Christophe Coenraets is a Principal Product Manager and Evangelist (at Adobe) working on Flex with an Enterprise twist in the BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services Engineering Team. Christophe joined Macromedia in 2000 as a J2EE Evangelist, and started working on Flex from its early days. Before joining Macromedia, Christophe was at Powersoft / Sybase from 1994 to 2000 where he managed Technical Evangelism. Christophe has been a regular speaker at conferences worldwide for the last 10 years. His blog is popularly read by all in the RIA community.

In this keynote, Christophe Coenraets will review the state of Rich Internet Applications in the context of some of the new and exciting features of Flex 3, AIR, BlazeDS, and the upcoming version of LiveCycle Data Services. Christophe will demonstrate how these features along with new projects and initiatives at Adobe can profoundly transform financial services applications.

Yakov Fain is a managing principal of Farata Systems, consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles. Recently, Yakov has co-authored an advanced book, "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. He is an Adobe Certified Flex Instructor. Yakov holds Masters Degree in Applied Math. You can reach him at yfain@faratasystems.com

Michael Labriola has been developing Internet applications since 1995 and has been working with Flex since its 1.0 beta program. He specializes in developing applications with high business impact using emerging technologies. Michael worked as an author and technical editor on Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source and has published a series of articles on Adobe’s Developer Center teaching others to integrate Flex client and server technologies. As a frequent speaker on Flex topics and contributor to Flex mailing lists, he is known throughout the developer community. Michael also speaks Spanish and Italian, and pretends to speak more Japanese than he actually knows. Michael is currently a senior consultant at Digital Primates IT Consulting Group. (Michael's Blog)

Mike Nimer is a former member of the Adobe ColdFusion engineering team. There he was responsible for the integration of Flex 2 with ColdFusion Server as well as many other current features of ColdFusion. Before joining the Adobe engineering team he worked for three years as a senior consultant with the Macromedia consulting group, assisting clients on-site with their architectural planning, code reviews, and performance tuning. He has spoken at every Allaire & Macromedia DevCon/Adobe MAX since they began 1998. Mike is currently a senior consultant at Digital Primates IT Consulting Group. (Mike's Blog)

James Ward is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe and Adobe’s JCP representative to JSR 286, 299, and 301. Much like his love for climbing mountains he enjoys programming because it provides endless new discoveries, elegant workarounds, summits and valleys. His adventures in climbing have taken him many places. Likewise, technology has brought him many adventures, including: Pascal and Assembly back in the early 90’s; Perl, HTML, and JavaScript in the mid 90’s; then Java and many of it’s frameworks beginning in the late 90’s. Today he primarily uses Flex to build beautiful front-ends for Java based back-ends. Prior to Adobe, James built a rich marketing and customer service portal for Pillar Data Systems.

Shashank Tiwari is the Chief Technologist at Saven Technologies, a technology driven business solutions company headquartered in Chicago, IL. As an experienced software developer and architect, he is adept in a multitude of technologies. He is an expert group member on a number of JCP (Java Community Process) specifications, JSRs 274, 283, 299, 301 & 312, and is an Adobe Flex Champion. Currently, he passionately builds rich high performance applications and advises many on RIA and SOA adoption. Many of his clients are banking, money management, and financial service companies that he has helped build robust, quantitative, data-intensive, highly interactive, and scalable applications. He writes regularly in many technical magazines, presents in seminars and mentors developers and architects. He has a popular blog on the O'Reilly Network. He is an ardent supporter of and contributor to open source software. He lives with his wife and two sons in New York. More information about him can be accessed at his website.

Victor Rasputnis is a Managing Principal of Farata Systems. He’s spends most of his time providing architectural design, implementation management and mentoring to companies migrating to Flex and JEE technologies. Victor authored several books and technical articles. Recently, he has co-authored an advanced book, "Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters". Victor holds a PhD in computer science from the Moscow Institute of Robotics.You can reach him at vrasputnis@faratasystems.com