traditional ActionScript developers can benefit greatly from the fine work that has been done to-date. Steve will discuss applying many of the design patterns espoused by Cairngorm to traditional Flash projects using work done to-date on the forthcoming redesign of Jumpman23.com as a real-word example. Adapting the official Cairngorm source for use with traditional AS projects will also be discussed.

About Steve
Steve Bond is a Senior Interface Developer specializing in Flash application development at Blast Radius, an interactive agency based in Vancouver, Canada. Steve's worked with Flash since 1998 and has had the opportunity to contribute to projects for clients such as AOL, BMW Canada, Cole Haan, Fairmont, Heineken, Mini (BMW Canada), Nike, Nintendo, Rogers Media, and Vivendi Universal Games. In his spare time, Steve likes to relax and not think too much about work. That doesn't always work out.