Speakers

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.

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.

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.

Dr Ben Alex is a Principal Software Engineer with SpringSource, and has been working professionally in software since 1995. Ben founded the Spring Security project in 2003, and continues to serve as its project lead. Spring Security is a popular, open-source security framework that is used in numerous government, banking and military installations. Whilst written in Java, Spring Security's powerful architecture has seen it ported to other platforms such as Microsoft .NET and Python.

Ben's career history also includes other roles in software development and business. From 2005 until 2008, he led the establishment and exponential growth of SpringSource's operations in Asia-Pacific. Prior to SpringSource, Ben founded and grew a successful Australian software company, Acegi Technology Pty Limited. He has also been a director and advisor to businesses in diverse industries including business services, intellectual property licensing and ecommerce.

In recent years Ben has presented at technology conferences including JavaOne, The Server Side Java Symposium, JAOO, Øredev, SpringOne and The Spring Experience. He is a regular guest presenter at user groups across the world, with recent appearances in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Canberra, Perth, Singapore, Wellington, Auckland, Christchurch and Stockholm. He also authored the security chapter of the Wiley book, "Professional J2EE Development with Spring Framework", and maintains a blog at http://blog.springsource.com/main/author/bena/.

Scott is a member of the web products team at SpringSource, where he focuses on creating and sustaining rich web applications and frameworks. Scott is the creator of the SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository, a production web application built on Spring 2.5, Spring MVC, and Spring JavaScript. He is also an expert in UI design, style, accessibility, and particularly skilled in interacting with customers to map business requirements to innovative software solutions. Over the course of his career, Scott has lead the successful development of mission-critical web applications in the areas of academia and technology infrastructure.

Chris is the technical lead for the Spring JavaConfig project and a Senior Consultant with SpringSource. He has trained hundreds of developers how to most effectively use Spring to create well-designed, testable enterprise applications. Before joining SpringSource in 2007, Chris worked as a software engineer in a variety of industries with a special focus on optimizing team productivity through test-driven development, continuous integration, and other agile techniques. He lives with his wife, Kim, in Seattle.

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

Christian joined SpringSource, the company behind the Spring Framework, in 2008 as a Senior Software Engineer. He is a member of the Tools Team based in Vancouver and is responsible for the various tool offerings of SpringSource. Since 2004 Christian is leading the well known Spring IDE (http://springide.org) open source project that provides development tools for the Spring Portfolio based on Eclipse.

Christian has been developing Java enterprise applications since 1997. During this time, Christian designed complex software architectures with a focus on multi-tiered, web-based, client-server applications using enterprise Java technologies and the Spring Framework. Prior to joining SpringSource, Christian worked as consultant and project manager for one of the leading global technology consulting firms in the financial sector in central Europe.

Christian has presented on a variety of enterprise Java topics at conferences such as JAX, W-JAX, SpringOne and The Spring Experience.

Justin Edelson is the Vice President of Applications and Platforms for MTV Networks Global Digital Media. He is the co-author of two books on software development: Java & XML, 3rd Edition (2006) and JRuby Cookbook (2008). Over the last decade, he has contributed to high-profile web and mobile applications for brands such as MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, Showtime, The Movie Channel, Spike TV, Nickelodeon, and MSN.

Mr. Evans leads Skyway Software’s global teams of enablement and support professionals and is responsible for ensuring customers and partners gain maximum value from using Skyway Visual Perspectives. Prior to joining Skyway Software, he spent 10 years at Accenture as one of their top technical architects and worked with a large variety of technical and application architectures to lead implementation teams during the full software delivery lifecycle at numerous client engagements. Evans earned a BS in Computer Science from the University of South Florida.

Mark Fisher is a Senior Software Engineer with SpringSource and lead of the Spring Integration project. As a core developer for the Spring Framework, he 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.

Adam is the Director of Developer Relations at SpringSource and has extensive experience in enterprise Java community management. Prior to joining SpringSource, Adam ran BEA's dev2dev community and was a product evangelist, technology educator and public speaker for BEA's WebLogic products.

