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.

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).

Matt Stine is an Enterprise Java/Cloud consultant based in Memphis, TN. He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, and retail store domains.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and has published several articles for Agile Zone, GroovyMag and NFJS the Magazine, as well as the Selenium 2.0 DZone Refcard. Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.

His current areas of interest include lean/agile software development, software architecture, mobile application development and functional languages.

Ken has been a practitioner and instructor of RUP since the late 1990s, and an extreme programmer and coach since the middle 2000s. Ken has worked with Fortune 500 companies to small startups in the roles of developer, designer, application architect and enterprise architect. Ken's current focus is on enterprise system automation and continuous delivery systems.

Ken is an international speaker on the subject of software engineering speaking at conferences such as JavaOne, JavaZone, Jax-India, and The Strange Loop. He is a regular speaker with NFJS where he is best known for his architecture and security hacking talks. In 2009, Ken was honored by being awarded the JavaOne Rockstar Award at JavaOne in SF, California and the JavaZone Rockstar Award at JavaZone in Oslo, Norway as the top ranked speaker.

Pratik Patel is the CTO of Atlanta based TripLingo (http://www.triplingo.com/). He wrote the first book on 'enterprise Java' in 1996, "Java Database Programming with JDBC." He has also spoken at various conferences and participates in several local tech groups and startup groups. He's in the startup world now and hacks iOS, Android, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, Rails, and ..... well everything except Perl.
Pratik's specialty is in large-scale applications for mission-critical and mobile applications use. He has designed and built 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.

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/.

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.

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 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 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.

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.

Ari Zilka founded Terracotta in 2003 and is the company’s Chief Technology Officer. Combining business and technology leadership, Ari was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Accel Partners and worked at PriceWaterhouseCoopers with some of the world’s leading brands. He was Chief Architect at Walmart.com where he built and led a team of core engineers. And in the mid 1990s, Ari invented a new object relational database that still exceeds the capabilities and performance of database technology today

Oleg is a Sr. Software Engineer with SpringSource/VMWare and a core developer of Spring Integration framework. He has 16+ years of experience in software engineering across multiple disciplines including software architecture and design, consulting, business analysis and application development. 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.
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.

Chip is a Senior Product Manager for SpringSource, with primary responsibility for the HQ monitoring application. Prior to joining the SpringSource team in May 2009, he had worked on the HQ product team for three years as a Hyperic employee. Chip has been a practicing technology professional for over fifteen years, and has served in hands-on leadership roles ranging in responsibility from systems and network administration to systems engineering for Fortune Global 500, non-profit, and start-up organizations.

Scott Vlaminck has been developing web applications for over a decade, and has spent most of that time using Java and J2EE. For the past two and a half years, however, he's been enjoying the freedom of programming in Groovy using Grails. He's an active member of the
Groovy Users of Minnesota and has contributed to both the Grails and Groovy projects. His weblog can be found at http://refactr.com/blog/and he can be contacted at [email protected].

Jon is the architect of Spring Insight and has more than 15 years of professional experience writing software. He has the privilege of leading the Insight team, a very skilled, agile group of developers committed to giving developers and operators tools to reduce complexity and overhead.

Prior to SpringSource, Jon was a principal engineer at Hyperic and co-founded the product eventually known as Hyperic HQ. He has spent more time capturing and displaying performance data than he cares to .. measure.

Mark Thomas is a Senior Software Engineer with SpringSource. At SpringSource Mark leads the integration of Tomcat with tc Server and has also had a hand in the development and integration of the additional serviceability functionality.

Mark has been using and developing Apache Tomcat for more than five years. He became involved in the development of Tomcat when he needed better control over the SSL configuration than was available at the time. After fixing that first bug, he started working his way through the remaining Tomcat bugs and is still going. Along the way, Mark became a Tomcat committer and PMC member, volunteered to be the Tomcat 4 release manager, created the Tomcat security pages, became a member of the ASF, joined the Apache Security Committee and is an Apache Commons PMC member where he contributes to Commons Pool, DBCP and Daemon. He also helps maintain the ASF's Bugzilla instances.

Mark has a MEng in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom.

