O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Meet the Experts

Community Manager: Rich Tretola

Rich Tretola currently holds the position of Rich Applications Technical Lead. He is an award-winning Flex developer and was the lead author of Professional Flex 2 (2007 ISBN: 0470102675) and sole author of Beginning AIR (2008 ISBN: 0470229047). Rich has been building Internet applications for over 10 years and has worked with Flex since the original Royale beta version of Flex in 2003. Other than Flex, Rich builds applications using ColdFusion, Flash, and Java. Rich is highly regarded within the Flex community as an expert in RIA and is also an Adobe Community Expert. He runs a popular Flex and AIR blog at http://blog.everythingFlex.com, and was also a speaker at the Adobe MAX 2007 conference in Chicago. Read Rich's recent InsideRIA entries.

Lead Expert: Andre Charland

Andre Charland is the co-founder and CEO at Nitobi Inc. He's been involved in Internet software development for almost a decade. As an advocate for usability and user experience, he speaks regularly on Ajax and web usability. Most recently Andre presented at MAX, the Adobe AIR Bus Tour, and the Ajax Experience. Andre is the co-author of "Enterprise Ajax", published by Prentice Hall this summer, and maintains his own blog at http://blogs.nitobi.com/andre. Read Andre's recent InsideRIA entries.

Design Experts:

Tony MacDonell

Tony MacDonell is a visionary in the Rich Internet Application space. He is a founder of Teknision Inc, a company that specializes in developing RIAs and Rich Media experiences, founded in 2001. Tony is known for his work for clients including Finetune, Sony,SNL Financial, PermissionTV, Walmart, and many more. He makes regular appearances at RIA conferences around the globe, speaking about design, usability, tooling and best practices. Read Tony's recent InsideRIA entries.

Gabor Vida

Gabor Vida is the president of Canadian RIA development firm, Teknision. Gabor leads Teknision’s user experience consulting and plays an active role furthering the concept of applications as brand building vehicles. Spanning the last 12 years, Gabor has an extensive background in both application development and branding. Read Gabor's recent InsideRIA entries.

Development Experts:

Raymond Camden

Raymond Camden is the owner of Camden Media, Inc, a web development and training company. A long time ColdFusion user, Raymond has worked on numerous ColdFusion books including the ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit and has contributed to the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update and the ColdFusion Developers Journal. He also presents at numerous conferences and contributes to online webzines. He founded many community web sites including CFLib.org, ColdFusionPortal.org, ColdFusionCookbook.org and is the author of open source applications, including the popular BlogCFC (www.blogcfc.com) blogging application. Raymond can be reached at his blog www.coldfusionjedi.com or via email at ray@camdenfamily.com. He is the happily married proud father of three kids and is somewhat of a Star Wars nut. Read Raymond's recent InsideRIA entries.

RJ Owen

RJ Owen is a Senior Developer at Effective UI . RJ was the lead developer on projects for Dow Jones, Random House and the Discovery Channel and contributed to ebay Desktop and the Adobe Video Workshop. In late 2007 RJ was featured on the Scoble show discussing RIA development and is passionate about the way that software affects and can improve people's lives. He is certified as an Adobe Community expert in Flex and co-authored the O'Reilly shortcut "Flex 3 Early Evaluator." RJ runs a flex blog called A Better Experience and while it's not as popular as Rich's, it's still pretty good. RJ holds a degree in Physics and Computer Science, generally does well on standardized tests, and lives in Colorado with his wife Marty.

Jonathan Snook

Jonathan Snook moves effortlessly from client-side, front-end work to hardcore server-side challenges, and his fluency in CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL make make him the "turn-to" man for many high-profile clients. Coauthor of Accelerated DOM Scripting and The Art and Science of CSS, he writes regularly for Digital Web and Sitepoint while also maintaining his popular blog at Snook.ca. Read Jonathan's recent InsideRIA entries.

Andrew Trice

Andrew Trice is the Principal Architect for Flex & AIR for Cynergy Systems, based in Washington, DC. He specializes in data visualization, client-server architectures, Object-Oriented principles, and rich application development. He has been developing for the web for over 10 years, with over eight years development for the Flash platform. Andrew has developed with Flex since version 1.5, and he thrives off the creativity and flexibility that the Flex/Flash platform enables. Andrew possesses over seven years experience with ColdFusion, is a Microsoft Certified Application Developer, and has a wide range of knowledge regarding relational databases, AJAX/Javascript, .NET, and Java web applications. Read Andrew's recent InsideRIA entries.

David Tucker

David Tucker is a software engineer with Universal Mind where he focuses on Flex and AIR application. In addition, he is an avid blogger and writes primarily about Adobe AIR, Flash, Flex, and ColdFusion at davidtucker.net. David is the author of the Lynda.com series, AIR For Flash Developers, and he is also the lead author of the upcoming O'Reilly publication, The Adobe AIR Cookbook. When he isn't staring at a computer screen he loves to play guitar and experiment with audio recording. Read David's recent InsideRIA entries.