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.

Rob Harrop is a respected speaker, author, entrepreneur and technologist.

As Lead Engineer of SpringSource dm Server, Rob is driving SpringSource's enterprise middleware product line and ensuring that the company continues to deliver high-performance, highly scalable
enterprise soutions. With a thorough knowledge of both Java and .NET, Rob has successfully deployed projects across both platforms. He has
extensive experience across a variety of sectors, in particular banking,retail and government. Prior to joining SpringSource, he co-founded UK-based software company Cake Solutions Limited and worked as Lead Developer for a successful dotcom start-up.

Rob is the author of five books, including Pro Spring, a widely acclaimed, comprehensive resource on the Spring Framework.

Rob is a member of the JCP and is involved in the JSR-255 Expert Group for JMX 2.0. Rob is an experienced, highly-sought after, technical speaker who can communicate complex topics in a way that any developer can understand. Over the past 3-4 years, Rob has also presented at JavaOne, QCon, AOSD, The Spring Experience, SpringONE, OSCon, and OreDev on a variety of topics to rave reviews.

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 SpringSource, Jennifer was a principal architect of a large-scale network management system.

Peter Higgins (aka dante) is a software engineer at SitePen, a prominent
web development and consulting company based in Silicon Valley. Peter
heads up SitePen's Dojo Support, a great option for companies needing
technical advice, code fixes and answers from the experts. As the newly
appointed Dojo Project Lead, Peter spends countless hours improving the
Dojo Toolkit, writing great demos and tutorials, and helping new Dojo
users become proficient with the toolkit, all key ingredients to
building a thriving Dojo Community.

Jack Kennedy leads all phases of software development at Skyway Software. Before co-founding Skyway Software in November 2001, Kennedy was a consulting architect for MarketMile, a leading e-procurement service provider. Kennedy served as Chief Architect of the Marketplace product for Ariba, following Ariba's acquisition of TRADEX. Kennedy earned a B.A. degree in Management of Information Systems from the University of South Florida.

Mik Kersten is the President & CTO of Tasktop Technologies, lead of the Eclipse Mylyn project, and a committer on the AspectJ projects. While a research scientist at Xerox PARC Mik created the first Aspect-Oriented Programming tool support and implemented AspectJ plug-ins for JBuilder, NetBeans, VisualStudio, and Emacs. Mik created Mylyn and the Task-Focused UI technology while completing his PhD in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. His passion is building tools that make it more natural and less stressful to work on very large systems.

Kirk is an industry analyst at Burton Group. For 15 years, he has worked in the trenches on real software projects. He takes a keen interest in design, architecture, application development platforms, agile development, and the IT industry in general, especially as it relates to software development.

In 2002, Kirk wrote the book Java Design: Objects, UML, and Process, published by Addison-Wesley. He has also written numerous whitepapers and articles, including The Agile Developer column for The Agile Journal. Kirk is the founder of Extensible Java, a growing resource of component design pattern heuristics for Java that can easily be applied to most other platforms, including .Net. Kirk has trained thousands of software professionals, teaching courses on UML, Java J2EE technology, object-oriented development, component based development, software architecture, and software process. He enjoys hacking in a variety of languages, including Java, .Net, Ruby, and PHP.

Mark Kralj-Taylor leads the global 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++.

Ramnivas Laddad is an Interface21 Principal. He has over a decade of experience in applying his enterprise Java and aspect-oriented programming (AOP) expertise to middleware, design automation, networking, web application, user interface, and security projects.

Ramnivas is a well-known expert in enterprise Java, especially in the area of AOP. He is the author of AspectJ in Action, the best-selling book on AOP and AspectJ. His book is highly recommended by leading industry experts for its practical and innovative applications of AOP solving a wide range of real-world problems. Ramnivas is also one of the industry's leading conference speakers, who has given over one hundred talks at conferences such as JavaOne, No Fluff Just Stuff, JavaPolis, and EclipseCon. Ramnivas hosts the Aspectivity blog, where he shares his thoughts on AOP and related topics. He is an active member of the AspectJ community and has been involved with AOP since its early form.

