Speakers

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 Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for SpringSource and the
vFabric Cloud Application Platform at VMware

SpringSource develops the Spring Framework and associated open source
projects such as Spring Integration and Spring Batch, Grails, Groovy, and
Eclipse AspectJ. Cloud Foundry is VMware's open platform-as-a-service with
full support for Spring, Grails, and a wide range of other application
frameworks. Adrian maintains a keen interest in the evolution of
enterprise application development as cloud, big data, and smart clients
all appear on the enterprise radar.

Adrian joined VMware in 2009 through VMware's acquisition of SpringSource
where he was the CTO. He led the AspectJ project at Eclipse.org and
oversaw the integration of aspect-oriented concepts into the Spring
Framework. He helped to grow the SpringSource portfolio from these two
projects into the rich set of projects and products that it is today.

In 2004 Adrian was recognised by MIT Technology Review as one of the top
100 young innovators in the world. Adrian has also served on a number of
industry groups including the Aspect-Oriented Software Association
Steering Committee, the OSGi Enterprise Expert Group, and the Eclipse
Architecture Council. Prior to joining SpringSource, Adrian gained over a
decade of experience in building enterprise middleware at IBM.

Juergen Hoeller is co-founder of the Spring Framework open source project and has been serving as the project lead and release manager for the core framework since 2003. Juergen is an experienced software architect and consultant with outstanding expertise in code organization, transaction management and enterprise messaging.

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.

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. His experience has spanned many industries including retail, banking, online games, defense, finance, hospitality and health care. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and lives in Auburn, CA. He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, data science, 3D graphics, visualization, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. He is also a rabid reader, devoted foodie and has excellent taste in music. If pressed, he might tell you about his International Pop Recording career.

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.

Mark Richards is an Independent Consultant working in the field as an Enterprise, Integration, and Application Architect, where he is involved in the architecture, design, and implementation of SOA, EDA, messaging, and other architectures, primarily in the Java platform. Previously, Mark was an Executive IT Architect with IBM, where he worked as an SOA and enterprise architect in the financial services area. He has been involved in the software industry since 1984 and has many battle scars to show for it. Mark served as the President of the Boston Java User Group in 1997 and 1998, and the President of the New England Java Users Group from 1999 thru 2003. Mark is the author of the book Java Message Service (2nd edition) from O'Reilly. He is also the author of Java Transaction Design Strategies, contributing author of the book 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know from O'Reilly, contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 1, and contributing author of NFJS Anthology Volume 2. Mark has many architect and developer certifications, including those from IBM, Sun, The Open Group, and Oracle. He is a regular conference speaker at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium Series and speaks at other conferences and user groups around the world. When he is not working Mark can usually be found hiking with his wife and two daughters in the White Mountains or along the Appalachian Trail.

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.

Matthew McCullough is an energetic 15 year veteran of enterprise software development, open source education, and co-founder of Ambient Ideas, LLC, a Denver consultancy. Matthew currently is VP of Training at GitHub.com, author of the Git Master Class series for O'Reilly, speaker at over 30 national and international conferences, author of three of the top 10 DZone RefCards, and President of the Denver Open Source Users Group. His current topics of research center around project automation: build tools (Gradle), distributed version control (Git, GitHub), Continuous Integration (Jenkins, Travis) and Quality Metrics (Sonar). Matthew resides in Denver, Colorado with his beautiful wife and two young daughters, who are active in nearly every outdoor activity Colorado has to offer.

Tim is a full-stack generalist and passionate teacher who loves working with people as much as he loves to code. He believes the best developer is one who is well-informed of specifics and can also make deep connections between software development and the broader world. He has recently been exploring non-relational data stores, why professionalized product management is a global suboptimization, and of course everything related to Git. He does not really believe that it is possible to teach, but rather believes that it is his responsibility to create an environment in which people can learn.

He is also a poet, having composed and produced companion videos for Oh, The Methods You'll Compose and The Maven, with another project currently in the works. If you've been in his Git classes, you've seen some famous poems make their way into the world's best version control system.

Tim is a speaker internationally and on the No Fluff Just Stuff tour in the United States, and is co-president of the Denver Open Source User Group, author of the Gradle Liquibase Plugin, the maintainer of the Ratpack web framework, co-presenter of the best-selling O'Reilly Git Master Class, co-author of Building and Testing with Gradle, a member of the O'Reilly Expert Network, and a member of the GigOM Pro Analyst Network. He occasionally blogs at timberglund.com.

He lives in Littleton, CO, USA with the wife of his youth and their three children.

Peter is an evangelist and hacker for hackNY - a not-for-profit that aims to federate the next generation of hackers for the New York innovation community.

Peter is a regular presenter at national and international conferences on ruby, nodejs, NoSQL (especially MongoDB and neo4j), cloud computing, software craftsmanship, java, groovy, javascript, and requirements and estimating. He is on the program committee for Code Generation in Cambridge, England and the Domain Specific Modeling workshop at SPLASH (was ooPSLA) and reviews and shepherds proposals for the BCS SPA conference.

He has presented at a range of conferences including DLD conference, ooPSLA, RubyNation, SpringOne2GX, Code Generation, Practical Product Lines, the British Computer Society Software Practices Advancement conference, DevNexus, cf.Objective(), CF United, Scotch on the Rocks, WebDU, WebManiacs, UberConf, the Rich Web Experience and the No Fluff Just Stuff Enterprise Java tour.

He has been published in IEEE Software, Dr. Dobbs, IBM developerWorks, Information Week, Methods & Tools, Mashed Code, NFJS the Magazine and GroovyMag. He's currently writing a book on managing software development for Pearson.

He is an organizer of the CTO School http://www.ctoschool.org - an organization in NYC devoted to creating the next generation of technical leaders. He also organizes the node.js meetup in New York and co-organizes the Domain Driven Design and Grails meetups.

He is a regular instructor at General Assembly in New York. His presentations cover managing software development, NoSQL, mobile development, Javascript development, Twitter Bootstrap and Javascript frameworks.

He tweets regularly as @peterbell.

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. He initiated the creation of the Grails web framework, and created the Gaelyk lightweight toolkit for Google App Engine. 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. Before founding G2One, which was acquired by SpringSource in late 2008, and taking the role of VP Technology, Guillaume worked for OCTO Technology, a consultancy focusing on architecture and agile methodologies. While at OCTO, Guillaume developed new offerings around Groovy and Grails for its customers.

Graeme Rocher 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 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, 2 birds and 3 dogs.

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).

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.

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.

Kris Zyp is a research and development associate with SitePen, a forward-thinking company that is committed to building and enhancing the open web. He represents the Dojo foundation on the EcmaScript 4 committee. Kris is the lead developer of the Persevere project and the JSON Schema format. He is actively researching and developing technologies in Ajax REST client/server architecture, JSON-RPC, JSONPath, JSON Referencing, and JavaScript persistence. He is also a contributor to Comet Daily and is working on RESTful HTTP Comet approaches.

Oleg is a Principal Architect with Hortonworks responsible for architecting scalable BigData solutions using various OpenSource technologies available within and outside the Hadoop ecosystem. Before Hortonworls Oleg was part of the SpringSource/VMWare where he was a core engineer working on Spring Integration framework, leading Spring Integration Scala DSL and contributing to other projects in Spring portfolio. He has 17+ years of experience in software engineering across multiple disciplines including software architecture and design, consulting, business analysis and application development. Oleg has been focusing on professional Java development since 1999. Since 2004 he has been heavily involved in using several open source technologies and platforms across a number of projects around the world and spanning industries such as Teleco, Banking, Law Enforcement, US DOD and others.
As a speaker Oleg presented seminars at dozens of conferences worldwide (i.e.SpringOne, JavaOne, Java Zone, Jazoon, Java2Days, Scala Days, Uberconf, and others).

Aaron Zeckoski is Senior Research Engineer in CARET (Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies) at Cambridge University. He has been involved in many aspects of system development over the past six years including analysis, design, implementation, QA, deployment, and support. His current responsibilities include project analysis, system design, and system implementation for web application development. Recent work involves Java, Spring, Hibernate, RSF (Reasonable Server Faces), PHP, and Sakai.

Mike Youngstrom is principal engineer for the LDS Church. Mike is a member of the DevOps team doing development of an in house CloudFoundry based PaaS. Prior to that Mike was the “Java Stack” architect for 6 years. Leading custom application development architecture and standards for custom application development at the LDS Church on a predominantly Spring based platform.

Rob Woollen is a Principal Architect at Salesforce.com. At Salesforce Rob leads the architecture for Salesforce Chatter, a real-time collaboration platform. Prior to Salesforce, Rob spent 9 years with BEA Systems serving as the WebLogic Server Chief Architect. Rob holds a BSE in computer science from Princeton University.

Dan Woods is an application developer who is passionate about software architecture and best practices. Dan solves software development problems using Groovy and Grails, and engages the community by sharing solutions through his Twitter account, blog, and GitHub contributions. He has code commits to Grails framework and has published articles on software architecture in Groovy Magazine.

Eberhard Wolff has worked with Java since 1996, mainly in enterprise applications. He co-authored "Server Component Patterns" and "Java Persistenz Strategien" (German). He is also author of the first German book on Spring, which is also the first book to cover Spring 2.0. He regularly contributes to conferences like JAX, W-JAX, JAOO and writes articles for several journals. Eberhard is also a founding member of the Java Champions.

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.

David Winterfeldt works at VMware on the VMware vFabric Application Director project. It enables developers and organizations to deploy applications to the cloud by having a logical abstraction for software services and application topologies. This allows an application to be easily deployed multiple times to different environments.

David has been doing software development for over 20 years. He's been using Java since 1998 and involved in using Open Source almost as long. David has focused on Web and Enterprise development for most of his career, and started working with the Spring Framework in 2006.

David runs the website Spring by Example, which is a site for sharing Spring examples. The site is a general resource for Spring and should ultimately save developers time. He's is also an Apache committer on Struts and Commons Validator, as well as the creator of Commons Validator (although currently no longer active on either).

Rob Winch is a Senior Software Engineer at VMware and is the project lead of the Spring Security framework. He is also a committer on the core Spring Framework and co-author of the Spring Security 3.1 book. In the past he has worked in the health care industry, bioinformatics research, high performance computing, and as a web consultant. When he is not sitting in front of a computer he enjoys playing the guitar.

Wes Williams is a Senior Consultant with EMC specializing in vFabric technologies and Domain-Driven Design.

He has extensive experience (25+ years) as a hands-on software developer, architect and designer supporting the creation of enterprise-class information technology systems in a wide variety of industries from small businesses to Fortune 10 companies using big, fast data. He is certified with both Microsoft and Java technologies, including certifications with Java architecture and enterprise architecture. He was formerly a guest instructor for Architecture at Sun Microsystems.

James Williams is a Senior Software Engineer for Taulia based in Silicon Valley and a frequent conference speaker. He is a co-creator of the Griffon project, a rich desktop framework for Java applications. He and his team WalkIN, created a product on a coach bus while riding to SXSW, and were crowned winners of StartupBus 2011. He is the author of the upcoming book "Learning HTML5 Game Programming..." for Addison-Wesley. He blogs at http://jameswilliams.be/blog and tweets as @ecspike.

James is an accomplished and experienced enterprise architect, that specializes in agile delivery of high quality software products using Java, Flex, and a myriad of supporting technologies. James has significant experience in several software specialties including product development for a start-up, consulting for large enterprises and pre-sales architect for Open Source software vendors. James spent three years as a Solutions Architect for JBoss/Red Hat. And, he has contributed code to several OSS projects.

Mike is a Senior Consultant with SpringSource and has 10+ years experience in Java enterprise development and consulting. He started using Spring and Spring Security shortly after the first release and has deep knowledge about making simple, transparent and powerful security solutions but still retaining maintainable code. He is a committer of the Spring Security Framework and the creator of the Spring Security Kerberos Extension. He regularly speaks at various conferences and publishes work around Application Security and Spring.

