O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Meet Our Contributors

Daniel Barreiro

Daniel Barreiro (screen name Satyam) has been around for quite some time. The ENIAC was turned off the day before he was born so he missed that one, but had a chance to punch cards, program 6502 chips (remember Apple II?), own a TRS-80 and see some fantastic pieces of operating equipment in his native Argentina which would have been on museums elsewhere.

When globalization opened the doors to the world, his then barely usable English (plus an Electrical Engineering degree) put him on the career path which ended in a 5 year job in the Bay Area. At the time, Mosaic was the browser of no-choice but. Totally intrigued by the funny squiggles a friend of his wrote in his plain text editor, full of <s and >s he ended up learning quite a lot about <s and >s. It's been a long journey since COBOL and Fortran. Now he lives quite happily semi-retired in the Mediterranean coast close to Barcelona, Spain.

Kelly Brown

Kelly Brown is the Chief Technology officer of AboutWeb.  He has a BS and MS in Computer Science and numerous certifications in Java, ColdFusion, Flex, and Microsoft technologies.  He is also an Adobe certified instructor for Flex and ColdFusion and teaches other technologies such as JavaScript and Perl at the local community college.

Kelly has been developing web application since 1995, when he worked for the Learning Technologies Project at NASA.  In his role as CTO of AboutWeb, Kelly serves as a software architect and oversees many projects using a variety of technologies such as Flex, Ajax, ColdFusion, LiveCycle, and Java.  He also serves as the user group manager for the Capital Area Flex User Group in DC.

Douglas Crockford

Douglas Crockford is a product of our public education 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 interested in Blissymbolics, a graphical, symbolic language. He is developing a secure programming language. He is now an architect at Yahoo!.

Christian Crumlish

Christian Crumlish has been designing and writing about shared information spaces since 1994. He is the curator of the Yahoo! pattern library and is director of technology for the Information Architecture Institute. He studied philosophy at Princeton and painting at the San Francisco School of Art He is the author of, most recently, The Power of Many: How the Living Web is Transforming Politics, Business, and Everday Life (Wiley, 2004), and he is working a book about online presence and identity, tentatively titled Presence of Mind. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, Briggs, and his cat, Fraidy.

Adam Flater

Adam Flater is a Software Architect at Universal Mind. His background is in working with java and Microsoft technologies, building both web and desktop applications. He has been working in Flex user interface and server development since the beta release of Flex 2.0. Adam was the lead developer on the ActionScript SDK for eBay's Web Services used in the eBay Desktop application. In 2007 Adam presented at Fig Leaf's Flex Maniacs in D.C., The eBay Developer's conference in Boston, 360Flex in Seattle, Adobe's OnAir Bus Tour in D.C., and Adobe's MAX Conference in Chicago. Adam is also co-creator of the former Artemis project and the current Merapi project, a java bridge to flash at the desktop.

Jun Heider

Jun Heider is a Developer and Technical Trainer with RealEyes Media. Jun graduated from Regis University with a BS in Computer Networking.

Jun has worked with ColdFusion since 4.5, Flex since Flex 2 beta, and AIR since it was first available in pre-release. In addition, Jun has a strong networking background starting with an NT 4 MCSE on up to on-site installs of Connect Enterprise 6. In addition to development and training, Jun is active on the conference circuit speaking at events such as Flexmaniacs, 360Flex, and MAX.

In his free time, Jun loves to play his guitar, play his Xbox, snowboard, and hang out with his son Kobi, daughter Mia, and wife Michelle in Colorful Colorado.

Tony Hillerson

Tony Hillerson is a Software Architect for EffectiveUI. He graduated from Ambassador University with a BA in MIS. On any given day he may be working with Flex, Java, Rails, Maven, Ant, Ruby, or shell scripts. Tony has contributed to many community projects, such as RubyAMF. Tony has spoken at 360|Flex and Adobe MAX, as well as local user groups.

Tony is interested in all levels of usability and experience design, from the database to the server to the glass.

In his free time Tony enjoys playing the bass, playing World of Warcraft, making electronic music, making beer, learning Latin, and studying philosophy. Tony lives outside Denver, CO with his wife and son Titus.

John Lindquist

John Lindquist is currently a Software Developer for Schematic. John graduated from the University of Alaska Anchorage with a BA in English focusing on technical writing. He will also soon graduate from the University of Utah with a JD focusing on Intellectual Property.

Before recently joining Schematic, John freelanced for five years mostly developing in-house Flex and php applications for the University of Utah. Last year, John gained a strong interest in the development of 3D Flash applications and runs a popular tutorial site, pv3d.org, to help newcomers enter the 3D fray. John also manages the Utah Flash User Group: uFlash.

