In his professional career, Ervin was mostly involved in developing large-scale distributed enterprise systems. He is an expert for object-oriented programming, functional programming, aspect-oriented programming, and pattern-based software development. He is a fan of agile methods. Ervin is an Owner/CEO of a software consulting and training company D.O.O. "EXPRO I.T. CONSULTING" KIKINDA (www.exproit.rs).

Aahz has been using Python since 1999 and is the co-author of Python for Dummies. He helps people on comp.lang.python, and is one of the webmasters for www.python.org. Aahz is currently working as a developer for web applications.

Jans Aasman is the new Director of Engineering at Franz Inc., the market leader in professional LISP software. His background is cognitive science, traffic, telecommunications, and industrial design. He's programmed in just about every language, but his favorite language is LISP.

The Flex 4 blog is sponsored by Adobe Systems Incorporated.

B. Scott Andersen has 20+ years of experience in software development splitting his time between individual contributor and management. He is now a Principal Software Engineer with Verocel, Inc., a company specializing in helping safety-critical system developers attain certification for their products. The opinions expressed here are his own and he takes full responsibility for them... unless, of course, they are worth money, at which point they belong to his employer.

Eric Armstrong has been programming and writing professionally since before there were personal computers. His production experience includes artificial intelligence (AI) programs, system libraries, real-time programs, and business applications in a variety of languages. He works as a writer and software consultant in the San Francisco Bay Area. He wrote The JBuilder2 Bible and authored the Java/XML programming tutorial available at http://java.sun.com. Eric is also involved in efforts to design knowledge-based collaboration systems.

Ken Arnold is a recognized loose cannon in the software business, whose previous fusilades include being an inventor of Jini, designing JavaSpaces, writing books on Java and distributed systems, helping design CORBA 1.0, and (while at Berkeley on the BSD project) the curses library package, co-authoring rogue, and generally enjoying himself. His interests include designing APIs and programming languages using general principles of human factors design because of his radical hypothesis that programmers are human, and other applications of this same principle to software design, management, and production.

R. Dale Asberry been hacking since 1978, professionally since 1990. He's certified in Java 1.1 and has a four digit MCP number. He discovered Jini at the 2000 JavaOne and has been building incredibly cool, dynamic, distributed architectures ever since! Over time, he's discovered several principles that have contributed to his success - they are the Princples of: Enabling Others, Simplicity, No Complaining, Least Work, Least Surprise, Least Damage, and "It Just Works".

Dave Astels has been developing hardware and software solutions for more than 20 years in domains ranging from environment control systems to electrical energy trading systems to mass market products. Since the late 1980s he has been working exclusively with object technologies: a mix of C++, Smalltalk, Java, and some more obscure OOPLs. Since the late 1990s, he has been studying, using, evangelizing, and teaching Agile Development processes and practices. He has coauthored/authored two books for Prentice Hall: "A Practical Guide to eXtreme Programming" and "Test-Driven Development: A Practical Guide". He also edits the TDD edition of The Coad Letter, which is part of the Borland Development Network. He co-founded and runs Adaption Software, Inc. (www.adaptionsoft.com).

Arash Barirani is a developer with a taste for fast software and fast cars. He enjoys reading Artima.com, and likes to comment on questions that have no real answers. His favorite subject area is user interface design and performance bottleneck resolution.

Matt Bauer works with all things big and expensive. He has worked with weather satellites and space instrumentation, administered government data centers, developed global intranets and designed international rich internet applications. He is currently president of For-Loop, a Minneapolis based technology company focused on distributed transactional systems and rich internet applications. Besides pushing the envelope of technology, you will find him out running marathons.

Charles Bell is an instructor in the training department of a nuclear power plant, where he was a programmer and supervisor of the power plant simulator for many years. He is currently developing a web based exam bank for all the training departments in the company. His first program was in Fortran on punch cards on an IBM 360 about 1970. If he's not Java programming, he's looking through his 12 inch Meade telescope, hoping to discover a new comet.

Berco Beute is innovator with the Dutch research & development institute TNO, where his focus is on the human side of distributed systems in the telecom industry. He has a Master's degree in both mass communication and artificial intelligence, and a PhD in distributed multimedia. Besides software engineering his interest is using software for cognitive science and creating multimedia.