Ramnivas’ role at SpringSource includes working with the Spring community and SpringSource clients to help them leverage the power of AOP. He is currently involved in interesting work combining ideas in domain-driven design with AOP and DI. He is also working on creating reusable aspects to simplify development of typical Spring-based projects. His work at SpringSource is expected to drive major new innovations atop the Spring 2.0 platform.

Ramnivas lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Costin Leau is an SpringSource software engineer 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, and has recently co-authored SpringSource'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.

John 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. John 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 Spring Framework. He is also active in several higher education open source communities, including uPortal and Sakai.

Mat Lowery is a Software Engineer at Pentaho Corporation. He has been with the company for more than two years and has worked on multiple front-end and back-end development projects across many different Pentaho products.

Mat is a contributor to the Spring Framework, having provided code, defect reports, and test cases to help improve Acegi security and other modules.

In his time at Pentaho Corporation, Mat has developed and contributed to many challenging product engineering initiatives at Pentaho including:

• Implementing row-level security in a centralized metadata layer
• Automating aggregate table design in databases to improve analytical query performance
• Numerous security and security-integration projects, including single sign-on through integration with Central Authentication Service (CAS)

Prior to working at Pentaho, Mat was an Application Software Developer for four years at Wyndham Vacation Ownership where he implemented an extensible web application security infrastructure as well as data layer, business facade, and reusable UI elements for Fairfield Resorts' primary external web site using established enterprise design patterns.

Mat received a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from The University of Central Florida in 2003.

Wayne has over 20 years of experience creating, developing, and deploying enterprise architectures systems for some of the largest organizations in finance, telecom, products and government.

Wayne is a senior technology manager within Accenture and a member of the Innovation and Architecture / Custom Solutions Architecture practice. In this capacity, he has been involved in the implementation of many enterprise applications including case management, customer service, web commerce, point of sale, call center, transportation operations and government programs. He is experienced in product development life cycle, bringing a solution from concept to production and operation.

Wayne's career over the past 8 years has had special emphasis on J2EE architectures with WebSphere/WebLogic focused on configuration, deployment, and performance. Wayne has had a history with object databases and has been a strong advocate for ORM solutions including TopLink and Hibernate. He's been a speaker at JBOSS World 2005 and in many internal Accenture architecture workshops.

Most recently, Wayne has been involved with a global architecture team involved with re-defining Java architecture based on open source and Spring's lightweight frameworks. One of the most interesting of those frameworks has been the introduction of a Spring based Java Batch framework based on years of experience with large, high performing batch solutions.

Richard McDougall is a Principal Engineer in the Office of the CTO at VMware, where he focuses on scalability, observability and performance of virtualization systems. One of his particular projects is characterizing the performance of Oracle Database on VMware Infrastructure.

Richard is the co-author of “Solaris Internals”, “Solaris Performance and Tools” (solarisinternals.com) and the lead author for “Resource Management” (Prentice Hall/Sun Blueprints). He has written numerous articles and papers on measurement, monitoring and capacity planning of Solaris systems, and frequently speaks at industry and customer technical conferences on the topics of system performance and resource management.

Richard and his performance team have published and blogged on several Oracle performance topics on vmware.com including http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/1055 and http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/ .

A self-confessed polyglot programmer, Russ Miles is a senior consultant for SpringSource in the UK where he works with various companies to help them take full advantage of the Spring Framework. To ensure that he has as little spare time as possible, Russ contributes to various open source projects and has authored a number of books.

Russ is a keen contributor to open source projects and an author for O'Reilly Media. He has authored and co-authored 3 books; "AspectJ Cookbook", "Learning UML 2.0" and "Head First Software Development"

Prior to joining SpringSource, Russ gained experience of enterprise development throughout all tiers of application architecture including high performance and usability presentation tier services for the Search and Mobile Portal industries right through to maximum availability application and data services for the Defence industry.

Russ holds an MSc. Software Engineering from Oxford University.

