Our presenters are not simply vendor representatives --
they are industry recognized subject matter experts. They are published authors.
They are the people writing the software you use on a daily basis.
Rod Johnson
- Creator of Spring & Best Selling Author of J2EE without EJB
Rod Johnson is the father of Spring, which grew out of his influential book, “Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development,” which initiated the “lightweight” transformation of enterprise Java. Rod co-founded SpringSource, where he served as CEO until its 2009 acquisition by VMware, where he is now a Senior Vice President.
Rod is an authority on enterprise Java architecture, a thought leader on open source development and business models, and a popular speaker at conferences around the world.
Rod has over 15 years technology, management and business experience. He holds a BA with Honors in Computer Science, Mathematics and Musicology as well as a PhD from the University of Sydney.
Adrian Colyer is the CTO of SpringSource and has more than a dozen years of experience leading teams in Java and enterprise middleware.
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 recognized 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 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.
Prior to joining SpringSource, Adrian gained over a decade of experience in building enterprise middleware at IBM. Whilst there he oversaw the introduction of aspect-oriented programming to many IBM development teams.
Adrian holds a BSc, Computer Science from University of Southampton.
Juergen Hoeller
- 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.
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects, and speaks frequently at international conferences and user groups. Venkat is also an adjunct faculty and teaches CS courses remotely at the University of Houston. He is author of ".NET Gotchas," coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer," author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" and "Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).
Matthew McCullough is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is a trainer for GitHub.com, author of the Git Master Class series for O'Reilly, speaker at over 30 national and international conferences, author of three of the top 10 DZone RefCards, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His current topics of research center around project automation: build tools (Maven, Leiningen, Gradle), distributed version control (Git), Continuous Integration (Hudson) and Quality Metrics (Sonar). Matthew resides in Denver, Colorado with his beautiful wife and two young daughters, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado has to offer.
Tim Berglund
- Developer, Consultant, Author
Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves coding, presenting, and working with people. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, continuous deployment, and how software architecture should resemble an ant colony.
His firm, the
August Technology Group, helps clients with product development, technology consulting, and technology upgrade projects atop the JVM. The August Group's technology preferences reflect the generalist sensibilities of its founder, and its development practices are always lightweight, self-improving, and humanizing by design.
Tim is a speaker internationally and on the
No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and is co-president of the
Denver Open Source User Group in the Denver area, co-author of the
DZone Clojure RefCard, co-presenter of the best-selling
O'Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of
Building and Testing with Gradle, and a member of the
O'Reilly Expert Network.
He lives in Littleton, CO with the wife of his youth and their three children.
Ben Alex
- Creator of Spring Security, Spring Roo & SpringSource Principal S/W 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 led its development into a popular, open-source security framework that is used in numerous government, banking and military installations. More recently Ben founded and serves as lead of the Spring Roo and Spring Shell projects, both of which deliver significant productivity and usability benefits to those using Spring technologies.
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 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, Oredev, 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/.
Guillaume LaForge
- Head of Groovy Development for SpringSource
As Head of Groovy Development for SpringSource, Guillaume Laforge is the official Groovy Project Manager, and the spec lead of JSR-241, the Java Specification Request that standardizes the Groovy dynamic language. He is also a frequent conference speaker presenting Groovy and Grails at JavaOne, SpringOne, QCon, the Sun TechDays, and JavaPolis. Guillaume also co-authored Groovy in Action along with Dierk König. Before founding G2One, which was acquired by SpringSource in late 2008, and taking the role of VP Technology, Guillaume worked for OCTO Technology, a consultancy focusing on architecture and agile methodologies. While at OCTO, Guillaume developed new offerings around Groovy and Grails for its customers.
Graeme Rocher
- Head of Grails Development for SpringSource
As Head of Grails Development for SpringSource, 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. Graeme joined SpringSource in late 2008 upon the acquisition of G2One Inc. Before founding G2One, 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.
Craig Walls
- Author of Spring in Action
Craig Walls has been professionally developing software for almost 18 years (and longer than that for the pure geekiness of it). He is a senior engineer with SpringSource as the Spring Social project lead and is the author of Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action (both published by Manning) and Modular Java (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf). He's a zealous promoter of the Spring Framework, speaking frequently at local user groups and conferences and writing about Spring and OSGi on his blog. When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 4 birds and 3 dogs.
Hans Dockter
- Founder of Gradle and CEO of Gradleware
Hans Dockter is the founder and project lead of the
Gradle build system and the CEO of
Gradleware, a company that provides training, support and consulting for Gradle and all forms of enterprise software project automation in general.
