Friday, May 8, 2009 (9am to 5pm)
Illinois Technology Association Chicago, IL
Following the overwhelming success of 2008's RIApalooza, we are proud to announce RIApalooza 2!
Join your fellow RIA professionals for an invaluable unconference aimed at exploring and promoting the development of Rich Internet Applications.
RIApalooza promises a platform agnostic and "PowerPoint-Free" zone, which means we are going to forgo the boring marketing pitches in favor of talking technology. RIApalooza is about creating Rich Internet Applications; how to go about building them and what is being built.
Presentations and sessions will be begin at 9am on Friday, May 8th. A social meet-and-greet will immediately follow at 5PM.
The event will be held at the Illinois Technology Association, located at 200 S Wacker Drive 15th Floor Chicago, IL 60606.
Click here for to register now!
RIAs Beyond The Mouse & Keyboard
Interactions with RIAs don’t have to be limited to the mouse and keyboard. Adam Flater and Pek Pongpaet from Roundarch will explore concepts and tools that can extend the richness of your application with a broader range of interfaces and output devices, from controlling an automobile through a touch-screen RIA dashboard to other using external devices for interface control (like the wii fit board).
They will also talk about Roundarch’s Merapi Project and show examples of how Merapi can be used to blur the line between desktop and Web in both Microsoft and Adobe technologies.
Top 10 Questions About RIA That You Never Had The Courage To Ask
Self-proclaimed RIA experts Josh Holmes and Mike Labriola will dive into 10 questions about RIA that you've thought about, but never had the gumption to ask. Speaking from their unique perspectives (Josh from the Silverlight camp and Mike from the Flex world) they will answer these questions from the vantage point of their favorite RIA tech and illustrate how different technology paths can each be leveraged to accomplish the same end results.
Josh and Mike will demo with sample code where appropriate. Bring your own questions and put these experts on the spot. Answers will be given for both Silverlight and Flex with just enough jQuery thrown in to make people squirm.
RIA Problems You Never Knew Existed
Is your RIA project a minefield riddled with unknown or unforeseen problems just waiting to bite you in the butt? Whether it is due to lack of foresight or inexperience it is easy to miss some serious "gotchas" when building a Rich Internet Application. Kevin Hoyt, Platform Evangelist at Abobe, will talk about problems waiting to happen in RIA architecture and development and ways we might start to address them. Kevin plans to expose many less than obvious issues such as keeping the web secure without killing your RIA UI, how specialized services (SOA) can kill operational efficiency, and why RPC is a spaghetti code nightmare waiting to happen.
Kevin Hoyt is a platform evangelist with Adobe Systems, Inc. Passionate about engaging user experiences, you'll most often find him meeting with customers, speaking at conferences, presenting online seminars, or just enjoying the chance to share ideas and brainstorm with other developers. When not on the road, Kevin enjoys spending time with his family, photography, and general aviation.
Building Interactive Applications using UX Principles
Designer at heart and developer by choice, Magenic’s Corey Miller will discuss UX principles and practices and how interactive developers can use these concepts to help build better applications for our users. This back-to-basics discussion is aimed at helping developers learn to differentiate between functional UI and compelling user experiences.
Corey is a professional designer and software developer with extensive experience in multimedia, web & windows based applications. A pioneer in Flash and Silverlight development, he uniquely combines design sensibility with rock-solid Microsoft .NET development skills. Corey is highly active in the designer/developer space, co-founder of CD2UG, Microsoft MVP in Client App Development and has served as a presenting speaker at numerous community events in the Chicago area.
Empowering the Client-Side: Consuming Internet Services in RIA
Our expectations for the web are changing. Today’s users are ready to embrace a brave new world online, and this migration to RIA applications is enabled by the omnipresent Flash/Flex player and the growth of the Silverlight plug-in. As businesses look to leverage existing development resources into legitimate RIA offerings, delivering live data to the client becomes a primary focus. We’ll review some of the mechanisms available to access data, examine a public API (Twitter), discuss a few development gotchas to avoid and discuss the pros & cons of your experiences accessing internet services via RIA.
Steve Holstad is a Development Consultant with Clarity Consulting, based in Chicago. His focus is on creating custom, data-driven Silverlight line of business applications while also contributing to the growing RIA community by demonstrating that user experience and business functionality are not mutually exclusive concepts. Ping him at sholstad@claritycon.com or follow him at http://twitter.com/steveholstad.
Social Media, RIA and Sustainability: A Website Development Case Study
Chad Udell will offer up a case study of his latest RIA project, a high-profile social media focused site that uses an open source CMS and webservices (AMFPHP) in conjunction with RIA technologies. Chad will talk about challenges faced and how he implemented a best practices approach during design and development.
A designer/developer with over a decade of professional experience, Chad strides the line between the two disciplines in order to bring out the best of both teams. He works closely with designers and developers at The Iona Group to create RIAs, museum and trade show experiences for numerous Fortune 100 companies and well known institutions. He blogs regularly at visualrinse.com, offering tips, code and opinion on RIA and rich media design/development topics. In addition, He teaches as an adjunct faculty member in Bradley University’s multimedia program, focusing on designing with web standards.
Call for Speakers.
If you'd like to be considered for a speaking slot at RIApalooza2, send a bio and brief abstract to info@riapalooza.com
A couple things to consider when you submit your session:
We are saying “no PowerPoint / Keynote” presentations. You are certainly allowed to have slides, but they should not be marketing of either your favorite technology or your company.
We want all presentations to be on Rich Internet Applications, not on a specific technology (Silverlight, Flash, Flex, AIR, WPF, AJAX, etc). So a topic on “Building applications with Adobe AIR” is not appropriate for the event. “Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight” is better topic, but “Building Line of Business Applications with RIA Technologies” is the best. You can certainly show any technology as your sample (and we encourage people to show lots of technology), but the principles should apply to any platform.
If you have further questions please drop us a line: info@riapalooza.com