Kevin Whinnery is a core contributor and evangelist for Appcelerator, Inc., developers of the Appcelerator RIA framework. Prior to joining Appcelerator, Kevin has done server-side Java programming and UI development for ERP vendor Lawson Software and technical consultancy Perficient, Inc. Kevin is also the author of the upcoming book "Appcelerator In Action" from Manning Publications (http://www.manning.com/whinnery).

Phil Webb is developer on the core Spring Framework and Spring Web Flow projects. He is member of the JSR-344 expert group and has been working with Java for over 10 years. Phil is particularly interested in server-side web technologies and has been working to improve integration between Spring and JSF. Born in the UK, Phil is currently living in California.

Bobby Warner is a Senior Technical Architect at Target Corporation based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Bobby has been developing web applications for over ten years and using Grails for the last three. He has been a key component in bringing Groovy and Grails to Target as well as other innovative technologies. Bobby is an active member in the Grails community and blogs frequently about Grails topics at www.bobbywarner.com.

Lucas Ward is a Java Architect focused on batch architectures within the Innovation and Architecture practice within Accenture. He has been working over the past two years on Accenture's methodology and architecture best practices, in particular regarding the use of open source. Lucas is co-leading the development of Spring Batch, utilizing experiences from multiple batch architecture implementations throughout Accenture.

James Ward (www.jamesward.com) works for Typesafe where he teaches developers the Typesafe Stack (Play Framework, Scala, and Akka) . James frequently presents at conferences around the world such as JavaOne, Devoxx, and many other Java get-togethers. Along with Bruce Eckel, James co-authored First Steps in Flex. He has also published numerous screencasts, blogs, and technical articles. Starting with Pascal and Assembly in the 80′s, James found his passion for writing code. Beginning in the 90′s he began doing web development with HTML, Perl/CGI, then Java. After building a Flex and Java based customer service portal in 2004 for Pillar Data Systems he became a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe. In 2011 James became a Principal Developer Evangelist at Salesforce.com where he taught developers how to deploy apps on the cloud with Heroku. James Tweets as @_JamesWard and posts code at github.com/jamesward.

Quinton Wall is a Developer Evangelist for Salesforce.com where he is a regular technical contributor and speaker at cloud industry events and media sites. For over 15 years, Quinton has been at the forefront of Internet technologies being a founding member of the Australia Java Users Group, building the prototype for the Looksmart search engine, and leading engineering teams across the globe. Quinton now brings this wealth of experience to cloud believing that the future of technology and cloud computing is harnessing the power of convergent clouds.

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

Abdul has over 12 years of rich & insightful experience in software solution development. He graduated with a Bachelor of computer science from Bangalore University, India.
He started as a java developer, Has good experience in Object Oriented Analysis and Design along with the design and development of complex, business critical applications using JEE technologies. He has been involved in solution proposals, Solution Design/recommendations, Enterprise Application Integration, Application modernization, Data modernization, OSS/BSS solutions, Cloud adoption for Paas Solutions using vFabric platform. Abdul has been in VMware since March 2012, and has contributed to IP initiatives for vFabric cloud application platform as part of global solutions and service engineering team.

Alexander von Zitzewitz is founder, managing director of the company and CEO of the US subsidiary. He has more than 20 years of project and management experience. In 1993 he founded ootec - a company focused on project services around object oriented software technology. This company was sold to the French Valtech group in March 2000 and served customers like Siemens, BMW, Thyssen-Krupp-Stahl and other well known names in German industry. From 2003 to early 2005 he was working as Director of Central Europe for the French company Xcalia S.A. Since the summer of 2008 he is living in Massachusetts. His areas of expertise are object oriented system design and large scale system architecture. Alexander has a degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Munich.

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 scott@refactr.com.

Erwin Vervaet is a software engineer with a keen interest in applying modern IT concepts and tools. He holds a master's degree in computer science from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.

Erwin has been using Java since its inception and has extensive experience applying it in IT research, e-commerce projects, open source initiatives, industrial software systems and business support applications. He currently works as an independent consultant, running his own software and consultancy company: www.ervacon.com.

Erwin also enjoys teaching and speaking on Java and Spring related subjects. As the originator the Spring Web Flow project, he currently co-leads it's development together with Keith Donald. He also authored the first book entirely dedicated to Spring Web Flow: Working with Spring Web Flow.

Vaughn Vernon is the author of the book Implementing Domain-Driven Design, published by Addison-Wesley. Vaughn is a veteran software craftsman with more than 25 years of experience in software design, development, and architecture. Vaughn is a thought leader in simplifying software design and implementation using innovative methods. Vaughn has been programming with object-oriented languages since the 1980s and applying the tenets of Domain-Driven Design since his Smalltalk domain modeling days in the early 1990s. His experience spans a wide range of business domains. He has also succeeded in technical endeavors creating reusable frameworks, libraries, and implementation acceleration tools.

Vaughn consults and speaks internationally, and has taught his Implementing Domain-Driven Design Workshop on multiple continents. He teaches both public and private classes and workshops, and has presented at conferences such as: SpringOne 2gx; PulsoConf in Bogota, Colombia; QCon; UberConf; IASA ITARC. As an author, Vaughn has contributed to industry literature and software patterns and is a founder of the DDD Denver Meetup group.

His IDDD Tour commences in Europe in April 2013: idddtour.com You can read more about his latest efforts at VaughnVernon.co and follow him on Twitter here: @VaughnVernon

Ryan is Chief Systems and Software Architect and Director of Products at ReachForce and formerly Lead Architect at Developerprogram.com.

He maintains the grails-quartz plugin, GVPS Grails plugin, and Struts 1 plugins, and co-chair of the Austin Groovy and Grails User Group in Austin, TX.

Ryan is currently building a Grails infrastructure for ReachForce as well as teaching Grails to the developer team.

Ryan is also co-founder of Xan Endeavors, LLC, a collaboration of software development, consulting, coaching, and innovation games.

In the past Ryan has architected a Grails solution for Developerprogram.com that allows rapid deployment of Developer Program portals for all kinds of companies, specializing in the mobile industry. He has also built Java and Linux based webcasting for events such as SXSW, built telecom software, and SaaS systems for the financial sector.

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

James Tyrrell is a Software Engineer with VMware and a member of the Spring Roo team. Since joining the team James has worked closely with Google on the GWT add-on, created the Cloud Foundry add-on, and provided a number of core enhancements to Roo. He enjoys getting his hands dirty with advanced code and is currently working on a new type analysis, parsing and generation engine.

Prior to coming to VMware, James worked extensively with GWT and has developed a number of applications using the technology. He has presented at a number of developer events on topics including Spring Roo, GWT and Cloud Foundry.

James can be found on the web at populationjim.com and twitter.com/jimbotyrrell

Greg has worked in the software industry since 1997, always seeking the right tool for the job. Greg joined SpringSource in 2010 as a senior software engineer. He previously was part of the senior software team working on Harris' $3.5 billion FAA telco program, architecting mission critical enterprise apps while managing a software team. While providing after hours support, he is no stranger to midnight failures and software triage.

Being a test-bitten script junky, Greg has used JUnit, TestNG, JMock, FEST, PyUnit, and pMock testing frameworks, along with other agile practices to produce top quality code.

He has worked with Java/Spring/Spring Security/@AspectJ/Jython technologies, UNIX/Linux/Solaris platforms, and python/jython/bash/csh/expect scripting. Being a wiki evangelist, he also deployed a LAMP-based wiki web site to provide finger tip knowledge to users.

In 2006, Greg created the Spring Python project. The Spring Framework provided many useful features, and he wanted those same features available when working with Python. He also wrote Spring Python 1.1 through Packt Publishing.

Greg completed a master's degree in Computer Engineering at Auburn University in 1997, and lives in Melbourne, FL with his family.

David Turanski is a Senior Software Engineer with SpringSource, a division of VMWare. David is a member of the Spring Data team and lead of the Spring Data GemFire project. He is also a committer on the Spring Integration project. David has extensive experience as a developer, architect and consultant serving a variety of industries. In addition he has trained hundreds of developers how to use the Spring Framework effectively.

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.

Kelly is Vice President and senior engineer at Broadleaf Commerce, a company that builds and distributes an open source eCommerce framework built on The Spring Framework. Besides contributing to the features and functions of Broadleaf Commerce, Kelly helps Broadleaf clients to implement, customize, and ultimately realize the full value of Broadleaf Commerce. Prior to joining Broadleaf, Kelly spent 14 years working as a consultant, focusing on application development and system integration using Java based technologies. Kelly is originally from Canada and lives in Austin, Texas.

John Thompson has over 20 years of experience with software development and is currently a Senior Software Engineer with Incept5. For his day job, John spends his time in the trenches helping various Incept5 clients in the financial and retail industries implement Spring centric solutions.

John is an avid triathlete, and currently is spending a lot of time training for his first Half Ironman race this October in Miami. Being a far better cyclist than runner, John has found the St Petersburg location of the Running for Brews running club an excellent motivator to get those runs in. John's favorite running buddy is his 4 year old Vizsla Jake.

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.

Gil Tene is CTO and co-founder of Azul Systems. He has been involved with virtual machine technologies for the past 20 years and has been building Java technology-based products since 1995. Gil pioneered Azul's Continuously Concurrent Compacting Collector (C4), Java Virtualization, Elastic Memory, and various managed runtime and systems stack technologies that combine to deliver the industry's most scalable and robust Java platforms. In 2006 he was named one of the Top 50 Agenda Setters in the technology industry by Silicon.com. Prior to co-founding Azul, Gil held key technology positions at Nortel Networks, Shasta Networks and at Check Point Software Technologies, where he delivered several industry-leading traffic management solutions including the industry's first Firewall-1 based security appliance. He architected operating systems for Stratus Computer, clustering solutions at Qualix/Legato, and served as an officer in the Israeli Navy Computer R and D unit. Gil holds a BSEE from The Technion Israel Institute of Technology, and has been awarded 28 patents in computer-related technologies.

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.

Max Tardiveau has been writing software since the days when the word "software" sounded funny to most people. He holds an M.S. in software engineering from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. After working at Unisys on repository development, he joined Versata and consulted around the world on transactional business logic. He then founded Integrity Logic, a software and consulting company specializing in geo-enabled mobile apps, but he never lost his interest in automating software development, which brought him to start ABL with Val Huber.

Guillermo is an award-winning Enterprise Architecture practitioner with 18+ years of progressive experience in different industries. At Pivotal, Guillermo works with customers to understand their business needs and challenges and helps them seize new opportunities by leveraging Pivotal solutions to modernize their IT architecture. Guillermo is passionate about his family, business, technology and soccer.

Dr David Syer is a founder and contributor to Spring Batch, lead of Spring Security OAuth, and an active contributor to Spring Integration, Spring Framework, Spring AMQP, Spring Security. 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 institutions worldwide. David is known for his clear and informative presentation style and has deep knowledge and experience with all aspects of real-life usage of the Spring framework. Recent publications have appeared in Java World, and the CloudFoundry and SpringSource blog sites.

Josh Suereth is a Senior Software Engineer at Typesafe and the author of "Scala In Depth.” He has been a Scala enthusiast ever since he came to know this beautiful language in 2007. He started his professional career as a software developer in 2004, cutting his teeth with C++, STL, and Boost. Around the same time, Java fever was spreading and his interest was migrating to web-hosted distributed Java-delivered solutions to aide health departments discover the outbreaks of disease - everything from EJB to Hibernate/Spring and even some Applets. He introduced Scala into his company code base first in 2007, and soon after he was infected by Scala fever, contributing to the Scala IDE, maven-Scala-plugin, and Scala itself. In 2009, he began writing the book "Scala In Depth" which provides practical support for using Scala in everyday applications. Today, Josh is the author of several open source Scala projects, including the Scala automated resource management library, the PGP sbt plugin, as well as contributing to key components in the Scala ecosystem, like the maven-Scala-plugin. His current work at Typesafe Inc. has him doing anything from building MSIs to profiling performance issues. Josh regularly shares his expertise in articles and talks.