Hans has 13 years of experience as a software developer, team leader, architect, trainer, and technical mentor. Hans is a thought leader in the field of project automation and has successfully been in charge of numerous large-scale enterprise builds. He is also an advocate of Domain Driven Design, having taught classes and delivered presentations on this topic together with Eric Evans. In the earlier days, Hans was also a committer for the JBoss project and founded the JBoss-IDE.
Jeff Brown
- Core Member of the Grails Development Team
Core member of the Grails development team, Jeff Brown, is a Senior Software Engineer with SpringSource. Jeff has been involved in designing and building object oriented systems for over 15 years. Jeff's areas of expertise include web development with Groovy & Grails, Java and agile development.
Oleg Zhurakousky
- Sr. Software Engineer, Spring Integration team - SpringSource/VMWare
Oleg is an Sr. Software Engineer with SpringSource/VMWare and has 14+ years of experience in software engineering across multiple disciplines including software architecture and design, consulting, business analysis and application development. He currently focuses on delivering simple but powerful Spring based solutions to the North American market.
After starting his career in the world of COBOL & CICS, Oleg has been focusing on professional Java and Java EE development since 1999. Since 2004 he has been heavily involved in using several open source technologies and platforms with Spring Framework at the forefront, while working on a number of projects around the world and spanning industries such as Telecommunication, Banking, Law Enforcement, US DOD and others.
Oleg’s current passions include Event Driven Architecture (EDA), Grid Computing, Test Driven development and Aspect Oriented Programming while his Spring passions are aligned with Spring Integration framework (http://www.springsource.org/spring-integration) where Oleg is a core committer.
You can regularly spot Oleg on the Spring Forums contributing to a number of topics.
A resident of the Philadelphia area, Oleg enjoys windsurfing, scuba diving, snowboarding, hockey and traveling when he can find some spare time.
Rob Winch
- Spring Security Committer, Software Architect at Cerner Corporation
Rob Winch started programming when he was 13 years old and has not looked back since. He currently works as a software engineer at Cerner Corporation with 5+ years of experience in securing health care applications and 10+ years writing web applications. In his spare time, he is a committer for Spring Security and actively responds to questions on the forums. In the past he has worked as an independent contractor, in proteomics research, and on the Globus Toolkit. His interests include web security and identity management, high performance computing, and ALM tooling. When he is not sitting in front of a computer he enjoys participating in a variety of intramural sports and playing guitar.
James Williams
- Co-creator of Griffon and Author of Learning HTML5 Game Programming
James Williams is a Senior Software Engineer for Taulia based in Silicon Valley and a frequent conference speaker. He is a co-creator of the Griffon project, a rich desktop framework for Java applications. He and his team WalkIN, created a product on a coach bus while riding to SXSW, and were crowned winners of StartupBus 2011. He is the author of the upcoming book "Learning HTML5 Game Programming..." for Addison-Wesley. He blogs at http://jameswilliams.be/blog and tweets as @ecspike.
James Williams
- Senior SE Manager - SpringSource / vFabric Team
James is an accomplished and experienced enterprise architect, that specializes in agile delivery of high quality software products using Java, Flex, and a myriad of supporting technologies. James has significant experience in several software specialties including product development for a start-up, consulting for large enterprises and pre-sales architect for Open Source software vendors. James spent three years as a Solutions Architect for JBoss/Red Hat. And, he has contributed code to several OSS projects.
James Ward
- Principal Developer Evangelist, Heroku
James Ward (www.jamesward.com) is a Principal Developer Evangelist at Heroku. Today he focuses on teaching developers how to deploy Java, Play! and Scala apps to the cloud. James frequently presents at conferences around the world such as JavaOne, Devoxx, and many other Java get-togethers. Along with Bruce Eckel, James co-authored First Steps in Flex. He has also published numerous screencasts, blogs, and technical articles. Starting with Pascal and Assembly in the 80′s, James found his passion for writing code. Beginning in the 90′s he began doing web development with HTML, Perl/CGI, then Java. After building a Flex and Java based customer service portal in 2004 for Pillar Data Systems he became a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe. You can find him tweeting as @_JamesWard, answering questions on StackOverflow.com and posting code at github.com/jamesward.
James Tyrrell
- Spring Roo building, Web crushing, GWT loving engineer
James Tyrrell is a Software Engineer with VMware and a member of the Spring Roo team. Since joining the team James has worked closely with Google on the GWT add-on, created the Cloud Foundry add-on, and provided a number of core enhancements to Roo. He enjoys getting his hands dirty with advanced code and is currently working on a new type analysis, parsing and generation engine.
Prior to coming to VMware, James worked extensively with GWT and has developed a number of applications using the technology. He has presented at a number of developer events on topics including Spring Roo, GWT and Cloud Foundry.