Geert is the founder of Uwyn, a small custom application development company with a strong focus on Web applications, open-source, Java and rich internet technologies. He is the founder of the RIFE project which provides a full-stack Java Web application framework for quickly building maintainable applications with sustainable developer productivity. He also started or contributed to projects like Bla-bla List, OpenLaszlo, JHighlight, JavaPaste, Drone, Bamboo, Elephant, RelativeLayers, and Gentoo Linux. Geert has spoken at TSSJS US & Europe, JavaOne, Java In Action, EuroOSCON, Fosdem and JavaPolis. He has recently been nominated and accepted as a Java Champion, mainly for his work on the RIFE project and its support for native Java continuations.

Nitin Borwankar is a Python and Java developer interested in email.

Vladimir Ritz Bossicard is a software engineer located in the Bay Area. He has a Master's degree in Computer Science from the EPFL and is interested in Open Source Software and pragmatic testing. Besides software engineering his main interest is his daughter Thea.

Rahul Chaudhary is an architect at a major financial company. Although he has experience in many different languages, he has been deeply into Java over the past few years, having extensive experience with Java, J2EE and its related technologies. Programming is his passion. His interests include Artificial Intelligence and open source. Rahul has a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and a Master's degree in Computer Science.

Bob Clancy is a former software developer who discovered software testing as a release engineer. While a release engineer at Hitachi, he discovered the value of providing rapid feedback to developers before software went over to SQA. Ever since, he has worked as a tester within development teams mostly using SCRUM where he learned the agile testing craft by doing. Bob believes the team as a whole needs to own the craft and is here to facilitate discussions to achieve this.

Jim Coplien is a Senior Agile Coach and System Architect at Nordija A/S, doing international consulting in organization structure, software patterns, system architecture, as well as software development in electronic design automation, telecom, and finance. In this 'blog, he reflects on his academic career pursuant to his visiting professorship at University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, his appointment as the 2003-2004 Vloebergh Chair at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, two years as an Associate Professor at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and extensive work developing some of the first C++ and OOD training materials. He is well-known for his foundational work on object-oriented programming and on patterns, and his current research explores the formal foundations of the theory of design, foundations of aesthetics and beauty, and group theoretic models of design structure. He most recent book "Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development", co-authored with Neil Harrison, culminates a decade of research. His book "Advanced C++ Programming Styles and Idioms" defined design and programming techniques for a generation of C++ programmers, and his book "Multi-Paradigm Design for C++" presents a vision for the evolution of current OO design techniques into a more general and better grounded theory of software construction.

Ward Cunningham is a founder of Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc. He has served as Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principle Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory. Ward is well known for his contributions to the developing practice of object-oriented programming, the variation called Extreme Programming, and the communities hosted by his WikiWikiWeb. He is active with the Hillside Group and has served as program chair of the Pattern Languages of Programs conference which it sponsors. Ward created the CRC design method which helps teams find objects. Ward has written for PLoP, JOOP and OOPSLA on Patterns, Objects, CRC and related topics.

Andy is a free-lance developer in C++, REALbasic, Python, AJAX and other XML technologies. He works out of Perth, Western Australia for a local and international clients on cross-platform projects with a focus on usability for naive and infrequent users. Included in his range of interests are generative solutions, software usability and small-team software processes. He still bleeds six colors, even though Apple stopped, and uses migration projects from legacy Mac OS to justify the hardware collection.

Christopher Diggins is a software developer and freelance writer. Christopher loves programming, but is eternally frustrated by the shortcomings of modern programming languages. As would any reasonable person in his shoes, he decided to quit his day job to write his own ( www.heron-language.com ). Christopher is the co-author of the C++ Cookbook from O'Reilly. Christopher can be reached through his home page at www.cdiggins.com.

Bruce Eckel (www.BruceEckel.com) provides development assistance in Python with user interfaces in Flex. He is the author of Thinking in Java (Prentice-Hall, 1998, 2nd Edition, 2000, 3rd Edition, 2003, 4th Edition, 2005), the Hands-On Java Seminar CD ROM (available on the Web site), Thinking in C++ (PH 1995; 2nd edition 2000, Volume 2 with Chuck Allison, 2003), C++ Inside & Out (Osborne/McGraw-Hill 1993), among others. He's given hundreds of presentations throughout the world, published over 150 articles in numerous magazines, was a founding member of the ANSI/ISO C++ committee and speaks regularly at conferences.