Rossen is a Spring Framework developer focusing on Spring MVC as well as Spring Web Flow. His 17+ year background includes work on trading and risk management software, investment accounting, e-commerce web applications, directory services, among others. Prior to becoming a full-time Spring Framework developer, Rossen spent several years teaching and consulting clients building enterprise Java applications with Spring on a broad range of topics.

Alan Stewart is a Senior Member of Technical Staff at VMware and Project Lead of the Spring Roo project. Alan has over twenty-five years of application development experience working for large enterprises in the finance, insurance, and retail industries. He is passionate about making Roo the best enterprise Java development tool available.

Mike spent several years doing the rounds in various London web agencies as a web standards and accessibility specialist, working for clients including Virgin, the BBC, the GLA, PriceWaterhouse Coopers, BusinessLink and Red Bull.

In pursuit of a broader interest in how and why people use the web Mike has settled into User Experience, helping to conceive and implement effective and usable user interfaces for web applications. When spare time presents itself Mike writes technical articles for Content with Style (contentwithstyle.co.uk), blogs on Donotremove (donotremove.co.uk) and Vitamin (thinkvitamin.com), and takes lots of photos (donotremove.co.uk/photos/).

Randy Stafford is a practicing software professional with 20 years experience as a developer, analyst, architect, manager, consultant, and author/presenter.

Currently for Oracle's middleware development A-Team, he engages globally for proof-of-concept projects, architecture reviews, and production crises with diverse customer organizations, specializing in grid, SOA, performance, HA, and JEE/ORM work.

Mark is the owner of Perfect World Programming a training and consulting company. 99% of Mark's work is done through SpringSource teaching Spring's Core Spring, Spring with Hibernate and Enterprise Integration with Spring.

Mark has over 20 years software development for many businesses and industries specializing in middle tier and backend development. As a former DBA and Architect Mark focuses on data driven applications that are both performant and robust.

Mark can also be found at www.javaranch.com answering questions in the Spring Framework forum. He was also part of the SCJP 5.0 exam creation team and technical editor for a few books.

Melanie is Manager of Hyperic Technical Support. Prior to her role with Hyperic she was an Escalation Engineer for VMware, where she worked for three years, specializing in the support and troubleshooting of core vSphere technologies. She is a Virtualization Certified Professional in VI 3 and vSphere 4 architecture. Her main work at VMware has been in the training and preparation of their global support engineers and partners in Bangalore, India. She also participated in the support readiness training of vSphere 4.1 release prior to moving to Hyperic technical support.

Before VMware, Melanie was a software analyst for McKesson, as a product specialist in the configuration and design of their clinical documentation software and started her career as a Unix system administrator for Sun Microsystems.

Melanie holds a BS degree from the University of Colorado at Denver in Computer Information Systems and is a Colorado native, where she still resides, enjoying the snow and sunshine.

Joe Sondow manages the Cloud Interface Tools team at Netflix, focused on creating usable open source web apps like Asgard to improve the experience of managing cloud resources and deploying code changes. Since 2005 Joe has been working alternately as a software engineer and as a manager, developing corporate and consumer web apps using various web front end and JVM 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.

Jeff Sogolov is a Solutions Architect at ADP having worked for Fortune 500 companies in a similar role spanning real-time, distributed & high-availability applications utilizing SOA and DDD principals.

Glen is an Enterprise Java consultant who spends most of his days writing frameworks and highly available middle tier components for the Australian government, while also running a small recrutiment company, so if you're looking for work in Australia...

Glen has been developing in Grails since 0.1 and launched his first public Grails site (an SMS gateway) on 0.2. He blogs frequently on Groovy and Grails related matters, releases tons of sample source and is the face behind the groovyblogs.org site and the Gravl blog engine.

Jim is the Lead Technical Architect for Big Lots (a nationwide retailer base in Columbus, Ohio), an international speaker, an open source evangelist, coauthor of "Beginning Groovy and Grails" (2008 Apress), coauthor of "Griffon In Action" (2011 Manning). The focus of his career has been using cutting-edge technology to develop IT solutions for the retail, insurance, financial services, and manufacturing industries. He has 14 years of large-scale Java experience and significant experience in distributed and relational technologies.

Nati is responsible for GigaSpaces' technology roadmap and the direction of GigaSpaces' products as they relate to standards adaptations, architecture, and product design. Nati is also the Head of the Israeli Grid consortium. He has led the development of the first Reverse BID exchange in the Israeli Yellow Pages. He previously worked with IONA, and was responsible for the penetration of their products and technology, to most of the leading ISV's in Israel. Nati is an experienced software engineer, with a strong background in middleware and specifically CORBA and EJB. He has been working for the past ten years with some of the leading Israeli companies, such as ECI, Comverse, BMC, Elisra, Rafael, and Amdocs. Nati holds a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Coventry University, U.K

With a background in the hardware and embedded area, Mattias has shifted his focus to Java and the enterprise domain. He is a clean code proponent who appreciates Test Driven Development and Agile methodologies. Mattias has experience from many different environments, including everything between big server solutions for multinational companies down to flashing LEDs by using small micro controllers. He is curious, open-minded and believes in continuous improvement on all levels.

Mark is an instructor/consultant at Pivotal (formerly VMware/SpringSource) teaching on topics such as the Spring Framework, Groovy & Grails, Gemfire and Big Data. Prior to becoming an instructor, Mark has developed software using technologies like Java, JEE, Groovy/Grails and more. In addition, he has presented at such conferences as JavaOne, HP Software Forum and more.

Mark Schwartz is an Architect Manager with eight years experience with enterprise focused development as a software engineer and manager.

Mark has worked for multiple Fortune 100 companies using his expertise in application development to introduce and implement new technologies including Java, WebSphere, WebLogic, and the Spring Framework.

Mark's current responsibilities include development, release management, and production support of enterprise class reusable Java, .NET, COBOL, and security frameworks and assets.

Mark's current mission focuses on optimizing the enterprise application development process by leveraging reusable open source products and delivering software automation solutions.

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.

Christian Schalk is a Developer Advocate and works to promote Google's APIs and technologies. He is currently engaging the international Web development community with Google's new OpenSocial API. Before joining Google, Chris was a Principal Product Manager and technology evangelist at Oracle in the Java development tools group. Chris also co-authored the book: "JavaServer Faces, The Complete Reference" published through McGraw-Hill-Osborne. Chris was also one of the original members of the Open Ajax alliance and helped Oracle and later Google join the alliance. Chris has spoken on Web, Java and Ajax development at numerous Oracle, Java and Ajax conferences, as well as Google related events including Google Developer Day and recently at Google IO.

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.

Brian Saville spent the majority of his life pretending he did not want to be a software engineer. After a BS in Computer Engineering and a MS in IT, he found that he just wanted to write applications. He has spent several years scripting and writing web applications as a system administrator and web developer, but has most enjoyed working with web frameworks such as Grails. After being introduced to the project a year and a half ago, Brian has become an active member of the Grails community, writing several plugins and frequenting the mailing lists. He is currently the lead engineer for a major API integration application written in Grails at Adaptive Computing.

Tal works on the Spring Insight project where in the past few months he focused on enabling Spring Insight for Cloud Foundry.
Prior to joining VMware, Tal was a team manager at HP and prior to that founded two start up companies focused on social media marketing.

Aled has over a decade’s experience developing distributed applications, mostly in the enterprise sector. Particular areas of interest include concurrency, fault tolerance and transactional semantics.

Prior to joining Cloudsoft, Aled was Chief Architect at Enigmatec Corporation. He holds a PhD (Computer Science) from the University of St Andrews.

Baruch Sadogursky, joined JFrog as the Developer Advocate following years of working alongside JFrog’s founding team.Prior to joining JFrog, Baruch was an innovations expert with BMC Software Incubator team after 6 years with AlphaCSP as a senior Java consultant, architect and training division manager.Baruch is hacking around Java technologies and Continuous-Integration tools since 2001, including module development for open source projects like Gradle & Spring. Baruch is also active in community development around Artifactory, participating in the development of it’s plugin ecosystem and enriching it’s functionality with open-source user plugins.

As JFrog’s Developer Advocate, Baruch contributes to the strong collaboration with leading open-source projects such as SpringSource, Grails and Gradle by providing them with the Artifactory Cloud platform, and fuels the Continuous-Integration ecosystem with open-source plugins for leading tools such as Jenkins, TeamCity & Bamboo.

As an analyst, John primarily contributes to Forrester's offerings for the Application & Program Management professional. He is a leading expert on the market for application platforms and infrastructure software for building and running applications. Included in his coverage are the Java/J2EE application servers from BEA, IBM, JBoss, Oracle, SAP, and Sun Microsystems and the equivalent portions of Microsoft's .NET platform. John also covers the business rules platforms market.

Gary has been in software engineering, concentrating on Enterprise Integration, for over 30 years on various platforms, and in the Java space since the late '90s.

He has been developing with the Spring Framework since 2004 and joined SpringSource/VMware in 2009 in a consulting role. From 2009 until the end of 2011 he taught Core Spring and Enterprise Integration with Spring to several hundred developers, as well as providing Enterprise Integration consulting services with Spring Integration, Spring Batch and Core Spring.

He has been a committer on the Spring Integration project for over 3 years and became a full time member of the engineering team in January 2012.

Jared Rodriguez created the first internet marketplace software in 1996 when he was co-founder and CTO at TRADEX, a leading provider of e-marketplace software technology. After Ariba acquired TRADEX in the late 1990s, Rodriguez served as CTO at Ariba and a Principal of Armada Venture Capital Group. Rodriguez is an author of the Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) specification and is listed as 'one to watch' among InfoWorld's 2002 list of technology innovators. Rodriguez co-founded Skyway Software in November 2001.

Thomas Risberg works as a software engineer on the SpringSource team at Pivotal. He is currently a member of the Spring Data team focusing on the Spring XD, Spring for Apache Hadoop and JDBC Extensions projects. Thomas started his career developing custom mainframe banking software and later worked with client server based direct marketing and market research database systems. In 2003 he joined the Spring Framework project, primarily contributing enhancements to the JDBC framework portion.

Co-author with Srini Penchikala of Spring Roo in Action, and long time SpringSource technology consultant at Chariot Solutions. I led the charge for Chariot to become a SpringSource/VMware training provider, as we have been working with Spring as an consulting partner since the Interface21 days.

I teach courses in Spring Maven and the Nexus repository manager, as well in other technologies. In my spare time, I run the Chariot TechCast podcast, which is in its 5th year online, and help to organize the Philadelphia Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference each year. I blog about Roo, Grails, Groovy and Spring at rimple.com and also have written articles that have appeared at DZone and Oracle's Java.NET blog.

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.

Nilanjan is a consultant and trainer for Typesafe. He started his professional career as a software developer in 2000 using object oriented programming languages. Nilanjan has previously worked with IBM, ThoughtWorks and LivingSocial where he gained a lot of experience in managing and developing software solutions in Java/JEE, Ruby, Groovy and also in Scala. He is zealous about programming in Scala ever since he got introduced to this beautiful language. Currently he spends his spare time working on the scala-webmachine open source project (restful resource framework). In the past Nilanjan worked on other open source projects and libraries. At Typesafe he is mainly teaching and designing Scala and Play courses and helping customers to adopt these technologies. Nilanjan enjoys sharing his experience via talks at various conferences. He is also the author of the "Scala in Action" book.

