Session Descriptions

Creator of Spring & Best Selling Author of J2EE without EJB
Rod is one of the world's leading authorities on Java and J2EE development. He is a best-selling author, experienced consultant, and open source developer, as well as a popular conference speaker.

Rod's best-selling Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (2002) was one of the most influential books ever published on J2EE. The sequel, J2EE without EJB (July 2004, with Juergen Hoeller), has proven almost equally significant, establishing a comprehensive vision for lightweight, post-EJB J2EE development.

Rod has extensive experience as a consultant in a wide range of industries: principally, finance, media and insurance. He has specialized in server-side Java development since 1996. Prior to that, he worked mainly in C and C++.

His experience as a consultant has led him to see problems from a client's perspective as well as a technology perspective, and has driven his influential criticism of bloated, inefficient, orthodox approaches to J2EE architecture, which have delivered very poor results for stakeholders.

Rod is the founder of the Spring Framework, which began from code published with Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development. Along with Juergen Hoeller, he continues to lead the development of Spring.

He regularly speaks at conferences in the US, Europe and Asia, including the ServerSide Symposium (2003, 2004 and 2005), JavaPolis (Europe's leading Java conference), and JAOO (2004). Engagements in 2005 include two presentations at JavaOne 2005 and a keynote at the JavaWorld 2005 conference (Tokyo, June).
Rod serves in the JCP on the Expert Groups defining the Servlet 2.4 and JDO 2.0 specifications.

Rod continues to be actively involved in client projects at Interface21, as well as Spring development, writing and evangelism.

Co-founder of the Spring Framework Project
Juergen has been the most active Spring developer since the open source project began from Rod's Interface21 framework back in February 2003. Juergen and Rod together continue to provide the direction for Spring.

Juergen has earned great respect in the Spring and J2EE communities for his energy, the quality of his code, his incredible attention to detail, and his huge contribution in Spring forums and mailing lists.

Juergen is an experienced consultant, with outstanding expertise in web applications, transaction management, O/R mapping technologies, and lightweight remoting. He has specialized in J2EE since early 2000, having held technology leader positions in various projects ranging from enterprise application integration to web-based data visualization.

AspectJ Lead
Adrian Colyer is the leader of the AspectJ open source project and a well-known industry expert on the topic of aspect-oriented programming (AOP). He is a co-author of the book "Eclipse AspectJ : Aspect-Oriented Programming in Eclipse with AspectJ and AJDT," and has also published numerous book chapters, articles and published papers. His short essay, "AOP without the buzzwords" has been described as "the best explanation of AOP, ever."

In 2004, Adrian was recognised as one of the top 100 young innovators in the world by MIT Technology Review for his contributions to the development and adoption of aspect-oriented programming in industry.

Adrian is a popular conference speaker and panelist at Java conferences and events around the world including the ServerSide Symposium, JavaPolis and JavaZone. He served on the Program Committee for the International Conference in Aspect Oriented Software Development for the 2004, 2005, and 2006 conferences, and was the first Industry Chair of the conference in 2002.

Adrian founded the AspectJ Development Tools project (AJDT) on Eclipse.org in 2003, a project that continues to lead the world in providing IDE support for AOP. As leader of the AspectJ project, Adrian has overseen several releases of the compiler and designed and implemented many of the AspectJ 5 language extensions to support Java 5 features such as generics and annotations. He is the author of the "AspectJ 5 Developer's Notebook" available from the AspectJ website.

Prior to joining Interface21, Adrian gained over a decade of experience in building enterprise middleware at IBM. Whilst there he built what he believes to be the best aspect-oriented development team in the industry at the time of his departure, and oversaw the introduction of aspect-oriented programming to many IBM development teams.

At Interface21, Adrian contributes to the Spring, AspectJ, and AJDT open source projects and provides education, training, and consultancy to clients working with Spring and AspectJ. He is also actively involved in writing and evangelism on these subjects.

Senior Research Engineer in CARET
Aaron Zeckoski is Senior Research Engineer in CARET (Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies) at Cambridge University. He has been involved in many aspects of system development over the past six years including analysis, design, implementation, QA, deployment, and support. His current responsibilities include project analysis, system design, and system implementation for web application development. Recent work involves Java, Spring, Hibernate, RSF (Reasonable Server Faces), PHP, and Sakai.

VP and Principal Consultant at Interface21
Alef Arendsen is VP and Principal Consultant at Interface21. Originally, Alef joined the development team of the Spring Framework in early 2003. Currently, Alef is responsible for several strategic Interface21 clients and he helps them achieve great results using some of the Spring Portfolio products. Furthermore, Alef is responsible for several activities related to technical marketing.