Ted Farrell is Architect and Sr. Director of Strategy of the Tools Group at Oracle Corporation. Prior to Joining Oracle, Mr. Farrell was Chief Technology Officer at WebGain and co-founder and CTO of Tendril Software. During his more than 15 years of experience architecting and building software products and companies, Mr. Farrell co-founded several small-business software companies in the application development space.

Michael has been active in the XP community for the past five years, balancing his time between working with, training, and coaching various teams around the world. Prior to joining Object Mentor, Michael designed a proprietary programming language and wrote a compiler for it, he also designed a large multi-platform class library and a framework for instrumentation control. When he isn't engaged with a team, he spends most of this time investigating ways of altering design over time in codebases.

Elisabeth Freeman is an O'Reilly author and Computer Scientist. She recently left the Walt Disney Internet Group, where she researched development of video on demand on the internet, digital rights management, and content management. Her background is in programming languages and software systems, and includes creating a visual programming language and an interface for document management on the web. Her interests include writing, digital rights management, learning software, content based applications, blogging and community software, digital photography, the internet in all its endless transformations, and encouraging more women to get involved in the field of computer science.

Dr. Eric Freeman is at heart a computer scientist with a love for designing, building and taking apart software architectures. Named by MIT's Technology review as one of the top 100 young innovators, Eric is currently co-writing a book for O'Reilly and advising clients on Internet strategy. Previously, Eric was Director of Engineering at the Walt Disney Internet Group where he drove the company's broadband efforts. Eric is also an expert in distributed computing and coauthor of Sun's official JavaSpaces book. Eric holds a Ph.D. from Yale University, where he worked with David Gelernter on Lifestreams.

Matt Gerrans is Artima.com's C# columnist. Matt began his professional life as an electronic engineer but quickly saw the light and switched to software development. He now has more than 12 years professional software development under his belt, including work in C++, Java, Python, and yes, even JavaScript.

David Goodger has been using Python since 1998, and began working on reStructuredText and Docutils in 2000. A proud Canadian, he lived in Japan for 7 years, where a stint at a document processing company in Tokyo began his love/hate relationship with structured markup. David is a Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) Editor and a member of the Python Software Foundation. He currently lives outside of Montreal, Quebec, with his Japanese wife and their two children.

Gabe Grigorescu is Engineering Manager at Tom Sawyer Software. Before joining Tom Sawyer Software in 1996, he worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in the mass storage group supporting and developing a large mass software package for all lab employees. He has also worked at University of California at Berkeley as a computer consultant for eight years, where he received his Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science. He completed his Master's Degree in Computer Science at Stanford University, and is now also teaching software engineering at California State University at Hayward. He is also an expert in Unix System Internals, Security, and System Administration. Before joining Tom Sawyer Software, Mr. Grigorescu worked on several complex software projects, including UNIX graphical user interface applications, graphics software packages, and other operating system and network level projects.

Rix Groenboom is European support manager for Reasoning Inc., a company that offers global inspection and migration services. In this capacity, he has been involved in many automated software inspection projects for Fortune 2000 companies. Groenboom holds a MSc and PhD in Computing Science from the University of Groningen (the Netherlands), and has written over 30 publications on the use of formal methods in imbedded and knowledge-based systems development. His special areas of interest are in the use of formal languages for the specification, design and validation of software applications.

Cees de Groot is currently working as team lead for eBay on one of the worlds largest classified sites. Cees brings 20 years of experience in a variety of industries, languages and positions. He was one of the earliest-adopters of Java, equally vocal and present in the Jini and Smalltalk communities, and has decided a long time ago that he's too lazy to understand complex systems. Therefore, he sticks to simple stuff resulting in a bookshelf full of works on agile development and no-nonsense OO techniques.

Philipp Haller is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Computer & Communication Sciences at EPFL (Switzerland), working with Martin Odersky on the Scala programming language, libraries, and tools. Among his research interests are programming abstractions for concurrency, as well as type systems to check their safety. Philipp created Scala's Actors, a library for efficient, high-level concurrent programming.

Peter Hansen heads consulting firm Engenuity Corporation, specializing in industrial control software. He's been programming since 1978 when he first met APL. Since then he's wandered through the Apple II era and BASIC, Assembly, the C-64 days, C, the Amiga, C++, systems design engineering, OS/2, Java, done serious work in at least twenty other languages and, frankly, was getting a little tired of computing. During a four-year stint as director of software engineering at Kaval Wireless, he encountered Python and Extreme Programming, however, and is finally enjoying software again. He's verbose in comp.lang.python, likes coaching XP teams, and has a cat named Silver.