Chris Ramsdale has worked extensively in the mobile space, starting as a Software Engineer at Motorola in 1997, and then joining local start ups as a Tech Lead and Product Manager. Chris is currently a Product Manager for Google App Engine focused on developer tools and platform services.

As the Chief Architect for GemFire product line at VMWare/Pivotal, Jags is responsible for the technology direction for its high performance distributed data Grid and virtualization platform. Jags has represented GemStone Systems in the EJB expert group and the J2EE platform specification. In the past, Jags represented BEA in the W3C SOAP protocol specification, JAXM and other standards. Jags has presented in several conferences in the past on Data management, clustering and grid computing(Javaone, W3C workshop, Java user groups, Open Grid Forum, Platform Grid conference etc) . He has over 20 years of experience, a bachelors degree in computer science and a masters degree in management of science and technology.

Matthias Radestock is the co-creator and Technical Director of RabbitMQ, an open-source, open-standards business & cloud messaging technology, featuring an Erlang-based server and clients and extensions in a multitude of programming languages. RabbitMQ was acquired by SpringSource in April 2010.

Matthias has a Ph.D. in Software Engineering from Imperial College and is the author of several papers in international journals on distributed system coordination and programming languages. His commercial experience during the past decade includes directorships and senior technical roles in several Internet technology companies.

As a mobile/web developer and user experience designer at HP, Emanuel has spent much of his life caring about the way users interact with the applications and systems that we develop. He first got involved with the Thymeleaf project as someone just looking to revamp his personal website. Since then he has released the Layout dialect (a Thymeleaf extension), has become an active member of its forums, and is now part of the Thymeleaf team (looking after the core codebase, developing the Eclipse plugin, and having a hand in the creation of its HTML documentation).

The rest of the time he spends across a variety of personal endeavours, including blogging, playing musical instruments, and baking cakes and other sugary treats (much to the delight of his friends and co-workers).

Cameron is president of Tangosol and has eight years of experience with
Java and Java-related technology. He is a frequent presenter at industry
conferences and has received a number of awards in recognition of his
contribution to the Java community. Cameron regularly participates in
industry standards development and is the specification lead for JSR 107
(jCache).

Ashley Puls is a software engineer at New Relic Inc. which provides an all-in-one web application performance tool.

Yan Pujante is a Distinguished Software Engineer at LinkedIn. As a member of the founding team of LinkedIn, Yan has been involved in a lot of various areas of the product: architecture, ui framework, wiring framework, security, replication, scalability, and many more... Yan is currently working with the platform team on building the next iteration of the software that will scale both from a product point of view and from a developper point of view.

Yan has 12 years of professional experience with a total of 25 years of passion for computers (dating back to the era of the TI-99/4A).

Arjen Poutsma is a Staff Engineer at SpringSource (a division of VMware) with more than fifteen years' experience in commercial software environments. During this time he has worked with both Java EE 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 and 3.1.

Alex Popescu is Chief Architect and co-founder of InfoQ.com. Alex is interested in bleeding-edge technologies (AOP, advanced testing) and has been spending more and more time on various scripting languages.
Alex is involved in many open source initiatives, being co-founder of the TestNG testing framework and a committer on Groovy, WebWork and a couple more OSS projects. Alexandru formerly was one of three committers on the AspectWerkz project before it merged with AspectJ. Alexandru also publishes a blog on tech topics at http://themindstorms.wordpress.com.

Dr. Mark Pollack has been a core Spring (Java) developer since 2003 and founded its Microsoft counterpart, Spring.NET, in 2004. Mark now leads the Spring Data project that aims to simplify application development with new data technologies around big data and NoSQL databases. Prior to working on Spring project, Mark worked in offline computing in high-energy nuclear physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory and then moved to the financial services industry as a technical lead for front-office trading systems.

Love People, Music and Coding. Spoke at Philadelphia Spring User Group.

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.

Lucas Panjer is a Software Engineer at Tasktop Technologies and is a primary developer of the Code2Cloud project.

Brian Oliver is an Enterprise Solutions Architect at Tanosol, working with leading Financial Institutions in the US and Europe to implement massively scalable and high-performance Data Grid solutions.

Over the past 8 years, Brian has been leading the development of large-scale multi-language and multi-currency Internet, E-Commerce, Betting and Financial Java-based systems. As an early adopter of Java in 1996, he has experienced almost every facet of Java development and deployment, from single servers to large scale clusters. He is an experienced technical and enterprise level architect with a ruthless focus on product engineering, delivery and success.

Glyn works in the SpringSource dm Server development team in Southampton, England where he helped to define the architecture of the dm Server and developed several core components.

He is an active member of the Core Platform Expert Group of the OSGi Alliance developing a future release of the OSGi platform.

He was the spec. lead of JSR 291 which brought OSGi into the Java Community Process. He was also an active member of the JSR 277 and JSR 294 Expert Groups which aim to add module constructs to Java.

His 27 year career has been spent mostly in transactional middleware and Java virtual machine development and in applying mathematical models to software development.

Kevin is a three time JavaOne Rock Star, Java Champion and VP of Engineering at just.me. just.me is a startup in the mobile and social space that is part of Google’s Startup Labs. Kevin has spoken at conferences such as JavaOne, Devoxx, JAX, Silicon Valley Code Camp, and AjaxWorld. Kevin is the co-author of Web 2.0 Fundamentals. In the past Kevin was an adjunct professor at the College of San Mateo. Kevin holds a MS and BS in Computer Science from Southern Illinois University. Kevin is the leader of the Silicon Valley Java User Group, Silicon Valley Google Developer Group and Silicon Valley JavaScript Meetup.

Peter Niederwieser is a computer language enthusiast from Austria who has been using Java since the early days. Peter's work experience ranges from small start-ups to large enterprises like Siemens. His passion for software quality and continuous delivery invariably leads him to take the build master role on new projects, pushing project automation as far as he can. It also lead him to create Spock, an innovation-packed developer testing framework that is seeing increasing adoption around the globe.

Peter is an active member of the Groovy community, and can't sleep without his daily dose of Scala. When Peter isn't coding, you can find him speaking at conferences around the world, or pondering over a chess board.

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.

Billy is a Distinguished Engineer at IBM. He's been at IBM since 2001. Billy was the lead on the WorkManager/ Scheduler APIs which were later standardized by IBM and BEA and are now the subject of JSR 236 and JSR 237. Billy lead the design of the WebSphere 6.0 non blocking IO framework (channel framework) and the WebSphere 6.0 high availability/clustering (HAManager). Billy currently works on WebSphere XD and ObjectGrid. He's also the lead persistence architect and runtime availability/scaling architect for the base application server.

Before IBM, Billy worked as an independant consultant at investment banks, telcos, publishing companies and travel reservation companies. He wrote video games in C and assembler on the ZX Spectrum, Atari ST and Commodore Amiga as a teenager. He started programming on an Apple IIe when he was eleven, his first programming language was 6502 assembler.

Billys current interests are lightweight non invasive middleware, complex event processing systems and grid based OLTP frameworks.

Data Scientist @ http://ConcurrentInc.com. Developer Evangelist for http://Cascading.org open source project. Expert in Hadoop, R, cloud computing, machine learning, predictive analytics, NLP. BS MathSci and CS CompSci from Stanford, 25+ yrs in tech industry. For the past several years, I've been leading Data Science teams, working with large scale MapReduce applications.

test again

Justin Murray holds a technical alliances role at VMware, where he has worked for three years. His main work at VMware is in helping ISV partners to test, prove and optimize performance of their products on the VMware vSphere platform. Justin also helps VMware's customers with virtualizing their business applications and infrastructure and advises them on best practice approaches to virtualizing Java-based applications in particular. Previous to joining VMware, Justin worked at HP on management software and on Java on HP-UX.

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.

Jim is a Senior Consultant for SpringSource, and has spent over a decade delivering solutions at all layers of the software stack. His experience ranges from designing back-end enterprise systems for multi-national corporations, to basic infrastructure and rich desktop applications.

He enjoys working with a wide range of technologies and languages, and speaks at user groups and conferences about the easiest ways to get development tasks done, whether that be specific technologies or methodologies.

David has been passionate about computers ever since he was given his first Amiga 500 (with the RAM upgrade) at age seven. Now, 19 years later, he works as a software engineer in the valley for Neo Technology, commercial backer of Neo4j, the most widely deployed graph database in the world. He loves his supporting family, he loves his fantastic job, and he loves programming. Oh and beer, he also loves beer.

Michael Minella is a software engineer, teacher and author with over a decade of enterprise development experience. Michael is a member of the expert group for JSR-352 (java batch processing). He currently works for VMware as the project lead for the Spring Batch project as well as an instructor at DePaul University. Michael is the author of Pro Spring Batch from Apress, the popular Refcard JUnit and EasyMock and was a technical reviewer for Struts 2 Web Application Development by Dave Newton.

A self-confessed polyglot programmer, Russ Miles is a senior consultant for SpringSource in the UK where he works with various companies to help them take full advantage of the Spring Framework. To ensure that he has as little spare time as possible, Russ contributes to various open source projects and has authored a number of books.

Russ is a keen contributor to open source projects and an author for O'Reilly Media. He has authored and co-authored 3 books; "AspectJ Cookbook", "Learning UML 2.0" and "Head First Software Development"

Prior to joining SpringSource, Russ gained experience of enterprise development throughout all tiers of application architecture including high performance and usability presentation tier services for the Search and Mobile Portal industries right through to maximum availability application and data services for the Defence industry.

Russ holds an MSc. Software Engineering from Oxford University.

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.

With over 20 years of cutting edge software experience with marquee firms like Gemstone, Intel, EDS and CenterSpan communications, Sudhir Menon is one of the key architects for the Gemfire Enterprise Data Fabric. Sudhir is the Director of Engineering for GemFire and hold multiple patents in the areas of scaled up networking systems. His expertise in distributed data management spans multiple languages (Java, C++ and .NET) and multiple platforms and he has architected and developed network stacks for the last 10+ years. At Centerspan communications, he was one of the key architects who built the largest secure peer to peer content distribution platform over the internet.

Richard McDougall is a Principal Engineer in the Office of the CTO at VMware, where he focuses on scalability, observability and performance of virtualization systems. One of his particular projects is characterizing the performance of Oracle Database on VMware Infrastructure.

Richard is the co-author of “Solaris Internals”, “Solaris Performance and Tools” (solarisinternals.com) and the lead author for “Resource Management” (Prentice Hall/Sun Blueprints). He has written numerous articles and papers on measurement, monitoring and capacity planning of Solaris systems, and frequently speaks at industry and customer technical conferences on the topics of system performance and resource management.

Richard and his performance team have published and blogged on several Oracle performance topics on vmware.com including http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/1055 and http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/ .

Tom McCuch is a Solution Engineer for Hortonworks with over twenty two 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. Prior to Hortonworks, Tom worked for SpringSource - handling field architecture for their global accounts including Financial Services, Transportation, and Energy. Tom has 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.

Clay McCoy works at Netflix as a Senior Software Engineer. There he contributes to an open source cloud deployment tool written in Grails named Asgard. Clay is passionate about developer testing and software craftsmanship and is always looking for new tools and techniques to produce better software.

Steve Mayzak is part of the Cloud Applications Platform team at
VMware. As part of this team he is focused on mapping our solutions to
customers needs and ensuring that what we offer fits their requirements.
He is constantly in the field working with customers on their Enterprise Java and Cloud initiatives.