Before working for G2One and SpringSource doing Groovy and Grails development, Matt worked as a Java developer, FORTRAN77 programmer, and military intelligence analyst. During his time with G2One / SpringSource, he was the lead programmer for the GrailsUI plugin, a team lead on an internal Contegix application, and main contributor on several other projects, including the Grails.org plugin portal.

Since leaving SpringSource, Matt has been a freelance Groovy/Grails developer and contributed to several other projects. He is currently very interested in jQuery, Flex, and the upcoming technological singularity that will change life as we know it for all humanity.

Learn more about Matt on his website at Dangertree.net.

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.

Javier Soltero is Chief Technology Officer for Management Products for SpringSource.

Previously, Javier was the co-founder and CEO of Hyperic, the leader in multi-platform, open source IT management, which SpringSource acquired in May 2009. Prior to co-founding Hyperic, he was chief architect at Covalent Technologies, where he led the design and implementation of multiple enterprise products, including the configuration management product for Apache and the Covalent Application Manager (CAM)—now Hyperic's flagship product Hyperic HQ.

Prior to Covalent, Soltero was a senior software engineer at Backflip, where he met Hyperic co-founders Charles Lee and Doug MacEachern. At Backflip, he was actively involved in the design, implementation, and operational aspects of the site.

Soltero also held senior engineering positions at Netscape, where he participated in the design development of e-commerce and Internet infrastructure suites. Over the last 10 years, Soltero has been actively involved in various open source communities as both user and contributor to projects like JBoss and Apache Tomcat.

Soltero is originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico and received his BS in Information Systems and Industrial Management from Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr Stefan Schmidt has been a Software Engineer with SpringSource since early 2008. He is currently based in the Sydney, Australia office, where he has been a key Roo developer since the project began. Stefan's work on Roo focuses on many of the most popular add-ons, including those which provide web, search and messaging features.

Stefan has been developing Java enterprise applications since 2003. Prior to his work at SpringSource, Stefan has been teaching various Enterprise Java subjects at the University of Technology in Sydney. He mentored hundreds of students in the design of enterprise software architectures with focus on scalability, separation of concerns and design patterns using enterprise Java technologies.

Vipul Savjani is a manager in the Accenture's Architecture Innovation organization. Vipul has more than nine years of diverse experience in developing software products and solutions. Vipul is interested in and focuses on emerging technologies and methodologies including Cloud Computing, Dynamic Languages, Model-Driven Development, and Agile Methodologies.

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.

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.

Arjen Poutsma is a senior enterprise application architect with more than fifteen years' experience in commercial software environments. During this time he has worked with both J2EE and Microsoft .NET.

In 2004, 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 worked 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. Currently, he is a Software Engineer.

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.

Prasad works as Sr. Member of Technical Staff in VMware’s EcoSystem Engineering Group, mainly focusing on the vCloud and vSphere Web Services API. Currently he is working with vCloud Service Providers and ISV partners for smooth adoption of VMware’s vCloud vision.

Prasad has more than 15 years of experience in Enterprise Software technologies in various technical and management capacity.

Prior to VMware Prasad worked in Vitria Technolgy Inc. where he developed and managed product in Business Process Management software suite. His main interests include enterprise java technologies and XML.
Prasad holds B.S. in Computer Engineering and M.S. in Software Engineering with emphasis on Enterprise Technologies. He also teaches graduate classes as a visiting faculty in San Jose State University.

Joseph Faisal Nusairat, author of "Beginning JBoss Seam" and co-author "Beginning Groovy & Grails", is a Java developer who has been working full time in the Columbus Ohio area since 1998, primarily focused on Java development. His career has taken him into a variety of Fortune 500 industries including military applications, data centers, banking, internet security, pharmaceuticals, and insurance. Joseph is particularly fond of open source projects and tries to use as much open source software as possible when working with clients. Joseph is a graduate of Ohio University with dual degrees in Computer Science and Microbiology with a minor in Chemistry. Currently, Joseph works as a Senior Partner at Integrallis Software (www.integrallis.com).

