About the Authors

Max Katz is a senior systems engineer and lead RIA (Rich Internet Application) strategist at Exadel, a software development company. He is a well-known speaker appearing at many conferences, webinars, and JUG (Java Users Groups) meetings.

Max leads Exadel’s RIA and mobile strategy. Part of this role is working as the developer advocate for Tiggr Mobile Apps Builder (gotiggr.com), a cloud-based application for building mobile web and native apps for any device. In addition, Max leads Exadel’s open-source projects (exadel.org), such as Fiji, Flamingo, and JavaFX Plug-in for Eclipse.

Max has been involved with RichFaces since its inception, publishing numerous articles, providing consulting and training, and authoring the first edition of Practical RichFaces (Apress, 2008). Max also co-authored the DZone RichFaces 3 Refcard and the DZone RichFaces 4 Refcard. You can find Max’s writings about RIA and mobile technologies on his blog, mkblog.exadel.com, and you can find his thoughts about these topics and others on Twitter at @maxkatz.

Max has a BS in computer science from the University of California, Davis, and an MBA from Golden Gate University.

Ilya Shaikovsky is a product engineer at Exadel. He has worked on the popular RichFaces project since its inception.

As part of the RichFaces project, Ilya gathered new component requirements, built new custom components, and developed RichFaces demo applications. He also acted as a community liaison and helped answer customers’ and users’ questions. In addition, Ilya has led a number of large enterprise development projects that used RichFaces, solving many performance and scalability problems along the way. He also led the Exadel Fiji project, a rich JSF library for wrapping Flash and JavaFX as JSF components. Prior to the RichFaces project, Ilya worked on the Exadel Studio product line, now part of JBoss Developer Studio and JBoss Tools.

Ilya has produced a wide variety of information on RichFaces. He acted as a reviewer on the first edition of Practical RichFaces and wrote a chapter in it. He also co-authored the DZone RichFaces 3 Refcard and the DZone RichFaces 4 Refcard. In addition to this, he is the author of two RichFaces-related blogs: in.relation.to/Bloggers/Ilya and www.jroller.com/a4j/. You can follow Ilya on Twitter at @ilya_shaikovsky.

Ilya has a master’s degree in computer science from Belarusian State University in the Republic of Belarus.