David H. Heinemeier has been working with the web since '96 as a writer, project manager, and now programmer. As a freelance developer working on his own, he takes a keen interest in all matters surrounding personal and team productivity. This has lead to his current cocktail of Ruby on Apple using agile development and social software, for all of which he's an incurable evangelist.

Kevlin is an independent consultant and trainer based in the UK. His development interests are in patterns, programming, practice and process. He has been a columnist for various magazines and web sites, including Better Software, The Register, Application Development Advisor, Java Report and the C/C++ Users Journal. Kevlin is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also editor of the 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know site and book.

Steve Holden has been using computers longer than some of you have been alive, and he still isn't tired of it. The fascination is to do with the modeling flexibility that information systems allow. Steve consults to help his clients design and build their network architectures and programmed web systems, and teaches networking, database and security classes. He is the author of "Python Web Programming" (New Riders, 2002) and chaired the PyCon DC 2003 conference.

Cay Horstmann is a professor of computer science at San Jose State University. He is an experienced professional programmer and was VP of Technology and CTO at Preview Systems Inc. He wrote many successful professional and college books, including Core Java (with Gary Cornell), Big Java, Big C++ (with Tim Budd), and OO Design & Patterns.

Ron Jeffries has been developing software since 1962, when Bill Rogers at Strategic Air Command handed him a Fortran manual. In that time, Ron has worked on operating systems, language compilers, database management systems, and a host of applications. As far as he knows, he has only put one company entirely out of business, and he is almost certain that he has helped some others. Ron has been involved in—some would say implicated in—the Extreme Programming movement since its beginning, and is the senior author, with Chet Hendrickson and Ann Anderson, of Extreme Programming Installed. Cribbing from Einstein, Ron believes that the best software, and the best processes, should be as simple as possible ... and no simpler.

Mark Johnson is a software developer, trainer, writer, and speaker living in Silver Spring, MD. He works at the National Center for Biotechnology Information, writing documentation and tools for open-source bioinformatics software. He is also president of Elucify Technical Communications (www.elucify.com). He has published dozens of articles on Java component technology, enterprise software development, and XML, and is co-author of the book "Designing Enterprise Applications for the J2EE Platform, Second Edition" (Addison-Wesley 2002). He is currently the author of the monthly Enterprise Java Tech Tips newsletter for Sun Microsystems. Mark has been interviewed on CNN, ITworld.com, and JavaWorld.com, and is a member of the National Association of Science Writers.

Greg Jorgensen started programming in 1974. Tainted by BASIC, Fortran, COBOL, and assembler at an impressionable age, he nevertheless managed to make a career out of programming and went on to work at Nike, Apple, and many other companies. Today Greg runs a small consulting business in Portland, Oregon. Besides making a living writing code, he teaches kids how to program and enjoys motorcycle riding.

Heinz Kabutz enjoys driving Java to the limits, and then a bit beyond. He has been programming in Java since 1997 on several very unimportant projects. During that time, he has picked up some horrifying tips on how you can get the most out of Java. These are published on his bi-monthly "The Java(tm) Specialists' Newsletter" (http://www.javaspecialists.co.za). It is not for the uninitiated :-) Heinz received a PhD in Computer Science from the University of CapeTown. He loves living in South Africa as it is both beautiful and interesting. Professionally, Heinz survives by writing Java code, insulting, ahem, consulting, and presenting courses on Java and Design Patterns.

Rick Kitts has been making a living writing software for a little while. He's started a company or two, worked at bigger companies, but mostly at startups. Constantly on the look out for things to help him build better systems he's a bit of a tool and process slut, though he can't bring himself to try C# or get serious about UML. Go figure. He's convinced being invited to have a weblog on Artima is the result of some glitch in the matrix. He's keeping quiet about it though.

Kirk Knoernschild is a hands-on software consultant with over ten years of industry experience, and is passionate about using leading best practices to build better software. Kirk is the author Java Design: Objects, UML, and Process, published in 2002 by Addison-Wesley. He frequently contributes to various technical publications, and actively updates his personal website, www.kirkk.com, with new articles and whitepapers on a variety of software development topics. He is also the founder of www.extensiblejava.com, a growing resource of design pattern heuristics in Java.