Alef is based out of Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Creator of the RSF framework
Antranig Basman is designer and architect for RSF, an innovative and minimal open source Java web presentation framework, which is based on Spring. Antranig's original training was in Mathematics, but he has since branched out into biotechnological applications of software engineering, (Bayesian) statistical inference and machine intelligence systems (his PhD is in Information Engineering).

Antranig is director of Lucendo Development Ltd., which specialises in sustainable, open source development for the academic sector, and is currently based at the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) at the University of Cambridge.

Founder & Project Lead for Spring Web Services
Arjen Poutsma is a senior enterprise application architect with more than ten years' experience in commercial software environments. During this time he has worked with both J2EE and Microsoft .NET.

Two years ago, Arjen started to specialise in Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures. During this period he has conducted trainings and has researched SOAs in large organisations.

Arjen is the founder and the project lead for the Spring Web Services. This Spring project aims at facilitating development of document-driven web services. Arjen has also contributed to various other open source projects, including XFire, NEO and others.

Since early 2005, Arjen has been a consultant for SpringSource in The Netherlands.

Creator of Spring Security (Acegi) & Interface21 Regional Director, Australasia
Ben Alex is Interface21's Regional Director, Australasia, and has over 12 years' experience architecting, developing and managing enterprise application solutions. During his career, Ben has been extensively involved in all aspects of software development using both Java and Microsoft platforms, and his experience covers a range of sectors, ranging from small startups through to large Government and corporate environments.

Ben has been a user and core contributor to the Spring Framework since mid-2003. In addition, Ben is founder and lead developer of the Spring Security (also known as Acegi Security) project. He is a developer on the Spring Rich Client project, and has also authored several Spring training modules and books, including the security chapter of "Professional J2EE Development with Spring Framework". Ben is also an active participant on the Spring forums, having answered over 2,000 questions from Spring users. He regularly speaks at international conferences and user group meetings about security and application architecture topics, and has delivered Interface21 training courses throughout Australasia, UK and USA.

In addition to his extensive experience developing highly scalable enterprise applications, Ben has also gained significant experience successfully managing projects, operations and commercial functions within a variety of companies. You can read Ben's blog at http://blog.interface21.com/main/author/bena/.

Senior Consultant at Interface21
Ben Hale is a senior consultant for Interface21, the company behind the Spring Framework and the Spring family of products. Ben's specialties include middle tier architecture with an emphasis on integration technologies such as JMS and JMX. Leading up to his role at Interface21 Ben has led teams in the architecture and development of large-scale enterprise management applications.

Distinguished Engineer at IBM
Billy is a Distinguished Engineer at IBM. He's been at IBM since 2001. Billy was the lead on the WorkManager/ Scheduler APIs which were later standardized by IBM and BEA and are now the subject of JSR 236 and JSR 237. Billy lead the design of the WebSphere 6.0 non blocking IO framework (channel framework) and the WebSphere 6.0 high availability/clustering (HAManager). Billy currently works on WebSphere XD and ObjectGrid. He's also the lead persistence architect and runtime availability/scaling architect for the base application server.

Before IBM, Billy worked as an independant consultant at investment banks, telcos, publishing companies and travel reservation companies. He wrote video games in C and assembler on the ZX Spectrum, Atari ST and Commodore Amiga as a teenager. He started programming on an Apple IIe when he was eleven, his first programming language was 6502 assembler.

Billys current interests are lightweight non invasive middleware, complex event processing systems and grid based OLTP frameworks.

Author of POJOs in Action
Chris Richardson is a developer, architect and mentor with over 20 years of experience and is the author of the recently published book "POJOs in Action". He runs a consulting company that helps development teams become more productive and successful by adopting POJOs and lightweight frameworks. Chris has been a technical leader at a variety of companies including Insignia Solutions and BEA Systems. Chris has a computer science degree from the University of Cambridge in England. He lives in Oakland, CA with his wife and three children.

Java Architect at Accenture, Spring IDE co-lead
Christian joined Accenture in 2002 and is a member of the Technical Architecture capability group within Financial Services. Christian has been working as a technical architect to design and implement multi-channel, mission-critical financial applications which leverage Spring features across all tiers.

Christian is co-lead of the Spring IDE (http://springide.org) Open Source project, providing development tools for the Spring Portfolio.

Core Spring Developer
Colin, a core Spring developer, is an architect with over 18 years of experience in developing commercial software, including all aspects of the software development lifecycle. Colin is co-author of 'Professional Java Development with Spring'

Colin has had a long and varied career, including experience developing for and managing his own retail software company, other experience in the C++ shrinkwrap and enterprise software space, experience with Java since '97, and a complete focus on enterprise Java since '99.

