Ian Hlavats is an experienced Java developer, architect, consultant, and instructor specializing in JavaServer Faces (JSF). He has successfully designed, implemented, and released many JSF applications. One of his accomplishments is the creation of JSFToolbox for Dreamweaver, a suite of JSF UI development tools, which is now used by Fortune 500 companies and government agencies worldwide.
Ian has been teaching Java programming at the college level and in corporate training environments for several years. Ian was an invited speaker at the JSFOne conference in 2008 where he delivered a presentation on building JSF applications alongside a panel of other JSF industry experts. Ian was also invited to deliver presentations on hands-on JSF design and development using JSF tools such as Eclipse, NetBeans, and Adobe Dreamweaver at the JSF Summit conference in Orlando, Florida in December 2009.
Ian has been working professionally as a Java consultant and Java instructor since 2003. His first project was an internal audit project tracking system for the Government of Canada that was implemented using the Struts, Spring, and Hibernate frameworks, and a MySQL database.
After working extensively with Struts, Ian became very interested in JSF since it solved many issues that Struts did not address. Ian's involvement in the JSF community began around 2005 when he was active on JSF mailing lists, providing feedback and submitting bug reports to the JSF and Facelets development teams. While Ian was employed in the Government, he was also teaching Java courses at the Algonquin College in Ottawa.
Ian left his permanent job in the Government in 2006 to work for his own company, Tarantula Consulting Inc., and pursued Java development contracts with high tech startups and small businesses in the Ottawa area. He worked extensively with JSF and in the process he developed a suite of JSF extensions for Adobe Dreamweaver. JSFToolbox for Dreamweaver was released in 2006 and has since expanded its support for JSF to include new extensions for Facelets, Apache MyFaces Tomahawk, Apache MyFaces Trinidad, ICEfaces, JBoss Seam, and JBoss RichFaces/Ajax4jsf.
From 2007 to 2008, Ian worked as a Java instructor delivering Java training to software architects, engineers, and managers at Cognos/IBM. During this time, he also won a contract to consult on an enterprise Java application for the Government of Canada. Ian conducted an architectural assessment of an existing Java EE application, performed extensive code review, interviewed staff, coordinated with other consultants, prepared a report, implemented his recommendations to improve the Java application architecture, and trained Java development staff. Tarantula Consulting continues to work on JSF projects for high tech startup companies in Canada and the US.
In his spare time, Ian enjoys playing flamenco guitar and taking road trips on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
Ian is currently working on a second book on writing custom JSF components.