In his 35+ years as a programmer, Andrew Koenig has written an online student registration system in APL, a software distribution system in a mixture of C and C++, pattern matching libraries in C++, ML, and Python, and a compiler for a syntactically sweetened front-end for Snobol4 in its own language. He has published more than 150 articles, and is author or coauthor of three books "C Traps and Pitfalls,'' "Ruminations on C++,'' and "Accelerated C++.'' He believes that he was the first person to write an efficient associative-array library in C++, and also the first to port the Adventure game to C.

Klaus Kreft has been developing software solutions for almost 20 years in domains ranging from embedded systems programming for the telecommunications industry to web-based business applications in the banking and insurance sector. He served as a systems architect on several successful large-scale projects. His passion is building solutions in time that work reliably and meet the customer's needs. He currently works as a Senior Consultant at Siemens Business Services in Germany.

Sean Landis is a technologist and programmer interested in, among other things, mobile and distributed sytems, location-based services, and skiing.

Angelika Langer works as an independent freelance trainer, mentor, and consultant with a course curriculum of her own and conducts seminars in Europe and Northern America. Her current work is backed by more than a decade of experience as a software engineer working for German and US companies, among them sevaral years in telecommunications and later in compiler construction at Siemens and 1.5 year in library development at Rogue Wave Software. Compiler construction got her involved into the standardization of C++ and in 1993 she joined the standards committee. When Java appeared in 1995 she immediately pounced on the new language. Since then she is truly bilingual, using both languages in parallel, and inevitably mixing up the syntax at times, naturally looking forward to adding a third curly brace language to the skill set, just to increase the confusion. In 1997 she decided that 13 years of sitting in front of a computer day in and day out were enough (at least for her taste) and she shifted her focus to training, coaching, and mentoring.

Jakob Eg Larsen is a computer scientist researching distributed systems and human-computer interaction. His research focus is on humane interfaces for technology, which he is pursuing at the Technical University of Denmark. He has been a Jini Community member since its inception and created the GLOBE project, a highly available and scalable tuplespace, which uses Jini and JavaSpaces technologies.

Josh Long (http://www.joshlong.com) is an enterprise architect, consultant, and author. 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 boundries of the technologies that enable them. His interests include scalability, BPM, grid processing, mobile computing and so-called "smart" systems.

Dr. Howard Lovatt is a senior scientist with CSIRO, an Australian government owned research organization, and is the creator of the Pattern Enforcing Compiler (PEC) for Java. PEC is an extended Java compiler that allows Software Design Patterns to be declared and hence checked by the compiler. PEC forms the basis of Howard's 2nd PhD, his first concerned the design of Switched Reluctance Motors.

Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob) has been a software professional since 1970 and an international software consultant since 1990. He is founder and president of Object Mentor Inc., a team of experienced consultants who mentor their clients worldwide in the fields of C++, Java, OO, Patterns, UML, Agile Methodologies, and Extreme Programming. In 1995 Robert authored the best-selling book: Designing Object Oriented C++ Applications using the Booch Method, published by Prentice Hall. From 1996 to 1999 he was the editor-in-chief of the C++ Report. In 1997 he was chief editor of the book: Pattern Languages of Program Design 3, published by Addison Wesley. In 1999 he was the editor of "More C++ Gems" published by Cambridge Press. He is co-author, with James Newkirk, of "XP in Practice", Addision Wesley, 2001. In 2002 he wrote the long awaited "Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices", Prentice Hall, 2002. He has published many dozens of articles in various trade journals, and is a regular speaker at international conferences and trade shows.

John McClain is a member of Sun's Jini Network Technology development team. His current responsibilities include technical lead of the Outrigger development team and ownership of the JavaSpaces Service Specification. Prior to joining Sun, John worked at Lockheed Martin on distributed simulation and at DEC on network printers.

Eamonn McManus is the technical lead of the JMX team at Sun Microsystems. As such he heads the technical work on JSR 3 (JMX API) and JSR 160 (JMX Remote API). In a previous life, he worked at the Open Software Foundation's Research Institute on the Mach microkernel and countless other things, including a TCP/IP stack written in Java. In an even previouser life, he worked on modem firmware in Z80 assembler. He is Irish, but lives and works in France and in French. His first name is pronounced Aymun (more or less) and is correctly written with an acute accent on the first letter, which however he long ago despaired of getting intact through computer systems.