Ross Mason is Co-founder and CTO of MuleSource, Inc., the creators of the open source Mule integration platform. Prior to founding MuleSource he was Chief Executive Officer of SymphonySoft Limited, an EU-based company providing services and support for large-scale integration projects. Mason founded the Mule project in 2003 and strived to make it the leading Java-based ESB and integration platform. Mule is used by top-tier financial institutions such as CitiGroup, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank as well as many other high profile enterprises including American Airlines, Adobe and Yum Brands. Previously, Mason was Lead Architect for RaboBank and played a key role in developing one of the first large-scale ESB implementations in 2002. Mason has also worked with NatWest Bank, Credit Suisse and UBS. He holds a B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science from Bristol, UK.

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.

I currently operate in Pivotal's Field Engineering Team specializing in next generation platform architecture. It is my job to work with our customers to understand the changing landscape of application development from tools and frameworks to runtimes and data fabrics, allowing them to build a new class of applications leveraging big & fast data. All of this in a cloud independent way on the path to a truly consumer-grade enterprise experience.

Jeff is a Senior Systems Engineer for SpringSource with over sixteen years of experience in software engineering. Jeff assists customers with implementing vFabric technologies to create their cloud infrastructure, whether it's in their datacenter, publicly available, or a hybrid of both.

Jeff has consulted with some of the largest companies in the country across a wide variety of industries and projects. Presently, his focus is on modernizing customer applications to take advantage of cloud infrastructures.

When he's not coding, you're likely to find him at some baseball game somewhere.

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.

Amit is a software engineer on the Google Web Toolkit team, where he works towards GWT delivering "productivity for developers, performance for users." In particular, he has contributed to improving GWT's development mode, testability of GWT applications, and resource selection in GWT. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, has founded a VC-backed Web startup, and enjoys mathematical puzzles.

A software architect and consultant at SpringSource with extensive experience aligning Spring technologies. He is passionate about cloud computing, messaging and works on several projects implementing Spring Integration, RabbitMQ, Gemfire, or related technologies.

Using Groovy and Grails since early 2008, he has developed large-scale Grails applications for the French Government and international IT. he has also co-founded the iceScrum agile tool tracker, an open source Grails application for agile teams. He still invests his spare time in the Grails community through the development of several Grails plugins, and in his contributions to the French Groovy/Grails User Group.

Currently working on a lightweight and scalable, asynchronous framework for the JVM supporting Spring and Grails Applications.

Jan is an enthusiastic Java and Scala programmer with a long history of large and successful systems.

Jan has used the Spring Framework from its earliest versions and then shared his experience with the framework itself and with writing elegant Spring code in Pro Spring and Pro Spring 2.5; he is an expert in most projects in the Spring Portfolio.

Alongside the Spring Framework and Java, Jan has extensive experience in functional and strongly typed programming in Scala. He is the author of Specs2 Spring and Akka Patterns projects which aim to give boost to Java programmers who want to try out Scala.

Jan also shares his expertise and passion for software as the chief editor of the Open Source Journal

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.

Wayne Lund is a Senior Systems Engineer within VMware vFabric. Currently Wayne is on the Java Batch expert group (JSR-352) working to standardize the use of Java Batch in the enterprise, which has just been released for public review. Prior to coming to VMware Wayne has been working as an enterprise Java Architect from the earliest days of Java. While at Accenture he was one of the Chief Architects of Spring Batch, a joint effort between Accenture and SpringSource, and introduced the Java Community to Spring Batch at Java One 2007 along with Rod Johnson and Scott Wintermute.

Mat Lowery is a Software Engineer at Pentaho Corporation. He has been with the company for more than two years and has worked on multiple front-end and back-end development projects across many different Pentaho products.

Mat is a contributor to the Spring Framework, having provided code, defect reports, and test cases to help improve Acegi security and other modules.

In his time at Pentaho Corporation, Mat has developed and contributed to many challenging product engineering initiatives at Pentaho including:

• Implementing row-level security in a centralized metadata layer
• Automating aggregate table design in databases to improve analytical query performance
• Numerous security and security-integration projects, including single sign-on through integration with Central Authentication Service (CAS)

Prior to working at Pentaho, Mat was an Application Software Developer for four years at Wyndham Vacation Ownership where he implemented an extensible web application security infrastructure as well as data layer, business facade, and reusable UI elements for Fairfield Resorts' primary external web site using established enterprise design patterns.

Mat received a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from The University of Central Florida in 2003.

Josh Long is the Spring developer advocate. He is the lead author on Apress’ Spring Recipes, 2nd Edition, and a SpringSource committer and contributor. When he's not hacking on code, he can be found at the local Java User Group or at the local coffee shop. Josh likes solutions that push the boundaries of the technologies that enable them. His interests include scalability, BPM, grid processing, mobile computing and so-called "smart" systems. He blogs at blog.springsource.org or joshlong.com and is on Twitter as @starbuxman.

Josh Long is the Spring developer advocate. Josh is the lead author on Apress’ Spring Recipes, 2nd Edition, and a SpringSource committer and contributor. When he's not hacking on code, he can be found at the local Java User Group or at the local coffee shop. Josh likes solutions that push the boundaries of the technologies that enable them. His interests include scalability, BPM, grid processing, mobile computing and so-called "smart" systems. He blogs at blog.springsource.org or joshlong.com.

Ken is a software engineer for the IEEE based in the NYC metro area. He leads the development of several websites for IEEE Spectrum (http://spectrum.ieee.org).

Ken has been working with Groovy and Grails exclusively for the past two years and has over 15 years of experience building large Java-based applications in many diverse industries including publishing, pharma, automotive, telecom, and travel. Ken holds a BS in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech.

Martin leads the team of the Spring Tool Suite and the Spring IDE and works together with the tools team on providing the best developer tools out there for Spring and Cloud Foundry. Before joining SpringSource/VMware, Martin co-founded it-agile, a leading consulting and development company focused on agile software development, and worked many years as consultant and coach for agile software development and flexible and modularized architectures. He is author of papers, articles, and books on various topics including agile software development, Eclipse technology and refactoring techniques.

Patrick Linskey has been involved in object/relational mapping for 5+ years. As the founder and CTO of SolarMetric, Patrick drove the technical direction
of the company and oversaw the development of Kodo.

Now at BEA, he leads the EJB team in designing and implementation of the WebLogic Server EJB solution. Patrick is one of the leaders on the EJB3 and the JDO specification teams, and is BEA's representative on the EJB3 expert group. Patrick also leads the OpenJPA open source project in Apache.
Patrick is involved in several industry consortia, serving as a luminary on JDOcentral and as the moderator on forthcoming JavaPersistence.com. He has been the face of standards-based persistence, having evangelized JDO and EJB Persistence in hundreds of talks throughout the world including BEA's keynote at the 2006 JavaONE Conference. Patrick is co-author of Bitter EJB, and is on the JAOO Conference Program Committee. Patrick has also worked for TechTrader, MIT's Media Lab and Bank One in various technical roles. Under Patrick's leadership, Kodo has become the market leading JDO implementation with over 400 customers throughout the world spanning all industries, and is now the basis for the WebLogic Server EJB persistence provider. Patrick holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

John Lewis is the Chief Software Architect for Unicon Inc, the leading independent provider of open source training, consulting, and support in higher education. John is a 16 year veteran of the software engineering industry. His passions are large-scale enterprise architecture, open-source technologies, and agile software development methods. John has been working heavily in Java-based enterprise information portals since 2001 and is the lead developer of Spring Portlet MVC, which provides JSR 168 support in the Spring Framework. He is also active in several higher education open source communities, including uPortal and Sakai.

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.

Peter is a long time Java developer, Grails user and plugin author. He is also co-author of the book Grails in Action with Glen Smith.

He has been using Java for over 10 years across a range of industries and technologies, covering both client-side and server-side development. He discovered Groovy & Grails in 2006 and is now a core Grails committer, general Groovy fan, and speaker on Groovy technologies. He is currently an independent consultant based in London.

Scott is Chief Architect at Near Infinity Corporation, an enterprise software development and consulting services company based in Reston, Virginia. He has been developing enterprise and web applications for 14 years professionally, and has developed applications using Java, Ruby, Groovy, and even an iPhone application with Objective-C. His main areas of interest include alternative persistence technologies, object-oriented design, system architecture, testing, and frameworks like Spring, Hibernate, and Ruby on Rails. In addition, Scott enjoys learning new languages to make himself a better and more well-rounded developer a la The Pragmatic Programmers' advice to "learn one language per year."

Scott holds a B.S. in Engineering Science and Mechanics from Virginia Tech, and an M. Eng. in Systems Engineering from the University of Maryland. Scott speaks at the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposiums and various other conferences. In his (sparse) spare time, Scott enjoys spending time with his wife, three children, and cat. He also tries to find time to play soccer, go snowboarding, and mountain bike whenever he can.

Costin Leau is an engineer at Elasticsearch, currently working with NoSQL and Big Data technologies. An open-source veteran, Costin led various Spring projects (Spring OSGi, GemFire, Redis, Hadoop) and authored an OSGi spec.
Speaker at various editions of EclipseCon/OSGi DevCon, JavaOne, Devoxx/Javapolis, JavaZone, SpringOne, TSSJS on Java/Hadoop/Spring related topics.

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.

Mark Kralj-Taylor leads the global Java Toolkits Application Infrastructure group at Morgan Stanley. The group provides Java infrastructure centrally, including open-source libraries, to improve the productivity of Java developers throughout the firm. Mark focuses on technical direction for the group, and how Java is used across the firm, evolving a blend of open-source and in-house libraries, to take best advantage of the ever changing Java landscape, and integrate with the firm's technology environment. Before this Mark worked in application groups, using Java to deliver solutions to the business.

Prior to joining Morgan Stanley in 2000, Mark used his Physics background to develop numerical simulations in C++.

Ken Kousen is the President of Kousen IT, Inc., through which he does technical training, mentoring, and consulting in all areas of Java and XML. He is the author of the O'Reilly screencast "Up and Running Groovy", and the upcoming Manning book about Java/Groovy integration, entitled "Making Java Groovy".

He has been a tech reviewer for several books on software development. Over the past decade he's taught thousands of developers in business and industry. He is also an adjunct professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute site in Hartford, CT. His academic background includes two BS degrees from M.I.T., an MS and a Ph.D. from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I.

Dierk König works as a fellow for Canoo Engineering AG, Basel, Switzerland.
He is a committer to many open-source projects including Groovy, Grails, and GPars, and a manager of the open-source Canoo WebTest project. He is lead author of the "Groovy in Action" book, which is amoung the publisher's best-selling titles of the decade.

Paul King leads ASERT, an organization based in Brisbane, Australia which provides software development, training and mentoring services to customers wanting to embrace new technologies, harness best practices and innovate. He has been contributing to open source projects for nearly 20 years and is an active committer on numerous projects including Groovy. Paul speaks at international conferences, publishes in software magazines and journals, and is a co-author of Manning's best-seller: Groovy in Action.

John has been a member of the Spring Insight team since May 2010. Prior to joining Insight he worked on complex application deployment and management projects at VMware, EMC and at a startup called SourceLabs (acquired by EMC).

At SourceLabs John also worked on various open source projects and a search engine for open source mailing list and issue trackers. John also spent some time in Microsoft's Open Source Labs and at Natural Selection, a company in San Diego which specializes in evolutionary computation for medical and military applications.

John Kew lives in Seattle, WA with his three fish and a wife.

Dr. Mik Kersten is the CEO of Tasktop Technologies, creator of the Eclipse Mylyn open source project and inventor of the task-focused interface. As a research scientist at Xerox PARC, Mik implemented the first aspect-oriented programming tools for AspectJ. He created Mylyn and the task-focused interface during his PhD in Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. Mik has been an Eclipse committer since 2002, is an elected member of the Eclipse Board of Directors and serves on the Eclipse Architecture Council. Mik's thought leadership on task-focused collaboration makes him a popular speaker at software conferences, and he was voted a JavaOne Rock Star speaker in 2008 and 2009. He enjoys building tools that offload our brains and make it easier to get creative work done. Follow @mik_kersten on Twitter.

Jack Kennedy leads all phases of software development at Skyway Software. Before co-founding Skyway Software in November 2001, Kennedy was a consulting architect for MarketMile, a leading e-procurement service provider. Kennedy served as Chief Architect of the Marketplace product for Ariba, following Ariba's acquisition of TRADEX. Kennedy earned a B.A. degree in Management of Information Systems from the University of South Florida.

Mike Keith has over 15 years of teaching, research and practical experience in object-oriented and distributed systems, specializing in object persistence. He was the co-specification lead for EJB 3.0 (JSR 220) and a member of the Java EE 5 expert group (JSR 244) and co-authored the premier JPA reference book called Pro EJB 3: Java Persistence API. He is currently an architect for Oracle TopLink and the Oracle OC4J Container and is a popular speaker at numerous conferences and events around the world.

Scot Junkin is Consultant Partner Integration Engineer for the Cloud Infrastructure Group at EMC Corporation and is responsible for guiding partners through technical hurdles on their way to success with EMC’s Cloud Storage solution, EMC Atmos.

Scot joined EMC in June of 2009 with the objectives of driving adoption of a new more flexible paradigm of IT for customers within the Enterprise. Prior to joining EMC, Scot consulted for a variety of technology startups focused on cloud computing, with a focus on their technical and go-to-market strategies. Scot also held strategic positions with MessageSling and Jingle Networks.

Scot holds an MS and a BS in Computer Science from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Christopher Judd is the president and primary consultant for Judd Solutions (http://www.juddsolutions.com), an international speaker, an open source evangelist, the Central Ohio Java Users Group (http://www.cojug.org) and Columbus iPhone Developer User Group leader, and the co-author of Beginning Groovy and Grails (Apress, 2008) as well as the author of the children’s book “Bearable Moments”. He has spent 16 years architecting and developing software for Fortune 500 companies in various industries, including insurance, retail, government, manufacturing, service, and transportation. His current focus is on consulting, mentoring, and training with Java, Java EE, Groovy, Grails, Cloud Computing and mobile platforms like iPhone, Android, Java ME and mobile web.

Mark Johnson is a Advisory Engineer at Pivotal where he focuses on helping people learn how to apply Fast and Big Data as well as PaaS solutions to address real world enterprise challenges. Mark has worked on a wide range of technology during his career. Most recently he has focused on Groovy, Grails, and Scala as technologies which enable high quality applications quickly. Mark is active in the software community as the President of the New England Java Users Group (NEJUG) and a regular presenter to user groups and various conferences. When not working, Mark can be found riding his mountain bike on local trails and playing with his family.

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.

Brian is the Chief Architect for Avantia, Inc., a custom solutions firm that specializes in Spring and open source solutions for enterprises. Brian has more than 7 years of experience designing and developing enterprise Spring solutions, and has been a Spring and Grails advocate for both Fortune 500 companies and SMB organizations. Brian is also actively involved in the Spring, Grails, and vFabric communities.

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.

Responsible for managing Alfresco's research and development team and ensuring both innovation and quality are delivered in Alfresco's software.

Paul has over 20 years experience of managing teams in collaborative research and development, both in open source and proprietary software organizations, including IBM® and Documentum®. His focus has always been to realize advanced technology solutions to real world problems.

His expertise covers Knowledge-based Expert Systems, Neural Networks, Information Extraction and Multilingual Natural Language Processing. Paul has been pivotal in a number of innovation start-ups, as well as having extensive experience of corporate production systems with Resumix® and Documentum®. Paul has PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Surrey.

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.

Gunnar Hillert is a member of technical staff (MTS) at SpringSource, a division of VMware, Inc. He is a committer for Spring Integration, Spring AMQP and also contributes to the Cloud Foundry project. Gunnar heads the Atlanta Java Users Group and is an organizer for the DevNexus developer conference.

A native from Berlin, Germany, Gunnar has been calling Atlanta home for the past 11 years. He is an avid gardener specializing in anything sub-tropical such as bananas, palm trees and bamboo. As time permits, Gunnar works on his Spanish language skills and he and his wife Alysa are raising their two children tri-lingually (English, German, Spanish). Gunnar blogs at: http://blog.hillert.com/ and you can follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ghillert

Hal Hildebrand arrived on earth some eons ago when his physical essence filtered down from the stars, and he took human form. Lingering for awhile on the plateau of Leng while waiting for the apes to evolve, he eventually mingled among human society, generally without being detected, although the century he spent staked out in a peat bog in Denmark was rather unpleasant and not something he'd care to repeat. Once computers were invented he became involved in distributed systems in the hope that enough insider knowledge would, at the right time, allow him to convince the artificial intelligence in control to bypass electronic security measures on the first translight spacecraft and allow him to return to the stars. This is probably still some time away. Until then he spends his time as an architect at Oracle, working on cracking the Dharma cycle of large scale distributed systems and autonomic control.

Peter Higgins (aka dante) is a software engineer at SitePen, a prominent
web development and consulting company based in Silicon Valley. Peter
heads up SitePen's Dojo Support, a great option for companies needing
technical advice, code fixes and answers from the experts. As the newly
appointed Dojo Project Lead, Peter spends countless hours improving the
Dojo Toolkit, writing great demos and tutorials, and helping new Dojo
users become proficient with the toolkit, all key ingredients to
building a thriving Dojo Community.

Jennifer Hickey is a Sr. Software Engineer with SpringSource/VMware, with over a decade of experience in software engineering. Jennifer is a member of the Cloud Foundry team, specializing in developer experience and support of frameworks such as Spring, Grails, Rails, and Sinatra. She is passionate about increasing developer productivity in the cloud. Jennifer has led or contributed to a number of SpringSource projects, including Hyperic and tc Server. She has been involved in converting multiple large EJB/legacy codebases to Spring. Prior to joining SpringSource, Jennifer was a principal architect of a large-scale network management system.

Derek Henninger is the director of R&D for the SpringSource tools, including STS, Roo, and WaveMaker. Derek joined VMware through the acquisition of WaveMaker Software. At WaveMaker Derek led the development and definition of the WaveMaker Studio development product. Derek has over 20 years of experience in development tools, including Progress Software, Persistence Software, and Metaphor.

Alex brings twenty years experience designing software solutions in the enterprise, start-up, and academic sectors. Most recently Alex was with Enigmatec Corporation where he led the development of what is now the Monterey Middleware platform. Previous to that, he founded PocketWatch Systems, commercialising results from his doctoral research. Alex holds a PhD (Informatics) and an MSc (Cognitive Science) from the University of Edinburgh and an AB (Mathematics) from Princeton University. Alex was both a USA Today Academic All-Star and a Marshall Scholar.

Ryan Heaton is a senior software engineer at FamilySearch.org, with specific responsibility for the design and development of the FamilySearch public Web service API. His expertise in the cutting edge of Web service technologies has spawned a significant set of open-source projects including Enunciate (a build-time Web service enhancement engine) and the OAuth extension for Spring Security. Ryan is also involved in a number of working groups for the development of technologies related to Web services and has been invited to share his expertise in a variety of professional conferences.

Ryan loves to code, and is occasionally surprised to discover that he actually gets a paycheck for doing something so enjoyable. But what’s even more surprising is that he has a beautiful wife and four boys that love him despite his geeky hobbies.

Mike Heath is a principal software engineer for the LDS Church working in the core technology group. He has contributed to multiple open source projects including Apache MINA, Apache JAMES, and JBoss Netty. He has a B.S. in computer science from Utah Valley University and a M.S. in computer science from Brigham Young University.

Justin Hartung is a Deployment Manager on the Google App Engine team where he focuses on helping customers embrace the cloud. Prior to Google, Justin was a Manager at Deloitte specializing in information security and privacy solutions for Fortune 500 companies.

Shawn Hartsock consults on Java technologies like Groovy/Grails and the Spring Framework providing expertise as an experienced Java developer and architect. Shawn discovered Groovy in 2007 and began working in Grails development for deployment to Java Enterprise environments and integration with Existing Java Enterprise software. He has contributed several Grails plugins to the Grails community and has had several articles published in Groovy Magazine on various topics including Enterprise Integration with Grails.

As CTO of Skills Matter, Rob helps to provide a community of over 35,000 software professionals with access to high-quality events and training.

Prior to Skills Matter, Rob served as CTO of UK-based consumer lender First Banco. At First Banco, Rob led the development of all internal and external software projects. Rob remains on the board at First Banco.

Co-founder of SpringSource, the software company behind the wildly-successful Spring Framework.

Specialist in high-volume, high-scale enterprise systems.

Author and co-author of five books, including the highly-popular Spring Framework reference "Pro Spring".

Chris Harris is a European Solution Architect at 10gen. Prior to 10gen, Chris was EMEA Architect at SpringSource responsible for evangelising vFabric products and defining architectural solutions for customers across EMEA. With the acquisition of SpringSource by VMware, Chris focused on how virtualization and cloud computing can be used to address the complexity within the Enterprise. Before joining SpringSource, Chris spent his time at RedHat/JBoss providing consultancy to major clients across EMEA.

Colin Harrington is a Principal Consultant at Object Partners, Inc with over 4.5 years of Grails experience. Based in Minnesota, Colin has 10+ years of experience developing web-based applications.

Colin is an agile practitioner and has been a key component of many powerful fast-paced local and remote teams with varying levels of composition and ability. He is a Technical leader and a forward thinker with a knack for delivering potent and engaging web-applications.

Colin is an active member of the Groovy and Grails community and an active speaker at local user groups, events and conferences such as MinneBar, GUM, GR8Conf in the US, etc.

John has been pushing the limits of the web since 1996 and has been totally engulfed in Javascript, HTML, and CSS since 2004. Notable achievements include Ajax-ish and JSON-RPC-like browser apps way back in 1999 (US Patent 7,016,751), composable Javascript constructors for creating draggable modal dialogs in 2004, and a Javascript non-preemptive multi-tasking framework in 2007. When he's not being a full-time Javascript Barbarian at Pivotal or working on his latest side-project with his kids, John is sure to be coding tenaciously on cujoJS, the Javascript architectural toolkit: http://cujojs.com

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 software engineer with Pivotal working to constantly improve the Java experience on Cloud Foundry.

Prior to working on Cloud Foundry, Ben worked on large-scale middleware management tools, tc Server, dm Server (OSGi), and Spring. If you go back far enough, he even worked on a network management and monitoring application, but will deny it when asked.

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 represented 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.

A Java veteran with over 23 years of experience in software development. Obtained M.Sc. in Computer Science from the Technion – Haifa Institute of Technology, followed a 6+ years term with the IDF involved in high-tech projects. After retiring from the army, continued in the private sector being involved in various projects and diverse technologies and architectures - e.g., telephony, VoIP, unified messaging, etc.. Has been a member of the Spring Insight team since May 2010 when he joined VMware. Initial developer of the Spring Insight bootstrap solution for Tomcat 5/6/7, JBoss 5.0/5.1/6.0, and POC for WebLogic and WebSphere, as well as developer of considerable number of Insight collection plugins

Oliver Gierke is engineer at SpringSource, a division of VMware, project lead of the Spring Data JPA, MongoDB and core module and member of the JPA 2.1 expert group. He has been into developing enterprise applications and open source projects for over 6 years now. His working focus is centered around software architecture, Spring and persistence technologies. He is regularly speaking at German and international conferences as well as author of technology articles and the first book on Spring Data.

Talya Gendler is a senior software engineer for the Spring Insight team. She joined Spring Insight in November 2011, and has been at VMware since May 2009. Prior to joining Insight she led the UI team of VMware vFabric AppInsight for two years. She has over 8 years of experience and holds a BSc, Computer Science from The Technion - Israel Institute of Technology (cum laude).