As architect and then chief architect at a software incubator / VC, from the '99 to 2004 time period, Colin's role was split between one part hands on architecture, design, and coding, another part mentoring and teaching best practices at the code and process level, and a final part performing technical due diligence and consulting for the VC arm. Throughout this period, Colin gained experience with and an appreciation for agile development practices as a vital part of software success.

Throughout his career, Colin's experience, wide ranging interests and general knowledge in the technology space have led him to be a resource that others have been able to draw on for advice. In general, Colin's background has left him with a deep knowledge of all it takes to successfully put out good software, at the code, process, and business level.

Along with client work at Interface21, Colin also spends significant time on Spring evangelism, including talks at a number of JUG meetings.

Lead, Spring OSGi and Spring JavaConfig
Costin Leau is an Interface21 consultant based in Romania. His interests include data access and aspect oriented programming. With significant development experience, Costin is currently the lead of the Spring OSGi and Spring JavaConfig projects. In addition, he has worked on the Spring JPA support project, Pitchfork (http://www.interface21.com/pitchfork), and has recently co-authored Interface21's public Hibernate training course.

One of the most active Spring forum contributor with around 3,700 posts in 2006, Costin is also involved as Project Lead for Spring Modules.

Author of Spring in Action
Craig Walls has been professionally developing software for over 14 years (and longer than that for the pure geekiness of it). He is the author of Spring in Action (now in its second edition) and XDoclet in Action, both published by Manning and is currently writing about OSGi and Spring-DM.

When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 6 birds, and 3 dogs.

Lead of Spring Batch, Interface21 Principal Consultant
Dr David Syer is the technical lead on Spring Batch, the batch processing framework and toolkit from Interface21. He is an experienced, delivery-focused architect and development manager. He has designed and built successful enterprise software solutions using Spring, and implemented them in major financial institutions worldwide. David is known for his clear and informative training style and has deep knowledge and experience with all aspects of real-life usage of the Spring framework. He enjoys creating business value from the application of simple principles to enterprise architecture. David joined Interface21 from a leading risk management software vendor where he worked closely with Interface21 on a number of projects. Recent publications have appeared in Balance Sheet, Operational Risk and Derivatives Technology.

Originator of Spring Web Flow Project
Erwin Vervaet is a software engineer with a keen interest in applying modern IT concepts and tools. He holds a master's degree in computer science from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.

Erwin has been using Java since its inception and has extensive experience applying it in IT research, e-commerce projects, open source initiatives, industrial software systems and business support applications. He currently works as an independent consultant, running his own software and consultancy company: www.ervacon.com.

Erwin also enjoys teaching and speaking on Java and Spring related subjects. As the originator the Spring Web Flow project, he currently co-leads it's development together with Keith Donald. He also authored the first book entirely dedicated to Spring Web Flow: Working with Spring Web Flow.

Project Lead of the Grails Project & CTO of G2One
Graeme Rocher is the project lead and co-founder of the Grails web application framework. He's a member of the JSR-241 Expert Group which standardizes the Groovy language. Graeme authored the Definitive Guide to Grails for Apress and is a frequent speaker at JavaOne, JavaPolis, NoFluffJustStuff, JAOO, the Sun TechDays and more. Before founding G2One Inc, Graeme was the CTO of SkillsMatter, a skills transfer company specializing in Open Source technology and agile software development, where Graeme was in charge of the company's courseware development strategy and general technical direction.

Architect, Oracle Java Products, OSGi Expert
Hal Hildebrand arrived on earth some eons ago when his physical essence filtered down from the stars, and he took human form. Lingering for awhile on the plateau of Leng while waiting for the apes to evolve, he eventually mingled among human society, generally without being detected, although the century he spent staked out in a peat bog in Denmark was rather unpleasant and not something he'd care to repeat. Once computers were invented he became involved in distributed systems in the hope that enough insider knowledge would, at the right time, allow him to convince the artificial intelligence in control to bypass electronic security measures on the first translight spacecraft and allow him to return to the stars. This is probably still some time away. Until then he spends his time as an architect at Oracle, working on cracking the Dharma cycle of large scale distributed systems and autonomic control.

Senior Software Engineer at SpringSource
Jennifer Hickey is a senior software engineer for SpringSource, the company behind Spring. She holds a master's degree in software engineering from the Florida Institute of Technology. Jennifer specializes in enterprise application management, with a focus on application modeling methodologies and techniques for rapid development and deployment of management agents. Her interests include aspect oriented programming, asynchronous messaging, JMX, and OSGi.