Jeremy has been designing and developing software for over 20 years, as well as teaching its mastery. He is fascinated by all aspects of architecture, design and development, the philosophical, the psychological and the aesthetic. He currently heads up the training division at hybris Software, a fast growing and very exciting eCommerce company.

John D. Mitchell is the Chief Architect of Krugle -- a search engine for developers. Along with developing and rescuing distributed enterprise systems, John advises investors and executives on technology and high-tech companies. Over the past 15 years, he has been the CTO of ElasticMedia, HealthLogic.com, jGuru and the MageLang Institute. John co-authored "Making Sense of Java: A Guide for Managers and the Rest of Us." He was the founder and contributing editor of the "Tips & Tricks" column at JavaWorld. John writes extensively on complex systems, development processes, computer languages and protocols, parsing and translating, and technological business risk management.

Since joining Sun in 1997, Brian Murphy has been a member of the Jini Network Technology development team, contributing in various capacities to each of the releases of the Jini Starter Kit. In the early days, Brian was a member of the team that designed and implemented the Jini Lookup Service. He was the technical lead on both the 1.1 and 1.2 releases of Jini, was one of the technical editors of "Core Jini", and authored a number of chapters of the 2nd edition of "The Jini Specifications". Prior to joining Sun, Brian worked in the telecommunications, robotics and defense industries, developing various distributed and client/server systems, as well as developing algorithms in the field of digital signal processing.

Sean Neville is a software architect at Macromedia where he is focused on creating the Flex platform. His previous projects include the JRun application server and Flash-related products for J2EE and .NET. His experiences include membership in the JCP Executive Committee and numerous JSR expert groups; authoring articles, contributing to books, and speaking on enterprise topics; financial services app consulting; building doomed yet fun web startups; maintaining open source projects; and half-decent fiddling of Irish jigs and reels.

Nancy Nicolaisen has authored three books on C++ programming topics; hundreds of articles for print magazines including Byte, Dr. Dobbs and PC Magazine; and was the chief contributor to codeguru.com's Windows CE Zone. Former researcher and Computer Science Professor, she specializes in small device and embedded systems programming.

Martin Odersky is the inventor of the Scala language and professor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2008, he was appointed fellow of the ACM for his contributions to the fusion of functional and object-oriented programming. He believes the two paradigms are two sides of the same coin, to be unified as much as possible. To prove this, he has worked on a number of language designs, from Pizza to GJ to Functional Nets. He has also influenced the development of Java as a co-designer of Java generics and as the original author of the current javac reference compiler.

Vlad Patryshev was born in Russia, graduated from Leningrad University, majoring in Algebra; His studies combined practical programming with interests in category and topos theory. He spent 7 years at Borland, 3.5 years at Google, and is now at Telenav, investigating the brave new mobile world.

Johan Peeters is an independent software architect who spends a lot of time plumbing and generally fixing leaks.

Carlos E. Perez has been an object-oriented practitioner for over a decade. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in Physics and a Master's Degree in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts. He has polished his craft while working in IBM's Internet Division and IBM's TJ Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York. He now works for a startup 1/100,000th the size of his former employer. He writes about topics covering emerging aspect and object oriented paradigms, loosely coupled architecture, open source projects and Java evangelism.

Ken Pugh of Pugh-Killeen Associates (www.pughkilleen.com) consults, trains, and mentors on technology topics ranging from Object-Oriented Design to Linux/Unix to the system development process. He has served clients from London to Sydney. When not computing, he enjoys snowboarding, windsurfing, biking, and hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Eric S. Raymond is an observer-participant anthropologist in the Internet hacker culture. His research has helped explain the decentralized open-source model of software development that has proven so effective in the evolution of the Internet. His own software projects include one of the Internet's most widely-used email transport programs. Raymond is also a science fiction fan, a musician, an activist for the First and Second Amendments, and a martial artist with a Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do. His home page is at .

Ian Robertson is an application architect at Verisk Health. He is interested in finding concise means of expression in Java without sacrificing type safety. He contributes to various open source projects, including jamon and pojomatic.

Guido van Rossum is the creator of Python, one of the major programming languages on and off the web. The Python community refers to him as the BDFL (Benevolent Dictator For Life), a title straight from a Monty Python skit. He moved from the Netherlands to the USA in 1995, where he met his wife. Until July 2003 they lived in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC with their son Orlijn, who was born in 2001. They then moved to Silicon Valley where Guido now works for Google (spending 50% of his time on Python!).