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 and rich desktop applications.

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.

Glyn works in the SpringSource dm Server development team in Southampton, England where he helped to define the architecture of the dm Server and developed several core components.

He is an active member of the Core Platform Expert Group of the OSGi Alliance developing a future release of the OSGi platform.

He was the spec. lead of JSR 291 which brought OSGi into the Java Community Process. He was also an active member of the JSR 277 and JSR 294 Expert Groups which aim to add module constructs to Java.

His 27 year career has been spent mostly in transactional middleware and Java virtual machine development and in applying mathematical models to software development.

Pratik Patel wrote the first book on 'enterprise Java' in 1996, "Java Database Programming with JDBC." He has also spoken at various conferences such as the Net Database Summit, WWW7 and the Atlanta Java User's Group (AJUG).

Pratik's specialty is in large-scale Java applications for mission-critical use. He has designed and built enterprise applications in the retail, health care, financial services, and telecoms sectors. Pratik holds a master's in Biomedical Engineering from UNC, has worked in places such as New York, London, and Hong Kong, and currently lives in Atlanta, GA.

Patrick Peralta is a software engineer for Oracle, specializing in Coherence and middleware Java. Patrick's ten years of software development experience includes implementing Java/J2EE middle tier solutions, web applications, system integrations, and Swing desktop clients. Prior to joining Oracle, Patrick was a senior developer at Symantec, working on J2EE and integration systems. He enjoys mentoring others on technology and participating in user groups and the developer community. Patrick has a BS in computer science from Stetson University in Florida.

Dr. Mark Pollack has worked extensively in the financial sector as an architect and developer on various front office trading systems that involved a mixture of Microsoft and Java technologies. Always interested in best practices and improving the software development process, Mark has been a core Spring (Java) developer since 2003 and founded its Microsoft counterpart, Spring.NET, in 2004 which he continues to lead.

Prior to joining SpringSource, he was a founding partner at CodeStreet, LLC, an independent software vendor in the financial services industry. This year Mark has been recognized as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for his involvement in the technical community.

Arjen Poutsma is a senior enterprise application architect with fifteen 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. Recently, Arjen started working on the REST support in Spring 3.0. 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.

Yan Pujante is a Distinguished Software Engineer at LinkedIn. As a member of the founding team of LinkedIn, Yan has been involved in a lot of various areas of the product: architecture, ui framework, wiring framework, security, replication, scalability, and many more... Yan is currently working with the platform team on building the next iteration of the software that will scale both from a product point of view and from a developper point of view.

Yan has 12 years of professional experience with a total of 25 years of passion for computers (dating back to the era of the TI-99/4A).

Mark Richards is a Director and Sr. Solutions Architect at Collaborative Consulting, LLC, a Boston-based Business and Architecture Consulting Firm, where he is involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of Service Oriented Architectures in J2EE and other technologies. He has been involved in the software industry since 1984, and has significant experience and expertise in J2EE architecture and development, Object-oriented design and development, and systems integration. Mark served as the President of the Boston Java User Group in 1997 and 1998, and the President of the New England Java Users Group from 1999 thru 2003. Mark is currently working on the 2nd edition of the "Java Message Service" book from O'Reilly. He is also the author of "Java Transaction Design Strategies", contributing author of "NFJS Anthology Volume 1", contributing author of "NFJS Anthology Volume 2", and contributing author of the upcoming "97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know" book from O'Reilly. Mark has many architect and developer certification, including ones from IBM, Sun, The Open Group, and BEA. He is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium Series and speaks at other conferences and user groups around the world. When he is not working Mark can usually be found hiking with his wife and two daughters in the White Mountains or along the Appalachian Trail.

Thomas has been a developer on the Spring Framework project since early 2003, contributing to enhancements of the JDBC framework portion.

Thomas currently works as a consultant for SpringSource specializing in Java EE and database projects. He has been involved with developing database applications, both as a DBA and as an application developer for over 20 years, using a wide variety of languages and databases.

