Speakers

Ben Alex

Creator of Spring Security, Spring Roo & SpringSource Principal S/W Engineer

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/.

Andres Almiray

Griffon Project Lead

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.

Scott Andrews

Software Engineer

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.

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.

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.

Chris Beams

Spring Framework Committer

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.

Burt Beckwith

Core Member of the Grails Development Team

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/

Peter Bell

Evangelist/hacker for hackNY

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.

Tim Berglund

GitHubber

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.

Stephen Bohlen

Senior Software Engineer, VMware

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.

Jon Brisbin

SpringSource R&D

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.

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.

Jeff Scott Brown

Core Member of the Grails Development Team

Core member of the Grails development team, Jeff Scott 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.

Reid Carlberg

Force.com Labs lead, salesforce.com

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.

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.

Cagatay Civici

JSF EG Member, PrimeFaces Lead, Apache MyFaces PMC

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.

Roy Clarkson

Senior Software Engineer at VMware

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.

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.

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.

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).

John Davies

CTO and Co-Founder of Incept5

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.

Joshua Davis

Grails Portal Project Team Member

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.

Scott Davis is the founder of ThirstyHead.com, a training company that specializes in Groovy and Grails training.

Scott published one of the first public websites implemented in Grails in 2006 and has been actively working with the technology ever since. Author of the book Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java and two ongoing IBM developerWorks article series (Mastering Grails and in 2009, Practically Groovy), Scott writes extensively about how Groovy and Grails are the future of Java development.

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.

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.

Keith Donald

SpringSource Principal & Founding Partner

Keith Donald is a principal and founding partner at SpringSource, the company behind Spring and a division of VMware. At SpringSource, Keith is a full-time member of the Spring development team focusing on web application development productivity. He is also the architect behind SpringSource's state-of-the-art training curriculum, which has provided practical Spring training to over 10,000 students worldwide.

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

Christian Dupuis

Lead, SpringSource Tool Suite and Spring IDE

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.

Brian Dussault

Staff Engineer, VMware

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.

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.

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

Jeremy Grelle

Senior Software Engineer, SpringSource

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.

Ben Hale

Cloud Foundry Java Experience Engineer

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.

Colin Harrington

Senior Consultant, Object Partners, Inc

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Rod Johnson

Creator of Spring & Best Selling Author of J2EE without EJB

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.

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.

Mik Kersten

CEO of Tasktop, Creator of the Eclipse Mylyn Project

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.

Paul King

co-author of "Groovy in Action"

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.

Dave Klein

Author of 'Grails: A Quick-Start Guide'

Dave is a consultant helping organizations of all sizes to develop applications more quickly (and have more fun doing it) with Grails. Dave has been involved in enterprise software development for the past 15 years. He has worked as a developer, architect, project manager, mentor and trainer. Dave has presented at user groups and national conferences. He is also the founder of the Capital Java User Group in Madison, Wisconsin, the Gateway Groovy Users in St. Louis, MO, and the author of Grails: A Quick-Start Guide, published by the Pragmatic Programmers. . Dave's Groovy and Grails related thoughts can be found at http://dave-klein.blogspot.com

Kenneth Kousen

Author of "Making Java Groovy"

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.

Guillaume LaForge

Head of Groovy Development for SpringSource

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.

Ramnivas Laddad is a SpringSource Principal Enginner. He has over a decade of experience in applying his enterprise Java and aspect-oriented programming (AOP) expertise to middleware, design automation, networking, web application, user interface, and security projects.

Ramnivas Laddad is a well-known expert in enterprise Java, especially in the area of AOP and Spring. He is the author of AspectJ in Action, the best-selling book on AOP and AspectJ that has been lauded by industry experts for its presentation of practical and innovative AOP applications to solve real-world problems. Ramnivas, a Spring framework committer, is also an active presenter at leading industry events such as JavaOne, JavaPolis, No Fluff Just Stuff, SpringOne, Software Development, and has been an active member of both the AspectJ and Spring communities from their beginnings.

Costin Leau

Lead, Spring GemFire, Hadoop, Redis

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Maudrit Martinez

Manager, Accenture

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.

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.

Tom McCuch

Solution Engineer, Hortonworks

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.

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/ .

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Arjen Poutsma

Founder & Project Lead for Spring Web Services

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Thomas Risberg

co-author of "Spring Data, Modern Data Access for Enterprise Java"

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.

Graeme Rocher

Grails Project Lead

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.

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.

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

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

Immediately prior to SpringSource, Colin spent 5 years as architect/chief architect at a leading software incubator and VC firm. Colin's role was split between one part hands on architecture, design, and coding, another part mentoring and teaching best practices at the code and process level, and a final part performing technical due diligence and consulting for the VC arm.

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

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.

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.

Stefan Schmidt

Software Engineer and Roo Developer at SpringSource

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.

Ken Sipe

Architect, Web Security Expert

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.

Brian Sletten

Forward Leaning Software Engineer

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.

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.

Matt Stine

Community Engineer @CloudFoundry

Matt Stine is a Community Engineer with Cloud Foundry (http://cloudfoundry.com) by Pivotal (http://goPivotal.com). He is a twelve year veteran of the enterprise software and web development industries, with experience spanning the healthcare, biomedical research, e-commerce, retail store and insurance domains.

Matt is obsessed with the idea that enterprise IT “doesn’t have to suck,” and spends much of his time thinking about lean/agile software development methodologies, DevOps, architectural principles/patterns/practices, and programming paradigms in an attempt to find the perfect storm of techniques that will allow corporate IT departments to not only function like startup companies, but also create software that delights users while maintaining a high degree of conceptual integrity.

Matt has spoken at conferences ranging from JavaOne to CodeMash and serves as Technical Editor of NFJS the Magazine (https://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/home/magazine_subscribe). Matt is also the founder of the Memphis/Mid-South Java User Group.

Rossen Stoyanchev

Senior Staff Engineer, VMware

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.

Venkat Subramaniam

Founder of Agile Developer, Inc.

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).

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.

Gil Tene

CTO & Co-founder, Azul Systems

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.

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.

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.

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.

Craig Walls

Author of Spring in Action

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.

Mike Wiesner

Senior Consultant, VMware

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.

James Williams

Co-creator of Griffon and Author of Learning HTML5 Game Programming

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.

David Winterfeldt

Staff Engineer, VMware

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 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.

Oleg Zhurakousky

Principal Architect w/Hortonworks

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).

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