Jennifer is also very interested in improving organizational productivity through testing. In a previous position, she won an excellence award for introducing automated unit, integration, and regression testing into the development process.

Prior to joining Interface21, Jennifer was a principal architect of a large-scale network management system.

Lead of the Spring Faces Project
Jeremy Grelle is a senior software engineer with SpringSource and the technical lead of the Spring Faces project which provides first-class integration between Spring and Java Server Faces. He is a software artisan with extensive experience in combining server-side Java with the latest web browser technologies to deliver a rich and usable experience for the end user on the web. He has worked heavily with JSF since its initial release and is a member of the JSR-314 Expert Group for JSF 2.0.

Prior to joining SpringSource, Jeremy spent several years crafting large-scale enterprise web applications for the giants of the telecommunications industry. He was a leader in utilizing Spring, JSF, and the latest Ajax techniques to solve a wide variety of problems ranging from inventory management, to low-level network device monitoring, to providing more efficient integration with legacy mainframe systems. He began his career developing e-commerce systems at several web startups where he first became fascinated with bending web browsers to his will and hasn't turned back since.

SpringSource Senior Consultant
Jim is a Senior Consultant for SpringSource, and has spent over a decade delivering solutions at all layers of the software stack. His experience ranges from designing back-end enterprise systems for multi-national corporations, to basic infrastructure (eg, committer emeritus for the Apache log4j project), to rich desktop applications (eg, committer for the Spring Rich Client project).

He enjoys working with a wide range of technologies and languages, and speaks at user groups and conferences about the easiest ways to get development tasks done, whether that be specific technologies or methodologies.

Core Developer of Spring Portlet MVC
John A. Lewis is the Chief Software Architect for Unicon Inc, the leading independent provider of open source training, consulting, and support in higher education. John is a 16 year veteran of the software engineering industry. His passions are large-scale enterprise architecture, open-source technologies, and agile software development methods. He has been working heavily in Java-based enterprise information portals since 2001 and is the lead developer of Spring Portlet MVC, which provides JSR-168 support in the core Spring Framework.

Lead of Spring Web and Creator of Spring Web Flow
Keith Donald is a principal and founding partner at SpringSource, the company behind Spring. He is best known in the Spring community for creating Spring Web Flow. At SpringSource, Keith is the lead of the Web Products Team. His team, based in Melbourne, Florida, sustains the development of Spring Web MVC and Web Flow and their associated integrations, and is also responsible for future innovations in the domain of web frameworks.

Since the first Spring Experience in 2005, Keith, with Jay Zimmerman of NoFluffJustStuff Software Symposiums, has served as director of the popular conference series.

Keith is also the principal architect behind SpringSource's state-of-the-art training curriculum, which has provided practical training on Spring to over 3000 students worldwide.

Over his career, Keith, an experienced enterprise software developer and mentor, has built business applications for customers spanning a diverse set of industries including banking, network management, information assurance, education, and retail. He is particularly adept at translating business requirements into technical solutions.

Keith's blog can be found at http://blog.springsource.com/main/author/keithd

Accenture Architect and Spring Batch Developer
Lucas Ward is a Java Architect focused on batch architectures within the Innovation and Architecture practice within Accenture. He has been working over the past two years on Accenture's methodology and architecture best practices, in particular regarding the use of open source. Lucas is co-leading the development of Spring Batch, utilizing experiences from multiple batch architecture implementations throughout Accenture.

Spring Integration Lead
Mark Fisher is a Senior Software Engineer with SpringSource and lead of the Spring Integration product. As a core developer for the Spring Framework, he has played a central role in developing the annotation-based configuration features of Spring 2.5. He has also provided consulting and training services for clients across numerous industries throughout North America including several fortune 500 companies.

In addition to the "No Fluff, Just Stuff" symposium tour, Mark speaks regularly at conferences such as The Spring Experience and SpringOne. He has also presented at Java User Groups throughout the United States on various Spring-related topics.

Lead of Java Application Infrastructure at Morgan Stanley
Mark Kralj-Taylor co-leads the Java Toolkits Application Infrastructure group at Morgan Stanley. The group provides Java infrastructure centrally, including open-source libraries, to improve the productivity of Java developers throughout the firm. Mark focuses on technical direction for the group, and how Java is used across the firm, evolving a blend of open-source and in-house libraries, to take best advantage of the ever changing Java landscape, and integrate with the firm's technology environment. Before this Mark worked in application groups, using Java to deliver solutions to the business.

Prior to joining Morgan Stanley in 2000, Mark used his Physics background to develop numerical simulations in C++.