Thomas is co-author of "Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework" together with Rod Johnson, Juergen Hoeller, Alef Arendsen, and Colin Sampaleanu, published by Wrox in 2005.

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.

Jared Rodriguez created the first internet marketplace software in 1996 when he was co-founder and CTO at TRADEX, a leading provider of e-marketplace software technology. After Ariba acquired TRADEX in the late 1990s, Rodriguez served as CTO at Ariba and a Principal of Armada Venture Capital Group. Rodriguez is an author of the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specification and is listed as 'one to watch' among InfoWorld's 2002 list of technology innovators. Rodriguez co-founded Skyway Software in November 2001.

As an analyst, John primarily contributes to Forrester's offerings for the Application & Program Management professional. He is a leading expert on the market for application platforms and infrastructure software for building and running applications. Included in his coverage are the Java/J2EE application servers from BEA, IBM, JBoss, Oracle, SAP, and Sun Microsystems and the equivalent portions of Microsoft's .NET platform. John also covers the business rules platforms market.

Colin is Director of Sales Engineering at SpringSource. He is a co-founder of the company, and one of the original core committers on the Spring Framework project (gaining commit status in mid-2003). Since starting the company he has served in a number of roles, usually combining both technical as well as business and customer facing aspects. He is a hands-on architect with 20+ 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.

Prior to SpringSource, Colin spent more than 4 years as architect then chief architect at a leading software incubator / VC. 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-facing work at SpringSource, Colin also spends significant time on Spring evangelism, having spoken on many occasion on Java EE and Spring Framework at conferences and JUGs.

Mark Schwartz is an Architect Manager with eight years experience with enterprise focused development as a software engineer and manager.

Mark has worked for multiple Fortune 100 companies using his expertise in application development to introduce and implement new technologies including Java, WebSphere, WebLogic, and the Spring Framework.

Mark's current responsibilities include development, release management, and production support of enterprise class reusable Java, .NET, COBOL, and security frameworks and assets.

Mark's current mission focuses on optimizing the enterprise application development process by leveraging reusable open source products and delivering software automation solutions.

Bruce Snyder is a veteran of enterprise software development and a recognized leader in open source software. With over a decade of experience, Bruce has worked with a wide range of technologies including Java EE, Enterprise Messaging and Service Oriented Integration. In addition to his role as a senior software engineer at SpringSource, Bruce is also an Apache Member, a co-founder of Apache Geronimo and a developer for Apache ActiveMQ, Apache Camel and Apache ServiceMix. He is the co-author of Professional Apache Geronimo, Beginning Spring Framework 2 both from Wrox Press and is currently co-authoring ActiveMQ In Action for Manning Publications. Bruce also serves as a member of various JCP expert groups and is a recognized international speaker at industry conferences. Bruce lives in beautiful Boulder, Colorado with his family.

Randy Stafford is a practicing software professional with 20 years experience as a developer, analyst, architect, manager, consultant, and author/presenter.

Currently for Oracle's middleware development A-Team, he engages globally for proof-of-concept projects, architecture reviews, and production crises with diverse customer organizations, specializing in grid, SOA, performance, HA, and JEE/ORM work.

Rossen is a software developer with a diverse background in enterprise application development. He has worked on a front-office trading and risk management application, a back-office investment accounting system, online shopping sites, and various other applications. He thrives on finding simplicity and solving problems in sometimes very complex domains.

Rossen joined SpringSource in March of 2007 and is currently focusing on Spring Web technologies. He recently helped develop the 4-day "Rich Web Development With Spring" course currently being offered in locations throughout the US, Europe, and Australia. In his capacity as a New York based consultant he conducts frequent training and consulting engagements.

Dr David Syer is the technical lead on Spring Batch, the batch processing framework and toolkit from SpringSource. 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 SpringSource from a leading risk management software vendor where he worked closely with SpringSource on a number of projects. Recent publications have appeared in Balance Sheet, Operational Risk and Derivatives Technology.

Greg has worked for 11 years as a software engineer at Harris Corporation, always seeking the right tool for the job. Since 2002, Greg has been part of the senior software team working on Harris' $3.5 billion FAA telco program, architecting mission critical enterprise apps while managing a software team. He provides after hours support and 2nd level engineering and is no stranger to midnight failures and software triage.

Being a test-bitten script junky, Greg has used JUnit, TestNG, JMock, FEST, PyUnit, and pMock testing frameworks, along with other agile practices to produce top quality code.

He has worked with Java/Spring/Acegi Security/@AspectJ/Jython technologies, UNIX/Linux/Solaris platforms, and python/jython/bash/csh/expect scripting. Being a wiki evangelist, he also deployed a LAMP-based wiki web site to provide finger tip knowledge to users.

In 2006, Greg created the Spring Python project. The Spring Framework provided many useful features, and he wanted those same features available when working with Python.

Greg completed a master's degree in Computer Engineering at Auburn University in 1997, and lives in Melbourne, FL with his family.

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.

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 2 dogs.

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.

Kevin Whinnery is a core contributor and evangelist for Appcelerator, Inc., developers of the Appcelerator RIA framework. Prior to joining Appcelerator, Kevin has done server-side Java programming and UI development for ERP vendor Lawson Software and technical consultancy Perficient, Inc. Kevin is also the author of the upcoming book "Appcelerator In Action" from Manning Publications (http://www.manning.com/whinnery).

David works at NYSE Euronext as a Senior Engineer. He is working on rearchitecting their existing web applications that are responsible for monitoring and managing broker connectivity across the family of NYSE Euronext exchanges worldwide.

David has been doing software development for over 15 years. He's been using Java since 1998 and involved in using Open Source almost as long. He's an Apache committer on Struts and Commons Validator, as well as the creator of Commons Validator (although currently no longer active on either). David has focused on Web and Enterprise development for most of his career, and started working with the Spring Framework in 2006.

David runs the website Spring by Example, which is a site for sharing Spring examples. David expects this site will become a general resource for Spring Examples and ultimately save developers time.

Ari Zilka founded Terracotta in 2003, where he currently serves as the infrastructure software company's CTO. There he's been working to refine the software that makes it easy to scale a Java application to as many computers as needed, without the usual custom application code and databases used to share data in a cluster.

Prior to Terracotta, Ari was the Chief Architect at Walmart.com, where he led the innovation and development of the company's new engineering initiatives. While there, he built and led a team of core engineers focused on performance management, and operations cost-saving measures. Outside of Walmart.com, Ari's work in software development and consulting has had him working with Gap.com, Nike.com, Harrod's of London, Siemen's, Intel, Compaq, and Barnes & Noble among others.

In June 2008, Ari and the Terracotta development team celebrated the release of the first commercially-available book about the technology, "The Definitive Guide to Terracotta: Cluster the JVM for Spring, Hibernate and POJO Scalability". The book was written for both developers and architects who want to learn the "whats, wheres, whens, and whys" of the Terracotta scaling engine.

Ari holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering Computer Science as well as in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley.

Kris Zyp is a research and development associate with SitePen, a forward-thinking company that is committed to building and enhancing the open web. He represents the Dojo foundation on the EcmaScript 4 committee. Kris is the lead developer of the Persevere project and the JSON Schema format. He is actively researching and developing technologies in Ajax REST client/server architecture, JSON-RPC, JSONPath, JSON Referencing, and JavaScript persistence. He is also a contributor to Comet Daily and is working on RESTful HTTP Comet approaches.

Alexander von Zitzewitz is founder, managing director of the company and CEO of the US subsidiary. He has more than 20 years of project and management experience. In 1993 he founded ootec - a company focused on project services around object oriented software technology. This company was sold to the French Valtech group in March 2000 and served customers like Siemens, BMW, Thyssen-Krupp-Stahl and other well known names in German industry. From 2003 to early 2005 he was working as Director of Central Europe for the French company Xcalia S.A. Since the summer of 2008 he is living in Massachusetts. His areas of expertise are object oriented system design and large scale system architecture. Alexander has a degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich.