Java platform roundtable, Spring 2010

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Dan Allen, Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

Dan is a member of the Seam, Weld, and Arquilian project teams at JBoss, by Red Hat; the author of Seam in Action (Manning); a representative on the JSR-314 (JSF 2.0) expert group; and a frequent speaker at major industry conferences. In 2009, he was awarded the the JavaOne Rock Star award for his talk on conversations and pageflows in JSF at JavaOne. Dan become deeply involved in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), particularly Linux and Java enterprise frameworks, shortly after graduating from Cornell University. His passion for these technologies continue to drive him today. You can keep up with his discoveries by subscribing to his blogs http://mojavelinux.com and http://in.relation.to/Bloggers/Dan, and by following him on Twitter, http://twitter.com/mojavelinux.

Selected contributions to developerWorks:

• Seamless JSF (April to June 2007): A three-part introduction to JavaServer Faces technology.

Neal Ford, Application Architect, ThoughtWorks Inc.

Neal Ford is a software architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy. He also designs and develops applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, and video/DVD presentations. He authors or edits books spanning a variety of technologies, including the most recent The Productive Programmer (O'Reilly). He focuses on designing and building large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker at developer conferences worldwide. For more about Neal, see http://www.nealford.com.

Selected contributions to developerWorks:

• Evolutionary architecture and emergent design (February 2009 to present): Fresh perspectives and concrete examples illustrating the concepts of software architecture and design.

Andrew Glover, Author and developer

Andrew Glover is a developer, author, speaker, and entrepreneur with a passion for behavior-driven development, Continuous Integration, and Agile software development. He is the founder of the easyb Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) framework and is the co-author of three books: Continuous Integration (Addison-Wesley Professional), Groovy in Action (Manning), and Java Testing Patterns (Wiley). You can keep up with him at http://thediscoblog.com.

Selected contributions to developerWorks:

• Java development 2.0 (August 2009 to present): Introducing new technologies that enable software developers to assemble, test, run, and maintain Java applications quickly and inexpensively.
• In pursuit of code quality (January 2006 to September 2007): A guided tour of tools for evaluating the quality of Java code.
• Practically Groovy (November 2004 to October 2005): A practical guide to using Groovy and related tools and frameworks.

Richard Hightower, Chief Software Architect, Corventis Inc.

Rick Hightower is chief software architect for Corventis Inc. and the CEO and founder of Mammatus Inc., a training company that specializes in cloud computing, GWT, Java EE, Spring, and Hibernate development. He is coauthor of the popular book Java Tools for Extreme Programming (Wiley) and author of the first edition of Struts Live (SourceBeat) the #1 download on TheServerSide.com for many years. He is has also written articles and tutorials for IBM developerWorks and is on the editorial board for Java Developer's Journal, as well as a frequent contributor to the Java and Groovy topics on DZone.

Selected contributions to developerWorks:

• Google App Engine for Java (August 2009): A three-part introduction to Google's platform for Java-based development.
• JSF for nonbelievers (February to July 2005): An enduringly popular series and first introduction to JSF for thousands of developerWorks readers.

Mik Kersten, CEO, Tasktop Technologies

Mik Kersten is the CEO of Tasktop Technologies, lead of Mylyn, and member of the Eclipse Architecture Council and Board of Directors. While on the AspectJ team at Xerox PARC, Mik implemented the first aspect-oriented programming tool support. He then created Mylyn and the Task-Focused Interface during his Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia. Mik likes building tools that offload our brains and make it easier to get creative work done.

Selected contributions to developerWorks:

• "Mylyn 2.0, Part 1: Integrated task management" (August 2007): Simplify your workday with integrated issue tracking for Eclipse.
• "AOP@Work: Tools comparison" (February 2005): A two-part introductory article in the groundbreaking developerWorks series introducing aspect-oriented programming.

Christopher J. Mackie, Consultant

Christopher J. Mackie consults with philanthropic and nonprofit organizations seeking to leverage information technology to accomplish large-scale social change; he also speaks and writes frequently on open source software and open educational resources. From 2006-2010, he co-managed the Program in Research in Information Technology (RIT) at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, one of the world's largest philanthropic funders of open source software. RIT's "community source software" projects, most of which are Java-centric, serve tens of thousands of nonprofit organizations and more than 30 million nonprofit clients worldwide every day: they have set new standards for social return-on-investment and sustainability in the nonprofit sector.

Alex Miller, Senior Engineer, Revelytix

Alex Miller is a senior engineer with Revelytix , building federated semantic Web query technology. Prior to Revelytix, Alex was technical lead at Terracotta, an engineer at BEA Systems, and Chief Architect at MetaMatrix. His interests include Java, concurrency, distributed systems, languages, and software design. Alex enjoys tweeting as @puredanger and blogging at http://tech.puredanger.com. In St. Louis, Alex is the founder of the Lambda Lounge group for the study of functional and dynamic languages and the Strange Loop developer conference.

Ted Neward, Principal, Neward & Associates

Ted Neward is an independent consultant specializing in high-scale enterprise systems, working with clients ranging in size from Fortune 500 corporations to small 10-person shops. He is an authority in Java and .NET technologies, particularly in the areas of Java/.NET integration (both in-process and via integration tools like Web services), back-end enterprise software systems, and virtual machine/execution engine plumbing.

He is the author or co-author of several books, including Effective Enterprise Java (Addison-Wesley Professional), C# In a Nutshell (O'Reilly), SSCLI Essentials (O'Reilly), Server-Based Java Programming (Manning), and a contributor to several technology journals, including IBM developerWorks. Ted is also a Microsoft MVP Architect, BEA Technical Director, INETA speaker, former DevelopMentor instructor, frequent worldwide conference speaker, and a member of various Java JSRs. He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, two sons, and eight PCs. Keep up with Ted at http://blogs.tedneward.com/.

Selected contributions to developerWorks:

• "5 things you didn't know about ...Java Object Serialization" (April 2010): Inaugural article in a new series dedicated to uncovering little-known factoids and polishing them into Java programming gems.
• "Dead like COBOL" (May 2008): Is Java ripe for replacement? Not when you survey the Java ecosystem as a whole.
• The busy Java developer's guide to Scala (January 2008 to October 2009): Ted's popular series introducing Scala and functional programming for the Java platform.

J. Steven Perry, Principal, Makoto Consulting Group

J. Steven Perry is an independent software development consultant and has been developing software professionally since 1991. Steve has a passion for software development, and enjoys writing about software development and mentoring other developers. He is the author of Java Management Extensions and Log4j (both from O'Reilly), and a contributor to IBM developerWorks. In his spare time, he hangs out with his three kids, rides his bike, and teaches yoga. Steve is the owner and principal consultant for Makoto Consulting Group, located in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Selected contributions to developerWorks:

• "OpenID for Java Web applications" (March 2010): A two-part introduction to the decentralized authentication protocol.

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