John Newton, CTO and Chairman, has had one of the longest and most influential careers in content management. In 1990, John co-founded, designed and led the development of Documentum®, the leader in content management recently acquired by EMC®.

For the next ten years, he invented many of the concepts widely used in the industry today. In addition, he built Documentum's marketing and professional services organizations in Europe. John has also been an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Benchmark Capital.

John was one of the founding engineers at Ingres® where he helped develop the world's first commercial relational database. John graduated with a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley.

Ryan is a Principal Engineer at SpringSource. Prior to the acquisition of Hyperic by SpringSource, Ryan was the co-founder and Chief Architect at Hyperic. In addition to his responsibilities as the technical lead on the project, Ryan is heavily involved in customer deployments of Hyperic HQ, gaining critical knowledge of how operations teams deal with the rapid technological advances in IT infrastructure.

Before Hyperic, Ryan was a Senior Software Engineer at Covalent Technologies, a provider of commercial support and add-on modules for the Apache web server. While at Covalent, Ryan was on the team that developed Enterprise Ready Server (now known as SpringSource ERS) and was the author of mod_ftp, a protocol module for Apache that adds FTP support. mod_ftp entered the ASF incubation process in 2005 and was graduated to a subproject of the HTTP Server Project in 2007.

Ryan holds a BS degree from the University of Nebraska in Computer Engineering and lives in San Francisco with his wife Amy.

Marty is Director of Support Services at SpringSource. Prior to the acquisition of Hyperic by SpringSource, Marty was the Director of Customer Success at Hyperic.

Before Hyperic, Marty was Director of Global Support Services and Operations at Red Hat, one of the world's leading open source providers. While at Red Hat, Marty lead various global initiatives from policy transparency to systems efficiency to support readiness while dealing with the occasional angry Enterprise customer. During his tenure at Red Hat he built the Asia-Pacific Support operations from the ground up while on assignment for two years in Australia. Additionally he held Developer and Director roles in the Information Technology department as part of the Enterprise Application Development team.

Marty holds a BS degree from North Carolina State University in Computer Science and now resides in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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.

Maudrit Martinez is manager in the Accenture's Architecture Innovation organization, where he focuses on technology architecture, custom enterprise application development and emerging technologies. He currently leads Accenture’s Foundation Platform for JavaTM (AFP-J) and Dynamic Languages initiatives.

Maudrit has more than 16 years of professional experience in software design and development across multiple industries, including financial services, telecommunication, media and entertainment. He holds a BSc. in Computer Engineering and a Master in Business Management from the Universidad Rafael Urdaneta. His interests include software architecture, agile software development, framework design, system scalability, process improvement and project management.

Andi comes to EMA with over 20 years experience, across 4 continents, with large-scale Enterprise systems software on mainframe, midrange, server and desktop systems. He has worked within the IT departments of various global corporations, and with several enterprise software vendors, leading diverse technical, sales and marketing teams.

At EMA Andi's focus is on the intelligent and automated management of IT, specifically surrounding systems and applications management, configuration management, provisioning and virtualization of systems and applications.

Andi began his career in 1984 in system operations supporting mixed mainframe and distributed computing environments. He spent several years in the UK and Australia with various financial, government, and manufacturing organizations delivering automation systems to improve efficiency of enterprise IT operations.

Andi then joined New Dimension Software as senior technical consultant and product specialist for the Asia Pacific region. In this role he focused on problem analysis, solution design and implementation across a wide range of industries, including outsourcing, government, financial, industrial, telecommunications and retail. Following the acquisition by BMC Software, Andi moved into a product marketing role for BMC, designing, developing and delivering enterprise management solutions.

Prior to joining EMA, Andi was Product Manager at Mobius Management Systems. In this role, he was responsible for researching and producing competitive market and gap analyses, defining product vision, leading development strategy and delivering products to market.

Andi's breadth and depth of experience provides EMA and its clients with a unique and extensive range of knowledge in Enterprise Management solutions.

Randy MacBlane is responsible for Product and Project Management of SpringSource tc Server. He also runs the Commercial Engineering team within SpringSource responsible for Enterprise support across the Spring and Hyperic product lines as well as handling direct customer relationships with Engineering.