Jonathan Fullam has over 12 years of experience with software development with a heavy focus on enterprise Java based applications and open source frameworks. Currently employed by SpringSource, a division of VMware, Jonathan advises enterprises on building scalable architectures using modern technologies and tools. With a passion for public speaking, he most recently presented Test Driven Developement at the 2011 Java Server Side Symposium. Jonathan received his education from The College of New Jersey where he obtained a B.S. in computer science.

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.

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.

My career began with a need to teach and mentor. I found these skills to be invaluable in the field of information technology. I started doing basic cabling and network infrastructure although I always had a propensity for coding and software architecture. My specialty in information technology is the integration of multiple technologies to assemble them into business applications with a keen focus on open source frameworks and products. I have consulted for some of the largest corporations in the world with my primary focus in the last 7 years around cloud computing.

Mr. Evans leads Skyway Software’s global teams of enablement and support professionals and is responsible for ensuring customers and partners gain maximum value from using Skyway Visual Perspectives. Prior to joining Skyway Software, he spent 10 years at Accenture as one of their top technical architects and worked with a large variety of technical and application architectures to lead implementation teams during the full software delivery lifecycle at numerous client engagements. Evans earned a BS in Computer Science from the University of South Florida.

Mike Esler is a Senior Manager at HSBC, responsible for the product management and product architecture of the framework, tools, and training provided to HSBC's global Java and Cobol development communities. He has a particular interest in developer productivity. Mike holds an MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Washington and expects to complete an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management next year.

Andrew Elmore is Head of Development at C24, a provider of financial services messaging software to many of the world's largest financial institutions. Prior to joining C24, Andrew built and managed the front & middle office systems at a Mastercard-owned credit card issuer & processor, led the development of numerous products at SmartStream Technologies and worked on a number of highly scalable systems including PitneyBowes' Portrait suite & British Telecom's call-routing software.
Andrew is a Chartered Engineer & Chartered IT Practitioner and holds a BEng in Computer Science & Electronics from the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Todd is a 15 year veteran of the Java development and has 4 years of professional Grails development experience. He is currently the V.P. of Engineering for VirtualTourist.com a TripAdvisor Media Group Company. In 2008, VirtualTourist.com was acquired by TripAdvisor/Expedia(EXPE), and Todd was brought in to lead a team of Java/Groovy/Grails engineers in the redevelopment effort. A graduate of the University of Arizona, with a B.S. in Computer Engineering, and an MBA from ASU with an emphasis on management of the creative software engineering process. When he is not actively writing code for his own startup ideas, you will find him entertaining his daughters or getting lost in a glass of wine, both of which usually lead to other crazy coding ideas like this one: "What would happen if I did a screencast of writing the same web application in eight different languages?" -- www.betterwebapp.com

Andrew Eisenberg is the lead of the Groovy-Eclipse project and also works on the Grails tooling portion of the SpringSource Tool Suite. He is also the prooject lead for the AspectJ Development Tools (AJDT) at Eclipse.org. Andrew creates IDE tools that ease the cognitive burden of creating complex programs. He will not rest and not be happy until programming is as fun and easy as playing with legos. Andrew has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of British Columbia where he researched the intersection between programming languages and tools.

Emil Eifrem is CEO of Neo Technology and co-founder of the Neo4j project. Before founding Neo, he was the CTO of Windh AB, where he headed the development of highly complex information architectures for Enterprise Content Management Systems. Committed to sustainable open source, he guides Neo along a balanced path between free availability and commercial reliability. Emil is a frequent conference speaker and author on NOSQL databases.

Justin Edelson is the Vice President of Applications and Platforms for MTV Networks Global Digital Media. He is the co-author of two books on software development: Java & XML, 3rd Edition (2006) and JRuby Cookbook (2008). Over the last decade, he has contributed to high-profile web and mobile applications for brands such as MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, Showtime, The Movie Channel, Spike TV, Nickelodeon, and MSN.

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).

Brian Dussault is a Staff Engineer with the vFabric division of VMware and has 14+ years of experience in software engineering. Throughout his tenure, he has worked in both IT (High Tech Manufacturing, Financial Industries) and R&D positions. His experience spans multiple disciplines including web applications, integration, SOA, open source, and system design.

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.

- Co-author of "Spring par la pratique", #1 book on the Spring Framework in France.
- Former SpringSource France regional director.
- Currently director of consulting at Ippon Technologies, a 120-person Java-focused consulting firm, located in Paris, France. More info at http://www.ippon.fr
- Leads the Tatami project, an Open Source Enterprise Social Network. See https://github.com/ippontech/tatami for more information.

Rajeev Dayal is a Google software engineer on the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) team. His primary focus is the Google Plugin for Eclipse (GPE), which involves both fun stuff (making Eclipse do cool things) and not-so-fun stuff (tracing through a zillion lines of Eclipse source to figure out how to make Eclipse do cool things).

Rajeev has also done work on GWT's user interface library, specifically on accessibility, widget development, and fighting browser quirks.

Rajeev holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo and Georgia Tech.

Joshua has been programming in Java for 12 years.. He now works for Cognizant Technology Solutions as a Senior Architect specializing in Open Source SOA and resides in Gotha, FL.

Joshua is presently working on the Grails Portal project, hosted on Google code (http://code.google.com/p/grailsportal/) which has the goal of creating a simple personalization scheme in Groovy and Grails.

John Davies is co-founder and CTO of Incept5. Incept5 have been intimately involved in implementing Visa's new capabilities and initiatives around the payments world. John's past includes global chief architect at JP Morgan and BNP Paribas, co-founder and CTO of C24 later sold to Iona and then Progress Software where he was technical director. John specialises in high performance, low latency enterprise architectures, Incept5 have products ranging form top selling iPhone/iPad apps to a high performance matching and reconciliation engine and consult to a number of large clients on IT strategy. John has co-authored several enterprise Java and architecture books and is a frequent speaker at banking and technology conferences.

Manny is a GemFire consultant for VMware's vFabric Cloud Application Platform. He brings with him over 18 years of software engineering experience in sectors such as finance, federal, pharma, and technology. His focus is on the server-side, but he also has experience in Java Swing rich client and Web development. He left the world of Smalltalk development when he plunged into the Java world in 1996, and hasn't looked back since. Manny started working with GemFire after joining Gemstone Systems as an Enterprise Architect in London in 2006, based on his prior experience in Coherence technology. He later joined VMware in early 2011, continuing to build on his expertise in designing GemFire-based solutions for applications that require in-memory persistence and distributed grid compute technology.

Damien is a Developer Evangelist at Splunk and spends a good deal of his time building apps, tools and frameworks for the Splunk platform, with a specific emphasis on the Java ecosystem and then engaging with the developer community to educate about the many different ways that Splunk can be developed upon and integrated with.A fervent JVM fan, he has a particular interest in the new breed of alternate JVM languages and actually thinks that logging is cool. Prior to joining Splunk, Damien paid his mortgage wearing many different technical hats coding,hacking,engineering and architecting software and solutions around the globe in a variety of industries, primarily in the Enterprise Java space. He also recently worked with the SpringSource team on creating new Spring Integration adaptors for Splunk.

Luke Daley is a member of the Gradleware engineering team. At Gradleware Luke works on Gradle (A JVM based build automation tool) and helps teams reach new levels of project automation and quality.

Luke is the lead of the Geb project (a productivity focussed Groovy browser automation/web testing tool) project which he created in 2010. You'll also find Luke contributing to other Open Source projects such as Grails (a Groovy web development framework), Spock (a next generation testing framework for the JVM) and anything else that catches his attention.

Ellery Crane is a seasoned software developer at Dealer.com, an industry leading automotive software solutions provider. He has been developing Spring applications professionally for six years, and Grails applications for the last three. At Dealer.com, Ellery pioneered the adoption of Grails as a framework for the company's internal applications and has spent the last two years as a lead designer and developer of an enterprise CRM system built primarily upon Groovy, Grails, Spring Integration, and MongoDB.
In his (scant) free time, Ellery is also avid researcher with numerous publications in the field of Evolutionary Computation. He also enjoys exploring the cutting edge in developer tools and technology, and has a passion for automated testing; he recently published an article on using Geb (a Groovy browser automation tool) for functional testing.
Born in Minnesota, Ellery now lives in Burlington, Vermont.

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.

Ben Corrie has been working on Java since 1998, where he began at IBM testing JDK 1.1.4. He progressed to working on the internals of IBM's Java Virtual Machine where he lead a project to develop industry-leading memory management technology for the JVM. He joined SpringSource as a consultant in 2008 and moved to California a year later to lead an effort to improve Java performance on vSphere. As the tech lead on the recently announced EM4J project, he is successfully helping to make vSphere the best place to run Java.

Jon started his career in IBM Research, over 20 years ago in the UK, working on high performance parallel processors. He moved to the US in 1995 and since then has held senior technical roles at several silicon valley startups, including General Magic. Prior to his current position at VMware he was CTO and VP of Engineering at Vidient, which he co-founded in 2004, specializing in computer vision applications for the physical security market. He has been working with Java technologies for the past 12 years, and more recently specifically with Spring. Jon lives in California, with his wife and 2 children, and enjoys Tennis in his spare time.

Emiliano Conde is the Founder and President of jBilling Software, Ltd. He oversees the architecture and product direction of jBilling, the leader in open source enterprise billing systems. He is often working on-site with companies around the world helping implement large, enterprise class billing solutions on Java environments. Emiliano Code counts 17 years of experience in software development, his last position prior to the founding of jBilling being Software Architect for HSBC Global Systems (ranked 2nd largest bank in the world). He holds a certificate on Software Engineer from the University of British Columbia (Canada). He now lives in Ottawa, Canada.

Derek is an industry veteran with over 20 years of experience, specializing in high performance distributed systems. With tenures at Google and TIBCO Software, he specializes in Distributed Systems Architecture, High Performance Messaging Systems, and Event-Driven Systems. His current focus is Cloud Foundry and the Open PaaS at VMware Inc.

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 staff engineer in the SpringSource division of VMware, based in the languages and tools lab in Vancouver. He has more than ten years experience in Enterprise Application Development and now spends his time building tools for languages like AspectJ, Groovy and JavaScript and frameworks like Grails. He currently oversees the Groovy Grails Tool Suite deliverable, a variant of the Spring Tool Suite with a focus on Groovy and Grails.

Roy Clarkson studied computer science at Georgia Tech before beginning his career as a software engineer. He has worked as a professional software developer for over fifteen years, with a variety of languages and technologies. He is currently working as an engineer with SpringSource, at VMware, where he is the lead on the Spring for Android project. He also participates on the Greenhouse project, and built it’s associated mobile clients. Roy has spent the last few years focusing on mobile application development, including iPhone, Android, and mobile web. Prior to that, he focused most of his time on web based application development.

Cagatay Civici is a member of JavaServer Faces Expert Group who defines the JSF specification(JSR-314), the founder and project lead of popular PrimeFaces Component Suite and PMC member of open source JSF implementation Apache MyFaces. He's a recognized speaker in international conferences including Jazoon, W-JAX, JSFSummit, JSFDays and many local events such as JUGs. Cagatay is also an author and technical reviewer of several books regarding web application development with Java and JSF. As an experienced trainer, he has trained over 100 java developers on Java EE technologies mainly JSF, Spring and JPA. Cagatay is currently working as a consultant for Prime Technology in Turkey.

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.

Cédric Champeau is a core Groovy committer. He joined SpringSource, a division of VMware, in order to help developing the language. Prior to that, he spent several years at Lingway, a software editor, where he used Groovy in multiple industrial contexts including DSLs for natural language processing, scripting or even workflows.

He his currently working on the implementation of static type checking and static compilation for Groovy 2.0.