Ben Longoria

Ben Longoria is an Academic Applications Developer for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been developing with Flash since Flash 5, and Flex since the Flex 2 release. For the past 2 years he has also been developing Mozilla-powered applications.

Ben has worked on a number of educational and academic projects including cross-platform applications targeting both the browser and the desktop.

He takes an active role in interface and interaction design, and enjoys the challenge of creating usable software. In the past he has contributed to projects such as ActionStep, SWFObject, Mozpad, and Adobe's Flex Cookbook.

Pete Mackie

Pete has been a software developer and publisher, first founding his own company, Seaquest Software, some thirty years ago, which is still going strong. His recent development efforts were as a volunteer code committer for the Eclipse IDE and working on PHP-based web sites for small start-up companies. Pete stumbled upon Adobe’s booth while attending EclipseCon 2006. Wondering what Adobe was doing at an open source centric conference, he stopped at the booth and discovered Flex Builder running on the Eclipse IDE. Pete instantly I recognized what Flex could do for RIA client/server applications. Rushing home, he installed the Flex Builder 2 beta and has been hooked on Flex software development ever since.

Eric Miraglia

Eric Miraglia has been authoring social web applications since 1995, when he began developing interactive writing spaces for universities; his Speakeasy Studio & Café application was used by more than 100 universities between 1997 and 2004.

Since 2003, Eric has been a part of Yahoo's web development community. In 2005, he joined the newly-formed YUI library engineering team along with other influencers from throughout Yahoo. In a few short years, YUI has come to underpin the Yahoo family of properties, including among many others Yahoo's front page, Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo, and Yahoo Finance. YUI was released under the liberal BSD license in 2006; YUI's worldwide developer community now numbers in the tens of thousands, and the library is widely used in the world beyond Yahoo.

In addition to his engineering work, Eric has taught writing at Stanford and Washington State Universities.

Colin Moock

Colin Moock is the author of five best-selling books on ActionScript, all published by O’Reilly Media, Inc. Moock's works include ActionScript: The Definitive Guide, ActionScript: The Definitive Guide for Flash MX, Essential ActionScript 2.0, and Essential ActionScript 3.0. Moock is a regular speaker at international Flash industry conferences, including FITC, Flash Forward, and Adobe MAX.

John Osborn

John Osborn is a senior editor with O'Reilly Media, Inc., responsible for Windows and .NET developer books, PDFs and other content. When he's not at his desk in Cambridge, MA you're likely to find him on his bike, in a kayak, or cross-country skiing.

Juan Sanchez

Juan Sanchez is an Experience Architect at EffectiveUI. He graduated from California State University, Chico with a BA in Communication Design. Juan’s background is primarily in print design, branding, and typography, however, his interests rapidly evolved into software design and development.

Juan manages ScaleNine.com, a website dedicated to compiling skins and themes for Flex. He is currently co-authoring a book on creating visual experiences in Flex and has spoken at user groups and conferences, including 360|Flex and WebManiacs. Juan is a founding member of Degrafa, a declarative graphics framework for Flex.

Scott Sheridan

Scott Sheridan is an aspiring web developer with interest in Adobe's Flex platform. Attracted to the intellectual and creative challenges offered as a programmer, he hopes to one day possess the skills to contribute meaningful and innovative code to the web community. Scott's academic background is in Psychology, with an emphasis on the research of visual sensory memory. In addition, he is a certified Yoga instructor, with eight years teaching experience, and a professional musician. Scott was chosen as a freelance developer to create sites for the Wisconsin Weights and Measures Association, The Driftless Farm CSA (an organic farm in South Western Wisconsin), and for Roald Gundersen Design's green building project.

Christian Wenz

Christian Wenz is a trainer and consultant who has written more than 50 books. He works with both open source and closed source web technologies, has been awarded a Microsoft MVP for ASP/ASP.NET, and is listed in Zend’s Who’s Who of PHP. Christian is also listed in Mozilla’s credits (about:credits) and is considered an expert in browser-agnostic JavaScript.

Moxie Zhang

Moxie Zhang is an Enterprise Solution Architect at ESRI. His background consists of series of transitions over 20 years, from BIOS hacker, network engineer, to DBA, Windows developer, Java developer, Open Source practitioner and RIA Evangelist. His role in career cycles around consultant, enterprise architect and project manager. His works received awards such as NASA Software Innovation Award for a SOA framework at JPL. Aside from working in applying geo spatial technologies in large, he blogs at Flex RIA and, as a RIA editor of InfoQ.com, reports the latest news in the RIA world.