Previously Randy was at BEA Systems with a variety of responsibilities including Tuxedo design, development and architecture; Engineering management for WebLogic Platform and worldwide Customer Centric Engineering for the WebLogic family of products.

Randy has a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Institute of Technology and a MS in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.

Charles Lee was a co-founder of Hyperic, before Hyperic was acquired by SpringSource. Prior to co-founding Hyperic, Lee was a senior software engineer at Covalent. There, he built Covalent's configuration management product for Apache (CMP), and he spearheaded and architected the application management software (CAM), which later became Hyperic HQ.

Before Covalent, Lee developed a document management system for retail store build-outs based on open-source technology at WiseConnect. Lee also held senior engineering position at Hewlett-Packard, where he was instrumental in developing print drivers for network LaserJets for the Asian market, as well as developing the UI framework used for LaserJet drivers for all markets. Lee also developed the first GUI printer configuration framework for AutoCAD while a senior engineer at Autodesk. Lee was an early engineer at Backflip, where he created the document publishing system for the website based on mod_perl.

Lee is now product manager of several products, including Hyperic, Cloud Foundry, and Spring Insight.

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 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.

Kirk is software developer with a passion for building great software. 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. His recent book, Java Application Architecture was published in 2012, and presents 18 patterns that help you design modular software.

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 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.

Steve Jin is the author of the first VMware SDK book: VMware VI and vSphere SDK by Prentice Hall. Currently he is a senior MTS at VMware, where he provides guidance to strategic partners, such as IBM, HP, Dell, NetApp, BEA, who build applications using VI (vSphere) SDK. In his spare time, he founded VI (vSphere) Java API open source project, which is widely used by various commercial companies and developers.
Jin received his BA, MS, and Ph.D. degrees in control theory (EE) from prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing. Prior to his current job, Jin worked at IBM Research, Rational Software, and ASDC in various engineering and management roles.

Jim Jagielski is Chief Open Source Officer, Principal Software Engineer and Lead for tc Server at SpringSource. As Chief Open Source Officer, Jim brings his decade plus of experience in working with open source communities to ensure that SpringSource is successfully contributing, leveraging and remains committed to the communities that matter most to our customers.

Jim is best known for his deep, long-term involvement in open source and with the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Within the ASF, which he co-founded, Jim is an active, key developer in numerous projects, including Apache Tomcat, Apache APR, and Apache HTTPd, in which he is the longest active committer within that project. He also serves on the board of directors of the ASF, a position he has held since its inception, and currently serves as Chairman.

Jim's team at SpringSource is focused on the Apache-based portfolio of products, used in association with the Spring Framework as well as independently. He and his team maintain continued deep development of these codebases, provide consulting and training around them, and serve as escalated technical support. As Chief Open Source Officer, Jim provides guidance and expertise over non-Spring related open source technologies, including Apache software, to compliment current offerings. He has a special affinity for scripting languages in addition to Java and C, and has the unique capability of handling technical problems from high-level architectural to low-level development point of view, and all aspects in between.

Over his career, Jim has served as CTO for Zend Technologies and Covalent Technologies. He founded jaguNET Access Services, a web solutions company and he also was a manager and engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. He has spoken and presented at numerous conferences and seminars, and is a sought after resource by reporters and analysts regarding Apache and open source in general. He is also a noted author, having written numerous articles, including a monthly section in several magazines. Previously, he was also editor of the Apache section on Slashdot.

Al Hilwa serves as Program Director for IDC's Application Development Software research. In this role, Mr. Hilwa provides thought leadership, expert opinion, analysis, research and competitive intelligence on all issues related to Application Development technologies, processes and audiences. Mr. Hilwa also offers technology and vendor advice to, investment and technology firms as well as Global 2000 end-user companies that subscribe to IDC's services.

In addition to market sizing and forecasting, the Application Development Software Program provides comprehensive coverage of the vendors and technologies in the space, including the various technologies being utilized today in developing applications, trends in the classic 3GL and 4GL areas, the ensuing battles in the Unified Development Environments, relevant developments in Open Source and AD offered as a Service, and the broadening of the space into web-design bolstered by trends in Web 2.0 and social networking.