James can be found on the web at populationjim.com and twitter.com/jimbotyrrell
David Turanski
- SpringSource Senior Consultant
David is a SpringSource Senior Consultant with VMWare professional services. David is a Java developer and architect with 20+ years of experience. He has been developing application with the Spring framework for several years and is a committer on Spring Integration.
Prior to joining VMWare, David provided technical leadership for numerous enterprise software development projects as an architect, consultant, and project manager.
Gil Tene
- CTO & Co-founder, Azul Systems
Gil Tene is CTO and co-founder of Azul Systems. He has been involved with virtual machine technologies for the past 20 years and has been building Java technology-based products since 1995. Gil pioneered Azul's Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector (C4), Java Virtualization, Elastic Memory, and various managed runtime and systems stack technologies that combine to deliver the industry's most scalable and robust Java platforms. "In 2006 he was named one of the Top 50 Agenda Setters in the technology industry by Silicon.com. Prior to co-founding Azul, Gil held key technology positions at Nortel Networks, Shasta Networks and at Check Point Software Technologies, where he delivered several industry-leading traffic management solutions including the industry's first Firewall-1 based security appliance. He architected operating systems for Stratus Computer, clustering solutions at Qualix/Legato, and served as an officer in the Israeli Navy Computer R and D unit. Gil holds a BSEE from The Technion Israel Institute of Technology, and has been awarded 24 patents in computer-related technologies.
Max Tardiveau
- Chief Technology Office, Automated Business Logic
Max Tardiveau has been writing software since the days when the word "software" sounded funny to most people. He holds an M.S. in software engineering from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. After working at Unisys on repository development, he joined Versata and consulted around the world on transactional business logic. He then founded Integrity Logic, a software and consulting company specializing in geo-enabled mobile apps, but he never lost his interest in automating software development, which brought him to start ABL with Val Huber.
Dave Syer
- Lead of Spring Batch, SpringSource Principal Consultant
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.
Rossen Stoyanchev
- Staff Engineer at SpringSource, VMware
I began my career as a C/C++ programmer working on VINES, a distributed directory services product at Banyan Systems. Over the years I've worked on various Java Web applications including a set of multi-tenant e-commerce web applications, an investment accounting system, a trading and risk management system, and others.
I've been using Spring and many of the Spring projects since 2006. I've helped many to learn or to use Spring more effectively through teaching and consulting. Presently I am a comitter on the Spring MVC and the Spring Web Flow projects. My current home is New York city.
Alan Stewart is a Senior Member of Technical Staff at VMware and Project Lead of the Spring Roo project. Alan has over twenty-five years of application development experience working for large enterprises in the finance, insurance, and retail industries. He is passionate about making Roo the best enterprise Java development tool available.
Glen Smith
- Creator of Groovyblogs.org site
Glen is an Enterprise Java consultant who spends most of his days writing frameworks and highly available middle tier components for the Australian government, while also running a small recrutiment company, so if you're looking for work in Australia...
Glen has been developing in Grails since 0.1 and launched his first public Grails site (an SMS gateway) on 0.2. He blogs frequently on Groovy and Grails related matters, releases tons of sample source and is the face behind the groovyblogs.org site and the Gravl blog engine.
Jim Shingler
- Lead Technical Architect for Big Lots
Jim is the Lead Technical Architect for Big Lots (a nationwide retailer base in Columbus, Ohio), an international speaker, an open source evangelist, coauthor of "Beginning Groovy and Grails" (2008 Apress), coauthor of "Griffon In Action" (2011 Manning). The focus of his career has been using cutting-edge technology to develop IT solutions for the retail, insurance, financial services, and manufacturing industries. He has 14 years of large-scale Java experience and significant experience in distributed and relational technologies.
Tal works on the Spring Insight project where in the past few months he focused on enabling Spring Insight for Cloud Foundry.
Prior to joining VMware, Tal was a team manager at HP and prior to that founded two start up companies focused on social media marketing.
Gary Russell
- Senior Consultant, SpringSource; Spring Integration Team
Gary has been in software engineering, concentrating on Enterprise Integration, for over 30 years on various platforms, and in the Java space since the late '90s.
He has been developing with the Spring Framework since 2004 and joined SpringSource in 2009 as a senior consultant. Since then he has taught Core Spring and Enterprise Integration with Spring to several hundred developers. Most recently has has been providing Enterprise Integration consulting services with Spring Integration, Spring Batch and Core Spring.
Very soon after joining SpringSource, he became a committer on the Spring Integration project. His initial efforts in that space were to develop the UDP/TCP integration adapters, which facilitate low-level integration facilities with any system utilizing any protocol (including proprietary, home-grown protocols). He can often be found on the Spring Integration forums providing general support and guidance for the Spring Integration project as a whole.
Thomas Risberg
- co-author of "Professional Java Development with the Spring Framework"
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.
Chris Richardson is a developer and architect with over 20 years of experience. He is a Java Champion and the author of POJOs in Action, which describes how to build enterprise Java applications with POJOs and frameworks such as Spring and Hibernate. Chris is the founder of CloudFoundry.com and works on cloud technology. He has a computer science degree from the University of Cambridge in England and lives in Oakland, CA with his wife and three children.
Chris Ramsdale has worked extensively in the mobile space, starting as a Software Engineer at Motorola in 1997, and then joining local start ups as a Tech Lead and Product Manager. Chris is currently a Product Manager for Google App Engine focused on developer tools and platform services.
Lucas Panjer
- Software Engineer at Tasktop Technologies
Lucas Panjer is a Software Engineer at Tasktop Technologies and is a primary developer of the Code2Cloud project.
Peter Niederwieser is a computer language enthusiast from Linz, Austria. Having used Java since 1997, Peter nowadays prefers to work with more flexible languages - in particular Groovy, Scala, and Clojure. Peter is the creator of Spock and a Groovy committer.
In his day job, Peter is a Principal Software Engineer at Gradleware.
Eric Mizell
- Solutions Architect w/Terracotta
As a Solutions Architect on the Field Engineering Team for Terracotta, Eric Mizell helps enterprise IT organizations improve their service availability and application performance through the application of the industry leading Terracotta Java Scalability Technology. Prior to Terracotta, Eric was the lead architect for a large scale insurance application. He has over 15 years of experience designing and developing enterprise systems where performance and scalability were essential. Eric has presented at NFJS, AJUG, SUG, and blogs about Java and caching at http://javaquip.blogspot.com/.
Tom McCuch
- Senior Sales Engineer, SpringSource
Tom McCuch is a Senior Sales Engineer for SpringSource with over twenty years of experience in software engineering. Tom specializes in the architecture, implementation, and deployment of distributed systems requiring high Reliability, Availability, and Scalability (RAS) features. Before joining SpringSource, Tom consulted enterprise clients across multiple industries in the architecture of mission-critical solutions based on open source software as well as led the engineering of enterprise Java middleware supporting next-generation telecommunications products deployed at tier-1 telcos both in the U.S. and Europe.
Jeff Markham
- Senior Systems Engineer at VMware
Jeff is a Senior Systems Engineer for SpringSource with over sixteen years of experience in software engineering. Jeff assists customers with implementing vFabric technologies to create their cloud infrastructure, whether it's in their datacenter, publicly available, or a hybrid of both.
Jeff has consulted with some of the largest companies in the country across a wide variety of industries and projects. Presently, his focus is on modernizing customer applications to take advantage of cloud infrastructures.
When he's not coding, you're likely to find him at some baseball game somewhere.
Josh Long
- Developer Advocate
Josh Long is the Spring developer advocate. Josh is the lead author on Apress’ Spring Recipes, 2nd Edition, and a SpringSource committer and contributor. When he's not hacking on code, he can be found at the local Java User Group or at the local coffee shop. Josh likes solutions that push the boundaries of the technologies that enable them. His interests include scalability, BPM, grid processing, mobile computing and so-called "smart" systems. He blogs at blog.springsource.org or joshlong.com.
Martin Lippert
- Lead, SpringSource Tool Suite and Spring IDE
Martin leads the team of the SpringSource Tool Suite and the Spring IDE and works together with the tools team on providing the best developer tools out there for Spring and Cloud Foundry. Before joining SpringSource/VMware, Martin founded (together with colleagues) it-agile, a leading consulting and development company focused on agile software development, and worked many years as consultant and coach for agile software development and flexible and modularized architectures. He is author of papers, articles, and books on various topics including agile software development, Eclipse technology and refactoring techniques.
Peter Ledbrook
- Grails Advocate at SpringSource
A long-time Grails user, Peter is currently a committer to the project and officially Grails Advocate at SpringSource, a division of VMware. He is also co-author of Grails in Action with Glen Smith.
Costin Leau
- Lead, Spring GemFire, Hadoop, Redis
Costin Leau is an engineer within the SpringSource. His interests include data access and aspect oriented programming. With significant development experience, Costin has worked on various Spring Framework features (cache abstraction, JPA, java config), led the Spring Dynamic Modules (Spring OSGi probject) and the Spring-inspired, OSGi 4.2 Blueprint Service RI. Currently Costin is working in the NOSQL and Big Data area, leading the Spring integration with GemFire, Hadoop and Redis.
Ramnivas Laddad
- Author of AspectJ in Action, Principal at SpringSource
Ramnivas Laddad is a
SpringSource Principal Enginner. 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 Laddad is a well-known expert in enterprise Java, especially in the area of AOP and Spring. He is the author of AspectJ in Action, the best-selling book on AOP and AspectJ that has been lauded by industry experts for its presentation of practical and innovative AOP applications to solve real-world problems. Ramnivas, a Spring framework committer, is also an active presenter at leading industry events such as JavaOne, JavaPolis, No Fluff Just Stuff, SpringOne, Software Development, and has been an active member of both the AspectJ and Spring communities from their beginnings.
Kenneth Kousen
- Author of "Making Java Groovy"
Ken Kousen is the President of Kousen IT, Inc., through which he does technical training, mentoring, and consulting in all areas of Java and XML. He is the author of the O'Reilly screencast "Up and Running Groovy", and the upcoming Manning book about Java/Groovy integration, entitled "Making Java Groovy".
He has been a tech reviewer for several books on software development. Over the past decade he's taught thousands of developers in business and industry. He is also an adjunct professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute site in Hartford, CT. His academic background includes two BS degrees from M.I.T., an MS and a Ph.D. from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I.
Dierk Koenig
- Lead Author of Groovy in Action
Dierk König works as a fellow for Canoo Engineering AG, Basel, Switzerland.
He is a committer to many open-source projects including Groovy, Grails, and GPars, and a manager of the open-source Canoo WebTest project. He is lead author of the "Groovy in Action" book, which is amoung the publisher's best-selling titles of the decade.
Dave Klein
- Author of 'Grails: A Quick-Start Guide'
Dave is a consultant helping organizations of all sizes to develop applications more quickly (and have more fun doing it) with Grails. Dave has been involved in enterprise software development for the past 15 years. He has worked as a developer, architect, project manager, mentor and trainer. Dave has presented at user groups and national conferences. He is also the founder of the Capital Java User Group in Madison, Wisconsin, the Gateway Groovy Users in St. Louis, MO, and the author of
Grails: A Quick-Start Guide, published by the Pragmatic Programmers. . Dave's Groovy and Grails related thoughts can be found at
http://dave-klein.blogspot.com
Paul King
- co-author of "Groovy in Action"
Paul King leads ASERT, an organization based in Brisbane, Australia which provides software development, training and mentoring services to customers wanting to embrace new technologies, harness best practices and innovate. He has been contributing to open source projects for nearly 20 years and is an active committer on numerous projects including Groovy. Paul speaks at international conferences, publishes in software magazines and journals, and is a co-author of Manning's best-seller: Groovy in Action.
John Kew
- Staff Engineer @ VMware - Spring Insight Developer
John has been a member of the Spring Insight team since May 2010. Prior to joining Insight he worked on complex application deployment and management projects at VMware, EMC and at a startup called SourceLabs (acquired by EMC).
At SourceLabs John also worked on various open source projects and a search engine for open source mailing list and issue trackers. John also spent some time in Microsoft's Open Source Labs and at Natural Selection, a company in San Diego which specializes in evolutionary computation for medical and military applications.
John Kew lives in Seattle, WA with his three fish and a wife.
Mark Johnson
- Staff System Engineer @ VMware
Mark Johnson is a Staff System Engineer at VMware where he focuses on helping people learn more about SpringSource technologies and they can aid enterprise applications.
Mark has worked on a wide range of technology during his career. Most recently he has focused on Groovy, Grails, and Scala as technologies which enable high quality applications quickly.
Mark is active in the software community as the President of the New England Java Users Group (NEJUG) and a regular presenter to user groups and various conferenes. When not working, Mark can be found riding his mountain bike on local trails and playing with his family
Jennifer Hickey
- Senior Software Engineer at SpringSource
Jennifer Hickey is a Sr. Software Engineer with SpringSource/VMware, with over a decade of experience in software engineering. Jennifer is a member of the Cloud Foundry team, specializing in developer experience and support of frameworks such as Spring, Grails, Rails, and Sinatra. She is passionate about increasing developer productivity in the cloud. Jennifer has led or contributed to a number of SpringSource projects, including Hyperic and tc Server. She has been involved in converting multiple large EJB/legacy codebases to Spring. Prior to joining SpringSource, Jennifer was a principal architect of a large-scale network management system.
Derek Henninger is the director of R&D for the SpringSource tools, including STS, Roo, and WaveMaker. Derek joined VMware through the acquisition of WaveMaker Software. At WaveMaker Derek led the development and definition of the WaveMaker Studio development product. Derek has over 20 years of experience in development tools, including Progress Software, Persistence Software, and Metaphor.
Justin Hartung
- Deployment Manager, Google
Justin Hartung is a Deployment Manager on the Google App Engine team where he focuses on helping customers embrace the cloud. Prior to Google, Justin was a Manager at Deloitte specializing in information security and privacy solutions for Fortune 500 companies.
Shawn Hartsock
- Principal, HartsockSolutions, LLC
Shawn Hartsock consults on Java technologies like Groovy/Grails and the Spring Framework providing expertise as an experienced Java developer and architect. Shawn discovered Groovy in 2007 and began working in Grails development for deployment to Java Enterprise environments and integration with Existing Java Enterprise software. He has contributed several Grails plugins to the Grails community and has had several articles published in Groovy Magazine on various topics including Enterprise Integration with Grails.
Rob Harrop
- Core Spring developer and author of the best seller Pro Spring
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.
Colin Harrington
- Senior Consultant, Object Partners, Inc
Colin Harrington is a Senior Consultant at Object Partners, Inc with over 3.5 years of Grails experience. Based in Minnesota, Colin has 10+ years of experience developing web-based applications.
Colin is an agile practitioner and has been a key component of many powerful fast-paced local and remote teams with varying levels of composition and ability. He is a Technical leader and a forward thinker with a knack for delivering potent and engaging web-applications.
Colin is an active member of the Groovy and Grails community and an active speaker at local user groups, events and conferences such as MinneBar, GUM, GR8Conf in the US, etc.
Filip Hanik
- Senior Software Engineer, SpringSource.
Filip is a Senior Software Engineer for SpringSource and a key participant in the company's Apache Tomcat initiatives. Filip brings 15 years of extensive experience in architecture, design and development of distributed application frameworks and containers and is recognized for his top-quality system development skills and continuous participation of Open Source development projects.
Filip is an Apache Software Foundation member and a committer to the Apache Tomcat project where he is a leading authority on Tomcat clustering and a key contributor to the core of the platform.
Filip has made contributions to software initiatives for Walmart.com, Sony Music, France Telecom and has held a variety of senior software engineering positions with technology companies in both the United States and Sweden.
He received his education at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden where he majored in Computer Science and Computer Engineering.
Jeremy Grelle
- Senior Software Engineer, SpringSource
Jeremy Grelle is an open source software engineer with SpringSource, a division of VMware, who specializes in bringing the cutting-edge techniques of web application development to the Java and Spring ecosystems. He is the creator of the Spring JavaScript, Spring Faces, and Spring BlazeDS Integration projects, and he represents SpringSource on the JSR-314 Expert Group for JSF 2.0. 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.
Jeremy is a frequent speaker at industry conferences such as JavaOne, The Spring Experience, SpringOne, JSFOne, TheServerSide Java Symposium, and Java and Flex user group events, and always enjoys getting out and showing his fellow developers how to bend web browsers to their will and the possibilities of what can be created with Spring and its wealth of complimentary web technologies.
Oliver Gierke
- Engineer at SpringSource
Oliver Gierke is engineer at SpringSource, a division of VMware, project lead of the Spring Data JPA module and involved into other Spring Data modules (e.g. MongoDB) as well. He has been into developing enterprise applications and open source projects for over 6 years now. His working focus is centered around software architecture, Spring and persistence technologies. He is regularly speaking at German and international conferences as well as author of technology articles.
Adam Fitzgerald
- Director of Developer Relations, SpringSource
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.
Mark Fisher
- Spring Integration Lead
Mark Fisher is an engineer within the SpringSource division of VMware and lead of the Spring Integration project. He is also a committer on the core Spring Framework and the Spring BlazeDS Integration project. Mark has provided consulting services for clients across numerous industries, and he has trained hundreds of developers how to use the Spring Framework and related projects effectively. Mark speaks regularly at conferences and user groups in America and Europe.
Andrew Eisenberg is the lead of the Groovy-Eclipse project and also works on the Grails tooling portion of the SpringSource Tool Suite. He is also the prooject lead for the AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT) at Eclipse.org. Andrew creates IDE tools that ease the cognitive burden of creating complex programs. He will not rest and not be happy until programming is as fun and easy as playing with legos. Andrew has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia where he researched the intersection between programming languages and tools.
Emil Eifrem
- CEO, Neo4J Technologies
Emil Eifrem is CEO of Neo Technology and co-founder of the Neo4j project. Before founding Neo, he was the CTO of Windh AB, where he headed the development of highly complex information architectures for Enterprise Content Management Systems. Committed to sustainable open source, he guides Neo along a balanced path between free availability and commercial reliability. Emil is a frequent conference speaker and author on NOSQL databases.
Keith Donald
- SpringSource Principal & Founding Partner
Keith Donald is a principal and founding partner at SpringSource, the company behind Spring and a division of VMware. At SpringSource, Keith is a full-time member of the Spring development team focusing on web application development productivity. He is also the architect behind SpringSource's state-of-the-art training curriculum, which has provided practical Spring training to over 10,000 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, retail, and healthcare. He is particularly skilled at translating business requirements into technical solutions.
Scott Davis
- Author of "Groovy Recipes"
Scott Davis is the founder of
ThirstyHead.com, a training company that specializes in Groovy and Grails training.
Scott published one of the first public websites implemented in Grails in 2006 and has been actively working with the technology ever since. Author of the book
Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java and two ongoing IBM developerWorks article series (
Mastering Grails and in 2009,
Practically Groovy), Scott writes extensively about how Groovy and Grails are the future of Java development.
John Davies
- CTO and Co-Founder of Incept5
John Davies is co-founder and CTO of Incept5. Incept5 have been intimately involved in implementing Visa's new capabilities and initiatives around the payments world. John's past includes global chief architect at JP Morgan and BNP Paribas, co-founder and CTO of C24 later sold to Iona and then Progress Software where he was technical director. John specialises in high performance, low latency enterprise architectures, Incept5 have products ranging form top selling iPhone/iPad apps to a high performance matching and reconciliation engine and consult to a number of large clients on IT strategy. John has co-authored several enterprise Java and architecture books and is a frequent speaker at banking and technology conferences.
Luke Daley
- Principal Engineer @ Gradleware
Luke Daley is a member of the
Gradleware engineering team. At Gradleware Luke works on
Gradle (A JVM based build automation tool) and helps teams reach new levels of project automation and quality.
Luke is the lead of the
Geb project (a productivity focussed Groovy browser automation/web testing tool) project which he created in 2010. You'll also find Luke contributing to other Open Source projects such as
Grails (a Groovy web development framework),
Spock (a next generation testing framework for the JVM) and anything else that catches his attention. With a “results over rhetoric” ethos, Luke's focus is on tools that empower software professionals to deliver and innovate, not try to save them from themselves.
Originally from Australia, Luke now resides in London where he spreads his time among work, software crafstmanship, musicianship and cursing the local weather.
Benjamin Corrie
- Staff Engineer in Java Performance
Ben Corrie has been working on Java since 1998, where he began at IBM testing JDK 1.1.4. He progressed to working on the internals of IBM's Java Virtual Machine where he lead a project to develop industry-leading memory management technology for the JVM. He joined SpringSource as a consultant in 2008 and moved to California a year later to lead an effort to improve Java performance on vSphere. As the tech lead on the recently announced EM4J project, he is successfully helping to make vSphere the best place to run Java.
Jon started his career in IBM Research, over 20 years ago in the UK, working on high performance parallel processors. He moved to the US in 1995 and since then has held senior technical roles at several silicon valley startups, including General Magic. Prior to his current position at VMware he was CTO and VP of Engineering at Vidient, which he co-founded in 2004, specializing in computer vision applications for the physical security market. He has been working with Java technologies for the past 12 years, and more recently specifically with Spring. Jon lives in California, with his wife and 2 children, and enjoys Tennis in his spare time.
Derek Collison
- Derek Collison, CTO, Chief Architect Cloud Application Platforms
Derek is an industry veteran with over 20 years of experience, specializing in high performance distributed systems. With tenures at Google and TIBCO Software, he specializes in Distributed Systems Architecture, High Performance Messaging Systems, and Event-Driven Systems. His current focus is Cloud Foundry and the Open PaaS at VMware Inc.
Andy Clement
- Sr. Software Engineer with SpringSource
Andy Clement is a senior software engineer at SpringSource, based in the languages and tools lab in Vancouver. Andy has more than ten years experience in Java and Enterprise Application Development. He is a recognized expert on Aspect Oriented Programming and leads the Eclipse AspectJ project as well as being co-founder of the Eclipse AspectJ Development Tools project. Most recently he has been using his compiler knowledge to enable first class language support for Groovy in Eclipse.
Ed is an open source software engineer with SpringSource, a division of VMware, where he regularly works with both Java and JavaScript, often at the same time. Ed joined VMware through the acquisition of WaveMaker Software, where he led numerous efforts including the founding of the developer community. Ed has been mixing new technologies with enterprise software and developer services for over 15 years.
Jon works with the Spring Data, Grails, RabbitMQ, and other teams to provide next-generation data and messaging capabilities for modern Ajax and mobile applications. He's been working with Spring Data to provide mapping capabilities for NoSQL databases like MongoDB and Riak and he's working with RabbitMQ and NoSQL to provide modern evented and message-driven data utilities. He authored the Grails support for Riak as well as contributes Erlang-based utilities for the Riak and RabbitMQ communities.
Prior to SpringSource, Jon developed private cloud architectures at the world's largets Pizza Hut franchisee, developed Lotus Domino, J2EE, PHP and even Perl CGI applications in BBEdit on an aged Mac, and got his start in web-based development 15 years ago, as an intelligence analyst for the US Air Force, when NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was cool.
Sam Brannen
- Senior Software Consultant, Swiftmind
Sam Brannen is a Senior Software Consultant with over 13 years' experience and co-founder of Swiftmind, a software consulting agency in Zürich, Switzerland. At Swiftmind Sam helps international clients achieve best practices in agile software development, architecture, design, implementation, and testing of enterprise Java applications using the Spring Framework and a plethora of open source technologies. In his consulting role, Sam most enjoys leading work shops, code reviews, coaching, and training clients.
Sam is a popular speaker at conferences on Java, Spring, and OSGi. He is also an active core committer for the Spring Framework, lead author of "Spring in a Nutshell" from O'Reilly, author of the Spring TestContext Framework, and was previously a core developer of SpringSource dm Server (a.k.a., Eclipse Virgo).
Over the years, Sam has helped clients build applications in various business sectors ranging from e-commerce to banking, retail, automotive, and social communities. When not in front of his computer, Sam enjoys traveling and spending time with family and friends.
Stephen Bohlen
- Senior Software Engineer, VMware
Currently a Senior Software Engineer for SpringSource where he is the Technical Lead and Community Evangelist for the Spring.NET Framework, Stephen brings his varied 18-year-plus experience in software and technology to the design and delivery of Software Engineering Solutions and Frameworks for other Software Engineers. In addition to his work on Spring.NET, Stephen is also an active contributor to several other .NET Open-Source Software projects including NHibernate, NDbUnit, and others as well having developed a number of Visual Studio productivity add-ins.
Active in the software development community, Stephen speaks publicly, blogs (semi-)regularly, and is the author of several popular screencast series focused on Agile and ALT.NET concepts and technologies including the widely-praised 15-part Summer of NHibernate video series introducing viewers to the popular open-source O/RM tool. Stephen is also a founding/organizing member of the NYC ALT.NET user group which meets monthly to discuss Agile-focused techniques and technologies in the world of Microsoft software development and beyond.
Emad Benjamin
- Staff Solutions Architect, VMware
Emad Benjamin has been in the IT industry for last 20 years, graduated with bachelor of electrical engineering from University of Wollongong. Earlier in his career he was a C++ software engineer, and then in 1997 made the switch to Java, and has been focusing on Java since then. For the last 7 years his main focus has been Java on VMware vSphere. He has been with VMWare since 2005, and is currently a Staff Architect on Java and vFabric.
Emad has presented at VMworld-2011 total of 4 sessions on Virtualizing Java, and is the Author of the book: Enterprise Java Applications Architecture on VMWare. This book provides both architecture and implementation details that are critical to successfully run enterprise Java applications on VMware. Emad has also presented at Openworld-2010, and various internal VMware events.
Burt Beckwith
- Core Member of the Grails Development Team
Burt Beckwith is a Java and Groovy developer with over ten years of experience in a variety of industries including biotech, travel, e-learning, social networking, and financial services. For the past three years he's been working with Grails and Groovy full-time. Along the way he's created over fifteen Grails plugins and made significant contributions to several others. He was the technical editor for Grails in Action.
Chris Beams
- Spring Framework Committer
Chris is an engineer for SpringSource and a member of the core Spring Framework development team. Chris joined SpringSource (then Interface21) in 2007, focused on training, consulting and leading the development effort to bring code-based configuration to the core Spring container. In 2010, Chris transitioned to full-time engineering, and continues to focus on Spring Framework development. You can find him online as @cbeams at both GitHub and Twitter.
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.
Andres is a Java/Groovy developer and Java Champion, with more than 11 years of experience in software design and development. He has been involved in web and desktop application developments since the early days of Java. He has also been teacher of computer science courses in the most prestigious education institute in Mexico. His current interests include Groovy and Swing. He is a true believer of open source and has participated in popular projects like Groovy, Griffon, JMatter and DbUnit, as well as starting his own projects (Json-lib, EZMorph, GraphicsBuilder, JideBuilder). Founding member and current project lead of the Griffon framework. He blogs periodically at http://jroller.com/aalmiray. You can find him on twitter too as @aalmiray. He likes to spend time with his beloved wife, Ixchel, when not hacking around.
Maciej is the AppFog product manager based out of Portland, Oregon. Before joining the AppFog team, he was a product owner on Windows Azure. By day gets paid to build a great developer experience, by night codes for fun.