Craig Walls has been professionally developing software for over 17 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.

Chris Wall is a senior engineer working for BEA Systems, Inc. Chris has been involved with the development of much of the samples and training material for WebLogic Server including the Medical Records application. Currently, Chris is a member of BEA’s Open Source Solutions team.

After finishing his Finance studies at the University of Massachusetts, Thomas Van de Velde joined Accenture in 2001. He has since been active as a Java architect on large government projects in Belgium (www.belgium.be) and France (Tax Declaration and Fiscal Account – www.impots.gouv.fr). Thomas is a part of Accenture’s Global Technology Consulting organization focused on the delivery of custom Java solutions. This organization is a cross-industry, global technology group with a multitude of deep, leading-edge technology skills that are applied to the design, build and implementation of complex solutions through state-of-the-art architectures.

Jeremy Thomerson currently works in Austin, TX for eBay on the CARad development team. He was one of the original developers of CARad.com, a startup that became the top listing tool for eBay Motors and was acquired eBay in early 2003.

Since mid-2004, Jeremy has been heavily involved in migrating the CARad application (both the user-facing web site and many backend processes)
away from the former ColdFusion 5, VB, and C# technology to a Spring /
Hibernate / Tapestry / Axis architecture.

When he's away from the office, Jeremy enjoys spending time with his wife and programming personal projects, as well as contributing to
interesting open source projects such as Cobertura
[http://cobertura.sourceforge.net].

Bram is an enterprise java architect who started working with java since 1996 and J2EE since early 2000 and has been in the lead for numerous Agile development projects over the last years. He has been using Ajax since the summer of 2004 extensively in many projects. He has been working for JTeam and Interface21 since both were founded.

Currently, Bram is core developer for Spring Modules. Spring Modules aims at facilitating the integration between the Spring framework and other projects, without extending Spring's core. Furthermore, he is developer for DWR, a project that aims to provide easy AJAX for Java. His main focus is on the integration between DWR and Spring.

Apart from his passion for Java, Spring and Ajax he likes to travel the world with his beloved girlfriend Petra. His favorite destinations are the best scuba diving spots, which luckily happen to be the most beautiful parts of the world.

Colin is Director of R&D at SpringSource (now a division of VMware), which he co-founded in 2004. He is one of the original core committers on the Spring Framework, a published author, and public speaker. Since starting SpringSource he has served in a number of roles throughout various parts of the organization, including Engineering, Service Delivery, Support, and Sales. Colin is at his best when combining both technical as well as business and customer facing aspects.

Colin has had a long and varied career spanning 23 years in both the enterprise and shrinkwrap software space, including previous experience developing for and building out a retail software company.

Immediately prior to SpringSource, Colin spent 5 years as architect/chief architect at a leading software incubator and VC firm. 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 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 release good software, at the code, process, and business level.

Matt Raible has been building web applications for most of his adult life. He started tinkering with the web before Netscape 1.0 was even released. For the last 13 years, Matt has helped companies adopt open source technologies (Spring, Hibernate, Apache, Struts, Tapestry, Grails) and use them effectively. Matt has been a speaker at many conferences worldwide, including ApacheCon, JavaZone, Colorado Software Summit, No Fluff Just Stuff, and a host of others.

Matt is an author (Spring Live and Pro JSP), and an active "kick-ass technology" evangelist on raibledesigns.com. He is the founder of AppFuse, a project which allows you to get started quickly with Java open source frameworks, as well as a committer on the Apache Roller and Apache Struts projects.

Matt has had quite a ride in the past few years, serving as the Lead UI Architect for LinkedIn, the UI Architect for Evite.com and the Chief Architect of Web Development at Time Warner Cable. Currently, he enjoys Utah's fluffy powder while consulting at Overstock.com.

Matthew Porter, Chief Executive Officer at Contegix, co-founded the award winning managed hosting, cloud computing and colocation service provider. Contegix is widely recognized throughout the industry for delivering reliable hosting with expert support to drive customer value. During his tenure, the company’s revenue has doubled consistently, year over year. In addition to its financial growth, the organization that began as a two-person team, now employees over 50 people in Saint Louis, MO. Porter continues to drive innovation, promote rapid organizational growth and foster the core values of Contegix by empowering employees, partners and customers respectively.

Porter was educated at Saint Louis University, where he earned his B.S. in Applied Computer Science. Porter, his wife and three children, reside in Saint Charles, MO.

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.

Jeremy manages eBay's CARad.com development group in Austin, TX. He has spent nine years managing web application development projects.

Prior to eBay, Jeremy worked for two enterprise software startup companies in Austin, and before that had an independent web consulting practice in Australia.

Jeremy's professional interests include enterprise open source, consumer web applications, usability, and the application design process.

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.

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.

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.

Justin is the co-founder of Relevance, a consulting/training/research organization located in the Research Triangle of North Carolina. Justin has been developing applications with static and dynamic languages since 1992. He has written code with Java, .NET, C#, Visual Basic, Perl, Python and Ruby. He loves to talk, especially in front of people, but all by himself in the corner if he must. Justin is currently focused on: Rails (because its the law), Spring (because Java isn't going anywhere) and security (because paranoia is your friend).

Christian is a Principal Software Engineer for SpringSource and is the leader of the Tools Team responsible for SpringSource development tools including SpringSource Tool Suite. Since 2004 Christian has led the well known Spring IDE 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.

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.

Dieter joined Wily Technology in 2004 coming from BEA systems. He is a Java and J2EE expert and has done many technical architectures, performance reviews and system optimizations. Dieter works for the Worldwide Technical Solution Group and helps Wily's engineering in early adopting new technologies and frameworks.

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.

Jim Clark is a consulting solution architect for Oracle. He has five years of consulting experience specializing in J2EE and TopLink. Recently, he has worked with the Spring team to provide an integration with TopLink. Further details have been classified top secret..

Jonas Bonér is working at Terracotta Inc. with a focus on strategy, product development & architecture and technical evangelism. Terracotta provides software that delivers enterprise-class infrastructure services to applications transparently at runtime with minimal required application code changes.

Prior to Terracotta, Jonas was a senior software engineer at the JRockit team at BEA Systems, where he was working on runtime tools, JVM support for AOP and technology evangelism.

He is the founder of the AspectWerkz AOP framework and committer to the Eclipse AspectJ 5 project. Jonas is a frequent speaker on AOP and
other emerging technologies (JavaOne, JAOO, eWorld, Java Pro Live!, Javapolis, AOSD conferences etc.).

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

Alef is based out of Utrecht, the Netherlands.

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/.