Mr. Hilwa comes to IDC with over 20 years of work experience in both the supply and demand sides of the market. In 2000, Mr. Hilwa joined Microsoft as a Senior Product Manager on the SQL Server database team. In his seven years at Microsoft, Mr. Hilwa covered almost all aspects of product management, including running the SQL Server Customer Advisory Network and the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for SQL Server 2005. Mr. Hilwa spent his last two years at Microsoft as a Senior Strategist in the Application Platform marketing team where he drove internal projects to enhance Microsoft's enterprise selling capabilities. Mr. Hilwa started his analyst career in 1995 at Gartner where he was a Research Director on core database technology. In his tenure at Gartner, Mr. Hilwa published over one hundred research units, gave tens of conference presentations, was often quoted by the press and handled over 2000 client inquiries. Prior to Gartner Mr. Hilwa worked on the IT side in various industries including Education, Healthcare, Transportation, and Financial Services. Mr. Hilwa launched his career in the University where he did his graduate studies by running the academic computing labs for several years.

Mr. Hilwa holds a Master of Science Degree in Computer Science from Washington University and a BA in Mathematics and Computer Studies from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin.

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.

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.

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.

Ben Hale is a senior software engineer with Springsource and a core developer on the SpringSource dm Server project. Ben specializes in middleware development with using technologies such as OSGi and Aspect Oriented Programming as well as directing the build and release processes for all products in the Spring and SpringSource portfolios.

His interests include middle-tier architecture and effective build and release management strategies.

Prior to joining SpringSource, Ben spent several years leading teams in architecture and development of large-scale enterprise management applications for the telecommunications industry.

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.

Andrew is the founder of the easyb BDD framework and the co-author of Addison Wesley's "Continuous Integration", Manning's "Groovy in Action" and "Java Testing Patterns". He is an author for multiple online publications including IBM's developerWorks and Oreilly's ONJava and ONLamp portals. He actively blogs about software at thediscoblog.com.

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 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.

Robert Fischer is a multi-language open source developer currently specializing in Groovy in Grails. In the past, his specialties have been in Perl, Java, Ruby, and OCaml. In the future, his specialty will probably be F# or (preferably) a functional JVM language like Scala or Clojure.

Robert is the author of Grails Persistence in GORM and GSQL, a regular contributor to GroovyMag and JSMag, the founder of the JConch Java concurrency library, and the author/maintainer of Liquibase-DSL and the Autobase database migration plugin for Grails.

Danno Ferrin has been programming in Java since the Netscape 2.0 beta and started his career programming in NetDynamics. After surviving three different startups he is currently working as a government contracter at Intelligent Software Solutions. His day job involves writing Swing applications in Java, but on his own time he writes Swing applications in Groovy.

In the open source Java world he is an emeritus commiter at the Apache Tomcat and Ant projects and currently is a committer for the Groovy project and a Despot (Project lead) for the Griffon project.

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.

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.

Hamlet D'Arcy has been writing software for over a decade, and has spent considerable time coding in C++, Java, and Groovy. He's passionate about learning new languages and different ways to think about problems. Hamlet is the founder of the Basel-based Hackergarten open source coding group, and regularly participates and speaks at local and international user groups and conferences. Hamlet is a committer on the Groovy and CodeNarc projects, and is a contributor on a few other open source projects (including JConch and the IDEA Groovy Plugin). He blogs regularly at http://hamletdarcy.blogspot.com and can be found on Twitter as HamletDRC (http://twitter.com/hamletdrc).

Michael Coté is analyst at RedMonk covering primarily enterprise software, specializing in open source, IT management, software development, collaborative, the web, and social/collaborative software. He is RedMonk’s IT Management Lead. His blog is available at http://www.PeopleOverProcess.com and he produces
the RedMonk podcast as well as the video podcast RedMonkTV.

Before joining RedMonk, Coté worked at BMC developing the BMC Performance Manager family of enterprise systems management products. Prior to BMC, Cote’ worked at a wide variety of tech companies and startups such as The Cobalt Group, Coral Technologies, and one of the first, and still thriving, online banking companies, FundsXpress. He also produces the popular code monkey podcast, DrunkAndRetired.com.

