Speakers

Speaker Biographies

Doris Chen

Dr. Doris Chen, a staff engineer and Java Technology Evangelist at Sun Microsystems with over 10 years industry experience, her expertise includes Web 2.0/Ajax/Comet, Java FX, Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) technologies, JavaServer Faces,web services/SOA, Java ME platform wireless programming, Java technology performance tuning, grid computing, and web-based distributed computing. She speaks at major industry international conferences: JavaOne, SD West Software Development, CommunityOne, etc.

Doris received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in computer engineering, specializing in medical informatics. Before coming to Sun, Doris developed medical image compression applications and web-based network management products.

Justin Bolter

Justin Bolter is a Technology Evangelist in the Sun Microsystem's Cloud Computing and Developer Outreach organization. He joined the evangelist team to work with dynamic languages and emerging web technologies. His primary areas of focus are PHP, JRuby, Groovy, JavaScript, JavaFX and Social Networking. Justin joined Sun over 4 years ago after graduating from UC Santa Barbara with a B.S. in Computer Science.

Charlie Hubbard

Charlie Hubbard is a 10+ year veteran of the software industry, blogger, open source project contributor and creator. His days are filled as a Senior Software Engineer at Nexidia working on a grid based approach for searching audio. In his free time he enjoys working with Ruby, Java, Flex, Javascript, and has been known to make a film every once in a while. Charlie and his wife live and work in Atlanta.

Bob McWhirter

Bob McWhirter has been involved in open-source for over a decade, including founding the Codehaus and the Jaxen, Drools, and Groovy projects. He's taken a shine to Ruby in the past few years, and is currently trying to make it more enterprisey.

Jean Barmash

Jean Barmash is the Director of Technical Services at Alfresco Software, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management Company. His responsibilities include architecture and hands-on development of content centric solutions, training, and working with open source and Alfresco partner community. Jean brings a wealth of experience in different areas of technology creation. Most recently, he worked as Sr. Consultant and Trainer at several Wall Street Firms. Well-versed in both .NET and Java, he is interested in the innovation going on in Web 2.0 and bringing it into the Enterprise. He is a frequent speaker on technology and architecture topics at user groups and industry conferences.

Emmanuel Bernard

After graduating from Supelec (French "Grande Ecole"), Emmanuel has spent a few years in the retail industry as developer and architect where he started to be involved in the ORM space. He joined the Hibernate team in 2003 and is now a lead developer at JBoss, a division of Red Hat. Emmanuel is the lead developer of Hibernate Annotations and Hibernate EntityManager, two key projects on top of Hibernate Core implementing the Java Persistence(tm) specification. He also leads Hibernate Search and Hibernate Validator. Emmanuel is a member of the JPA 2.0 expert group and the spec lead of JSR 303: Bean Validation. He is a regular speaker at various conferences and JUGs, including JavaOne, JBoss World and Devoxx and the co-author of Hibernate Search in Action published by Manning.

Bill Burke

Bill is a Fellow at the JBoss division of Red Hat Inc. He is JBoss's representative on the JAX-RS specification and leads the JBoss RESTEasy project. Bill is co-author of O'Reilly's "EJB 3.0" and has numerous other online and in-print publications about REST, EJB, JAX-RS, and AOP.

Keith Donald

Keith Donald is a principal and founding partner at SpringSource, the company behind Spring. He is best known in the Spring community for creating Spring Web Flow. At SpringSource, Keith is the lead of the Web Application Development Products Team. His team, based in Melbourne, Florida, sustains the development of Spring MVC and Web Flow and their associated integrations, and is also responsible for future innovations in the domain of web application development frameworks. Since the first Spring Experience in 2005, Keith, with Jay Zimmerman of NoFluffJustStuff Software Symposiums, has served as director of the popular conference series. Keith is also the principal architect behind SpringSource's state-of-the-art training curriculum, which has provided practical training on Spring to over 3000 students worldwide. Over his career, Keith, an experienced enterprise software developer and mentor, has built business applications for customers spanning a diverse set of industries including banking, network management, information assurance, education, and retail. He is particularly adept at translating business requirements into technical solutions.

Keith's blog can be found at http://blog.springsource.com/main/author/keithd/

Yakov Fain

Yakov Fain is a managing principal of Farata Systems, a consulting, training and software development company. He's authored several Java books and dozens of technical articles. The latest book he co-authored is "Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters." Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group.

Neil Ford

Neal Ford is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, video/DVD presentations, and author and/or editor of 6 books spanning a variety of technologies, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. He focuses on designing and building of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, speaking at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. Check out his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

Jeremy Haile

Jeremy Haile is VP of Product Development at WeTheCitizens, an Atlanta startup, and is responsible for leading the development of the Wildfire Social Mobilization Platform. Jeremy is an experienced leader and consultant, with expertise implementing agile software methodologies and leading teams to develop high-quality software. He has focused on Java web application development using open-source technologies since 2000. He graduated from Georgia Tech in Computer Science, and is an active member of the development and startup communities in Atlanta, a founding member of the JSecurity open-source project, and a certified ScrumMaster.

Peter Higgins

Peter Higgins (aka dante) is a software engineer at SitePen, a prominent web development and consulting company based in Silicon Valley. Peter heads up SitePen's Dojo Support, a great option for companies needing technical advice, code fixes and answers from the experts. As the newly appointed Dojo Project Lead, Peter spends countless hours improving the Dojo Toolkit, writing great demos and tutorials, and helping new Dojo users become proficient with the toolkit, all key ingredients to building a thriving Dojo Community.

Bruce Johnson

Bruce Johnson is Tech Lead of the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). He joined Google in 2005 as a founding member of Google's engineering office in Atlanta, Georgia. Prior to Google, Bruce was Director of Engineering at AppForge, specializing in cross-platform mobile development tools.

Pratik Patel

Pratik Patel wrote the first book on 'enterprise Java' in 1996, "Java Database Programming with JDBC." He has also spoken at various conferences such as the Net Database Summit, WWW7 and the Atlanta Java User's Group (AJUG).

Pratik's specialty is in large-scale Java applications for mission-critical use. He has designed and built enterprise applications in the retail, health care, financial services, and telecoms sectors. Pratik holds a master's in Biomedical Engineering from UNC, has worked in places such as New York, London, and Hong Kong, and currently lives in Atlanta, GA.

Jared Richardson

Jared Richardson, co-author of Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects, is a speaker, consultant, and mentor with NFJS One. Jared has been in the industry for more than fifteen years as a consultant, developer, tester, and manager.

Ari Zilka

Ari Zilka founded Terracotta in 2003, where he currently serves as the infrastructure software company's CTO. There he's been working to refine the software that makes it easy to scale a Java application to as many computers as needed, without the usual custom application code and databases used to share data in a cluster. Prior to Terracotta, Ari was the Chief Architect at Walmart.com, where he led the innovation and development of the company's new engineering initiatives. While there, he built and led a team of core engineers focused on performance management, and operations cost-saving measures. Outside of Walmant.com, Ari's work in software development and consulting has had him working with Gap.com, Nike.com, Harrod's of London, Siemen's, Intel, Compaq, and Barnes & Noble among others.

In June 2008, Ari and the Terracotta development team celebrated the release of the first commercially-available book about the technology, "The Definitive Guide to Terracotta: Cluster the JVM for Spring, Hibernate and POJO Scalability". The book was written for both developers and architects who want to learn the "whats, wheres, whens, and whys" of the Terracotta scaling engine.

Ari holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering Computer Science as well as in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley.