In the Spotlight - Ben Alex

Creator of Spring Security (Acegi) & SpringSource Principal Software Engineer

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/.

Presentations by Ben Alex

What's New In Spring Security 2?

This session will cover the exciting new capabilities of Spring Security 2 M1. We'll cover what each new feature does and how you would configure it. We'll highlight how to upgrade your existing Acegi Security 1.0.x configurations to the new and significantly simplified Spring Security 2 configuration format."

Spring Security Fundamentals

This session introduces Spring Security to those not already using it, or those seeking to gain a wider appreciation of what it can do for a typical enterprise application. Attendees will learn how to configure and deploy a basic Spring Security system, as well as gain knowledge on how to extend the system to meet their unique security requirements."

Birds of a Feather: Security

Come to this session for a lively discussion on implementing secure systems with Ben Alex and Erwin Vervaet."

Introducing Spring Security 2.5

Does your application need security? If so, you'll find this intensely demonstration-oriented session provides an easy introduction to the popular Spring Security project, and how to apply it to web applications. You'll discover the three easy steps to adding Spring Security to an existing application, how to configure some of your main authentication services, and how to use both web and method authorization capabilities. You'll also receive plenty of pragmatic security tips, plus see demonstrations of the exciting new Spring Security 2.5 expression language (EL) features."