Coté was selected for the Texas Social Media Awards in 2009. Technobabble 2.0, a popular blog about analyst relations, ranked Coté’s blog #8 in its ranking of “Top 100 analyst blogs”. He was recently named the 3rd most regarded analyst in the U.S. and 5th globally by the Institute of Industry Analyst Relations. (Thanks!)

See my LinkedIn page for even more information.

Christophe Coenraets is a technical evangelist for Adobe where he focuses on rich Internet applications and enterprise integration. He has been working on Flex since the early days of the product in 2003. In his previous role at Macromedia, Christophe worked on JRun, the company's J2EE application server. Before joining Macromedia, Christophe was managing Java and Internet applications evangelism at Sybase. Christophe has been a regular speaker at conferences worldwide for the last 15 years. He blogs at http://coenraets.org.

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.

Isaac Christoffersen has over 15 years of experience in system integration and software solutions development for commercial and government clients. His expertise also encompasses relational database design and development, software and systems architecture and analysis, telecommunications management, and systems and software design.

Currently he is involved in the design, development, and implementation of Infrastructure and Platform as a service solutions for mission-critical systems using the latest SOA, JEE, Virtualization and open source standards and technologies.

Mr. Christoffersen is professional member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). He is currently chairs the Historical and Membership committees of the Washington DC Chapter of the ACM (DC ACM). He is a frequent speaker on the use of open source and SOA technologies within the Federal Government.

Dennis leads The 451 Group's coverage of service-oriented architecture (SOA), including Web services development, governance, integration and management tools, application integration, middleware and business process management. His coverage area also includes a number of other IT management technologies, such as Internet performance management, desktop management, service-level monitoring and management, IT asset and service management, and project management. Dennis also contributes regularly to 451 Special Reports on topics including open source adoption and virtualization. He often speaks at industry events focused on SOA and is regularly quoted in the trade and business press in articles about companies in this space.

Before joining The 451 Group, Dennis was a senior writer at eWeek magazine for more than five years. At eWeek he covered a number of application and productivity software beats, including CRM, business intelligence and analytics, email, IM, collaboration, enterprise search, business-to-consumer e-commerce technologies and portals. He also led eWeek's coverage of Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance and the impact it has had on IT professionals, in addition to covering the software-as-a-service model and the IT market for small and medium-sized businesses.

Prior to joining eWeek, Dennis was Associate Editor at MC Magazine, where he covered the marketing of technology. He was also News Editor at Midrange Systems and Midrange Channels magazines, where he covered IBM AS/400 computing. In addition, Dennis has worked as a technical writer at SunGard Capital Markets, a global financial trading and risk management software firm, and as a sportswriter for a daily newspaper.

Kent spent 20 years in software development and consulting, mostly on middle-tier and integration technologies. He has published numerous technical articles, spoken at numerous technical conferences, including TechEd, VSLive!, and developer user groups. Kent joined Microsoft in 2008 and is the Technical Product Manager for Windows Communication Foundation and oversees several cross-vendor web service interoperability efforts.

Imad is the Technical Marketing Director of M2Spring (Model to Code). He is MS graduated in Enterprise Architecture. He has over 10 years experience in software development Java EE and a deep expertise in Model Driven Architecture. Imad is a regular speaker at worldwide tradeshows, JavaOne, Eclipse world, IBM RSDC, EclipseCon, Code Generation, etc.

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 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.

Alex has joined Orbitz in 2004 and is responsible for providing technical leadership and guidance in the development of foundational technologies, core libraries and APIs for the enterprise-wide use, as well as establishing and maintaining common design principles and standards used within the company and integration of new software development practices within the development community.

Previously Alex was a Senior Engineer on the same team responsible for web application frameworks and developing common practices and additional functionality on top of Spring MVC & Webflow.

Alex is a graduate of Loyola University of Chicago, with a B.S. in Computer Science and M.S. in Computer Science specializing in Software Architecture. He currently resides in Evanston, IL and when not coding, Alex enjoys playing tennis, hiking, skiing, and traveling.

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.