SpringOne - Speakers

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/.

Alex joined Orbitz LLC 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Keith Donald is a principal and founding partner at SpringSource, the company behind Spring. He is best known in the Spring community for creating Spring Web Flow. At SpringSource, Keith is the lead of the Web Products Team. His team, based in Melbourne, Florida, sustains the development of Spring Web MVC and Web Flow and their associated integrations, and is also responsible for future innovations in the domain of web frameworks.

Since the first Spring Experience in 2005, Keith, with Jay Zimmerman of NoFluffJustStuff Software Symposiums, has served as director of the popular conference series.

Keith is also the principal architect behind SpringSource's state-of-the-art training curriculum, which has provided practical training on Spring to over 3000 students worldwide.

Over his career, Keith, an experienced enterprise software developer and mentor, has built business applications for customers spanning a diverse set of industries including banking, network management, information assurance, education, and retail. He is particularly adept at translating business requirements into technical solutions.

Keith's blog can be found at http://blog.springsource.com/main/author/keithd

Christian 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.

Mark Fisher is a Senior Software Engineer with SpringSource and lead of the Spring Integration project. As a core developer for the Spring Framework, he played a central role in developing the annotation-based configuration features of Spring 2.5. He has also provided consulting and training services for clients across numerous industries throughout North America including several fortune 500 companies.

In addition to the "No Fluff, Just Stuff" symposium tour, Mark speaks regularly at conferences such as The Spring Experience and SpringOne. He has also presented at Java User Groups throughout the United States on various Spring-related topics.

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

Jeremy Grelle is a senior software engineer with SpringSource and the technical lead of the Spring Faces project which provides first-class integration between Spring and Java Server Faces. He is a software artisan with extensive experience in combining server-side Java with the latest web browser technologies to deliver a rich and usable experience for the end user on the web. He has worked heavily with JSF since its initial release and is a member of the JSR-314 Expert Group for JSF 2.0.

Prior to joining SpringSource, Jeremy spent several years crafting large-scale enterprise web applications for the giants of the telecommunications industry. He was a leader in utilizing Spring, JSF, and the latest Ajax techniques to solve a wide variety of problems ranging from inventory management, to low-level network device monitoring, to providing more efficient integration with legacy mainframe systems. He began his career developing e-commerce systems at several web startups where he first became fascinated with bending web browsers to his will and hasn't turned back since.

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.

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

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

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

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

Jennifer Hickey is a senior software engineer for SpringSource, the company behind Spring. She holds a master's degree in software engineering from the Florida Institute of Technology. Jennifer specializes in enterprise application management, with a focus on application modeling methodologies and techniques for rapid development and deployment of management agents. Her interests include aspect oriented programming, asynchronous messaging, JMX, and OSGi.

Jennifer is also very interested in improving organizational productivity through testing. In a previous position, she won an excellence award for introducing automated unit, integration, and regression testing into the development process.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Costin Leau is an SpringSource software engineer based in Romania. His interests include data access and aspect oriented programming. With significant development experience, Costin is currently the lead of the Spring OSGi and Spring JavaConfig projects. In addition, he has worked on the Spring JPA support project, Pitchfork, and has recently co-authored SpringSource's public Hibernate training course.

One of the most active Spring forum contributor with around 3,700 posts in 2006, Costin is also involved as Project Lead for Spring Modules.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Two years ago, Arjen started to specialise in Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures. During this period he has conducted trainings and has researched SOAs in large organisations.

Arjen is the founder and the project lead for the Spring Web Services. This Spring project aims at facilitating development of document-driven web services. Recently, Arjen started working on the REST support in Spring 3.0. Arjen has also contributed to various other open source projects, including XFire, NEO and others.

Since early 2005, Arjen has been a consultant for SpringSource in The Netherlands.

Chris Richardson is a developer, architect and mentor with over 20 years of experience and is the author of the recently published book "POJOs in Action". He runs a consulting company that helps development teams become more productive and successful by adopting POJOs and lightweight frameworks. Chris has been a technical leader at a variety of companies including Insignia Solutions and BEA Systems. Chris has a computer science degree from the University of Cambridge in England. He lives in Oakland, CA with his wife and three children.

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.

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

Colin has had a long and varied career, including experience developing for and managing his own retail software company, other experience in the C++ shrinkwrap and enterprise software space, experience with Java since '97, and a complete focus on enterprise Java since '99.

Prior to SpringSource, Colin spent more than 4 years as architect then chief architect at a leading software incubator / VC. Colin's role was split between one part hands on architecture, design, and coding, another part mentoring and teaching best practices at the code and process level, and a final part performing technical due diligence and consulting for the VC arm. Throughout this period, Colin gained experience with and an appreciation for agile development practices as a vital part of software success.

Throughout his career, Colin's experience, wide ranging interests and general knowledge in the technology space have led him to be a resource that others have been able to draw on for advice. In general, Colin's background has left him with a deep knowledge of all it takes to successfully put out good software, at the code, process, and business level.

Along with client-facing work at SpringSource, Colin also spends significant time on Spring evangelism, having spoken on many occasion on Java EE and Spring Framework at conferences and JUGs.

Dr Stefan Schmidt has been a Systems 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, messaging and dynamic finder 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.

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.

Matt is the Group Leader of Research Application Development in the Research Informatics Division of Information Sciences at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. Matt has been developing and supporting enterprise Java applications in support of life sciences research for St. Jude since 2001. Matt is a committer to multiple open source projects and is the founding member of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group. Matt earned his Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the University of Mississippi, and was a graduating member of the inaugural class of the Sally McDonnell-Barksdale Honors College. His current areas of interest include Groovy/Grails, cloud computing, concurrency, and functional programming. You can learn more about Matt and read his blog at http://www.mattstine.com.

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.

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.

Craig Walls has been professionally developing software for over 15 years (and longer than that for the pure geekiness of it). He is the author of Modular Java (published by Pragmatic Bookshelf) and Spring in Action and XDoclet in Action (both published by Manning).

When he's not slinging code, Craig spends as much time as he can with his wife, two daughters, 6 birds, and 2 dogs.

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.

Oleg is an IT professional with 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 and training 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, Aspect Oriented Programming while his Spring passions are aligned with OSGi, Spring Integration and Spring Web Services, a combination which he believes will evolve in simple, light weight and yet powerful SOA platform.

A resident of the Philadelphia area, Oleg enjoys windsurfing, scuba diving, snowboarding, hockey and traveling when he can find some spare time.