Brian is a server-side Java guy turned front-end engineer, and open source fanatic. From collaborative aircraft maintenance systems for the US Navy, to Computer Assisted Surgery systems for Orthopedic surgery, to a global-scale content curation and personalization system, he loves building things that users love to use. He works at SpringSource on making the web more awesome, and is co-lead of the cujo.js architecture unframework (cujojs.com), a lover of Siberian huskies, family, and things with two wheels.

More about Brian: https://github.com/briancavalier http://blog.briancavalier.com/ http://www.slideshare.net/briancavalier http://lanyrd.com/profile/briancavalier/

Dave Carroll is the Director of Developer Evangelism at salesforce.com. In Dave’s 8 years at salesforce.com, his focus has been on growing the developer community around the company’s Force.com Platform as a Service. Dave was instrumental in launching and validating the Force.com platform. Dave has also led and participated in the creation of many developer tools, including the Force.com Toolkit for AJAX, Force.com Toolkit for Adobe Flex and the Force.com IDE Eclipse plugin. Dave has spent over 15 years developing software on a variety of platforms.

Reid Carlberg leads the Force.com Labs program for salesforce.com. Reid helps internal developers define, create and publish solutions using the full variety of tools available on the Force.com platform. Before joining the salesforce.com ecosystem in 2007, Reid built apps using a variety of technologies and was an early adopter of the Spring Framework and other lightweight Java technologies. He holds a masters degree in software engineering and lives in the Chicago area.

Ed is an open source software engineer with SpringSource, a division of VMware, where he regularly works with both Java and JavaScript, often at the same time. Ed joined VMware through the acquisition of WaveMaker Software, where he led numerous efforts including the founding of the developer community. Ed has been mixing new technologies with enterprise software and developer services for over 15 years.

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.

Starting as a Smalltalk developer at IBM, David has been building or architecting enterprise systems in object languages for over 20 years. Working for both GemStone and Oracle, he has focused on the issues that arise between applications and the data they depend on in high performance and distributed systems.

David currently advises customers worldwide on their application of VMWare's vFabric technologies, including GemFire, tcServer, RabittMQ and Hyperic.

Jon works with the Spring Data, Grails, RabbitMQ, and other teams to provide next-generation data and messaging capabilities for modern Ajax and mobile applications. He's been working with Spring Data to provide mapping capabilities for NoSQL databases like MongoDB and Riak and he's working with RabbitMQ and NoSQL to provide modern evented and message-driven data utilities. He authored the Grails support for Riak as well as contributes Erlang-based utilities for the Riak and RabbitMQ communities.

Prior to SpringSource, Jon developed private cloud architectures at the world's largest Pizza Hut franchisee, developed Lotus Domino, J2EE, PHP and even Perl CGI applications in BBEdit on an aged Mac, and got his start in web-based development 15 years ago, as an intelligence analyst for the US Air Force, when NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was cool.

Sam Brannen is a Senior Software Consultant with over 14 years' experience and co-founder of Swiftmind, a software consulting agency in Zürich, Switzerland. At Swiftmind Sam helps international clients achieve best practices in agile software development, architecture, design, implementation, and testing of enterprise Java applications using the Spring Framework and a plethora of open source technologies. In his consulting role, Sam most enjoys leading work shops, code reviews, coaching, and training clients.

Sam is a popular speaker at conferences on Java, Spring, and OSGi. He is also an active core committer for the Spring Framework, lead author of "Spring in a Nutshell" from O'Reilly, author of the Spring TestContext Framework, and was previously a core developer of SpringSource dm Server (a.k.a., Eclipse Virgo).

Over the years, Sam has helped clients build applications in various business sectors ranging from e-commerce to banking, retail, automotive, and social communities. When not in front of his computer, Sam enjoys traveling and spending time with family and friends.

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

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

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

Currently a Senior Software Engineer for SpringSource where he is the Technical Lead and Community Evangelist for the Spring.NET Framework, Stephen brings his varied 18-year-plus experience in software and technology to the design and delivery of Software Engineering Solutions and Frameworks for other Software Engineers. In addition to his work on Spring.NET, Stephen is also an active contributor to several other .NET Open-Source Software projects including NHibernate, NDbUnit, and others as well having developed a number of Visual Studio productivity add-ins.

Active in the software development community, Stephen speaks publicly, blogs (semi-)regularly, and is the author of several popular screencast series focused on Agile and ALT.NET concepts and technologies including the widely-praised 15-part Summer of NHibernate video series introducing viewers to the popular open-source O/RM tool. Stephen is also a founding/organizing member of the NYC ALT.NET user group which meets monthly to discuss Agile-focused techniques and technologies in the world of Microsoft software development and beyond.

Nenad Bogojevic is a software architect in Sales and E-commerce Platform division of Amadeus IT Group. For the last 12 or so years, Nenad has been working on a high volume web based travel reservation platform using Java technologies. As a key actor he has been influencing the technical direction of the company's e-commerce platform. Currently, he provides technical guidance for mission critical travel agency application platform with paramount scalability and extensibility requirements. Nenad loves experimenting and whenever time permits, he mashes up a prototype or two to test or prove new technologies. At home, when he needs a dose of geekiness, he constructs robots with his daughters.

Marius Bogoevici is a Senior Software Engineer with Red Hat, leading the Spring integration efforts for JBoss AS and other JBoss projects. He is the lead for Snowdrop, a utility package that contains JBoss-specific extensions to the Spring Framework, and also a contributor to Weld, the JSR-299/CDI Reference Implementation and other Java EE-related developer initiatives at JBoss.
Marius Bogoevici has an extensive experience of more than 15 years developing and architecting software systems. Prior to joining Red Hat, he was a Spring consultant with SpringSource. He is a contributor to the Spring Integration enterprise integration framework and co-author of “Spring Integration in Action”.

Sébastien Blanc is JEE engineer with 8 years of experience. After spending 7 years in the Netherlands as Software Engineer, he decided to go back to his roots in the South of France. He is working for the company Sopra and he is working on a prestigious assignment for the client Amadeus including a lot of Groovy.

Besides his “heavy” JEE profile (middleware, banking and insurance products) Sébastien spends a lot of time in Groovy and Grails. He is the author of several Grails plugins such as Spring Mobile, Jquery Mobile Scaffolding or Geolocation. He believes that Mobile Web Apps are the future and tries to evangelize this through different conferences (Gr8Conf, Devoxx, RivieraDev, Grails Exchange).

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.

Emad Benjamin has been in the IT industry for the past twenty years. He graduated with a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering from the University of Wollongong. Earlier in his career, he was a C++ software engineer, then in 1997, he switched to programming with Java, and has been focusing on Java ever since. For the past seven years, his focus has been Java on VMware vSphere, vFabric GemFire and SQLFire. Emad has been at VMware since 2005, and is the author of the Enterprise Java Applications Architecture on VMware book. Emad has previously presented at VMworld, SpringOne, and Open World on the subject of Java virtualization.

Burt Beckwith has been a software developer for 15 years, most of that as a JVM developer, and for the last five years working with Grails and Groovy. He is a core developer on the Grails team at SpringSource, and has created over 40 Grails plugins. Burt is a frequent speaker at conferences and user groups where he shares his passion for Grails and other Groovy-based technologies, in particular those that are related to persistence, security, and performance. He is the author of "Programming Grails" and blogs at http://burtbeckwith.com/blog/

Chris Beams is a senior technical staff member at VMware and a core Spring Framework committer. His work in enterprise application development began in 1998 and has covered a wide range of technologies, languages and frameworks. Prior to becoming a full-time Spring committer, Chris trained hundreds of students on the topics of enterprise architecture and how best to use the Spring family of projects. He is a regular speaker at conferences around the world and is @cbeams at Twitter and GitHub.

Swapnil is a software engineer on the GemFire team of vFabric Cloud application platform at VMware. He is passionate about enabling scalable applications, loves programming and the challenges that a distributed system offers. At Gemstone systems, he has worked on a variety of things from transactions in a distributed system to a complex event processing engine. Currently he is the Lead for "GemFire as a L2 cache for Hibernate" project. Swapnil has a Master degree in Computer Science from George Mason University.

Antranig Basman is designer and architect for RSF, an innovative and minimal open source Java web presentation framework, which is based on Spring. Antranig's original training was in Mathematics, but he has since branched out into biotechnological applications of software engineering, (Bayesian) statistical inference and machine intelligence systems (his PhD is in Information Engineering).

Antranig is director of Lucendo Development Ltd., which specialises in sustainable, open source development for the academic sector, and is currently based at the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) at the University of Cambridge.

Jean Barmash is the co-founder and lead developer of EnergyScoreCards, a startup company that helps benchmark energy efficiency of multi-family buildings. He is responsible for architecture and implementation of the SaaS software using the Grails framework.

To this role Jean brings over 10 years of experience in different areas of software industry. Most recently, he was Director of Technical Services at Alfresco Software, the Open Source Enterprise Content Management Company, where his responsibilities included architecture and hands-on development of content centric solutions, training, and working with open source community. He also worked as Sr. Consultant and Trainer at several Wall Street Firms. Well-versed in both .NET and Java Platforms, Jean is interested in applying latest development techniques to interesting problems.

Jean is a frequent speaker on technology and architecture topics at various user groups and industry conferences. He is also the founder of the New York Groovy / Grails Meetup.

Shay is the founder of the Compass open source project, a unique solution enabling search capabilities into any application model. He started working on mission critical real time C/C++ systems, later moving to Java (and never looked back). Within the Java world, Shay has worked on a propriety implementation of a distributed rule engine(RETE) server, your typical Java based web projects, and messaging based projects within the financial industry. Currently, Shay is a System Architect at GigaSpaces, GigaSpaces provides a single platform for end-to-end scalability of high performance and stateful distributed applications. GigaSpaces’ unique approach enables developers to Write their business logic Once and then seamlessly Scale out the application linearly Anywhere.

Mattias Arthursson is a senior consultant for Jayway, Sweden's leading Java consultancy firm. During his 11 years in the industry he has been working with system development on a wide variety of platforms and technologies, focusing on Java since 2000. Mattias is co-lead of Spring LDAP.

Located in Munich/Germany, I'm doing freelancing in software engineering and consulting since +12 years. My technical focus is Grails and Neo4j and other emerging technologies. The second part of my professional life is Netjay, a small co-founded company doing larger scale projects. Last couple of years I gave several talks at various conferences like gr8conf.eu, grailsXchange, AgileWorld. In my spare time I serve as a volunteer firefighter, that's my there is the nice helmet on my avatar image.

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

Alef is based out of Utrecht, the Netherlands.

Durai is a Director of Platform Architecture at ETRADE Financial. He has created multi-tier architecture with custom frameworks and open source components such as Spring, RabbitMQ, Java etc that power etrade.com, an online trading website. He holds BS in Computer Science from Madurai Kamaraj University, India.

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 Lead 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.

Scott is a member of the web products team at SpringSource, where he focuses on creating and sustaining rich web applications and frameworks. Scott is the creator of the SpringSource Enterprise Bundle Repository, a production web application built on Spring 2.5, Spring MVC, and Spring JavaScript. He is also an expert in UI design, style, accessibility, and particularly skilled in interacting with customers to map business requirements to innovative software solutions. Over the course of his career, Scott has lead the successful development of mission-critical web applications in the areas of academia and technology infrastructure.

Andres is a Java/Groovy developer and Java Champion, with more than 13 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.

Michael Alford is a Senior Architect for Orbitz Worldwide's online travel commerce platform, with a focus on internationalization, web architecture, concurrency, and resource-oriented architecture. He has been working with Java and e-commerce since 1997 and holds a B.S. in Computer Science (1995) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Maciej is the AppFog product manager based out of Portland, Oregon. Before joining the AppFog team, he was a product owner on Windows Azure. By day gets paid to build a great developer experience, by night codes for fun.