Alberto Savoia is founder and CTO at Agitar Software, and he has been life-long agitator and innovator in the area of software development and testing tools and technology. Alberto's software products have won a number of awards including: the JavaOne's Duke Award, Software Development Magazine's Productivity Award, Java Developer Journal's World Class Award, and Java World Editor's Choice Award. His current mission is to make developer unit testing a broadly adopted and standar industry practice rather than a rare exception. Before Agitar, Alberto worked at Google as the engineering executive in charge of the highly successful and profitable ads group. In October 1998, he cofounded and became CTO of Velogic/Keynote (NASD:KEYN), the pioneer and leading innovator in Internet performance and scalability testing. Prior to Velogic, Alberto had 13-year career at Sun Microsystems where his most recent positions were Founder and General Manager of the SunTest business unit, and Director of Software Technology Research at Sun Microsystems Laboratories.

Jerome Scheuring is a software architect and designer of more than twenty years' standing. He is a student of literature, history, and the sciences, and a devoted husband and father. He is a charter member of the Jini Community, and a promoter of the Jini vision. He is co-author of a course on web development, and author of a case study published in Professional Jini. With his wife, Sylvia, he has founded several software development companies, including Sylent and PersonalGenie, His current project is OtherGods, a comprehensive virtual world development kit for immersive entertainment.

Richard Hale Shaw (www.RichardHaleShawGroup.com) is an out-spoken questioner of patterns and practices, and consultant, architect and lecturer largely specializing in Managed Code development of distributed systems using Microsoft's .NET technology and the C# programming language. A Microsoft MVP for Visual C# and a member of the C# Customer Council (a group of hand-picked experts who consult to the C# Team at Microsoft regarding new features and new directions in the C# Programming Language), Richard speaks at a number of developer conferences and gives on-site and public training courses using his own, unique materials.

Calum Shaw-Mackay is an architect on Java and Jini systems, working in the UK. His interests lie in distributed computing, adaptability, and abstraction. Calum has been using Jini for longer than he would care to mention. His main area for taking the blame (some people would call it 'expertise') is systems integration and distributed frameworks, and is an advocate of using Jini's unique strengths to build adaptable enterprise systems. His opinions are his own. He's tried to get other people to take his opinions off him, but they just won't.

Jack Shirazi is the author of O'Reilly's "Java Performance Tuning" and director of the popular website JavaPerformanceTuning.com/, the world's premier site for Java performance information. Jack writes articles for many magazines, usually about Java performance related matters. He also oversees the output at JavaPerformanceTuning.com, publishing around 1 000 performance tips a year as well as many articles about performance tools, discussion groups, and much more. In his earlier life Jack also published work on protein structure prediction and black hole thermodynamics, and contributed to some Perl5 core modules "back when he had more time".

Michele Simionato started his career as a Theoretical Physicist, working in Italy, France and the U.S. He turned to programming in 2003; since then he has been working professionally as a Python developer and now he lives in Milan, Italy. Michele is well known in the Python community for his posts in the newsgroup(s), his articles and his Open Source libraries and recipes. His interests include object oriented programming, functional programming, and in general programming metodologies that enable us to manage the complexity of modern software developement.

Most who've heard of Van Simmons before will remember him in his former role as President of VNP Software. Since 1990, Van has usually made a living architecting, designing, writing and generally being frustrated with large systems for Wall Street firms. Originally he hacked his way about these in Objective-C on the old NeXT platform, but starting in 1996, he realized that he was flogging a dead horse and transferred his allegiance to the (then) immature Java platform. These days, Van is an employee of a firm with a lot of numbers to crunch, so he's spending his days trying to figure out how to get an hours worth of computation done in a minute of elapsed time. Venting, musing and guffawing on this topic is what he plans to write about.

Frank Sommers is a Senior Editor with Artima Developer. Prior to joining Artima, Frank wrote the Jiniology and Web services columns for JavaWorld. Frank also serves as chief editor of the Web zine ClusterComputing.org, the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing's newsletter. Prior to that, he edited the Newsletter of the IEEE Task Force on Cluster Computing. Frank is also founder and president of Autospaces, a company dedicated to bringing service-oriented computing to the automotive software market.

Prior to Autospaces, Frank was vice president of technology and chief software architect at a Los Angeles system integration firm. In that capacity, he designed and developed that company's two main products: A financial underwriting system, and an insurance claims management expert system. Before assuming that position, he was a research fellow at the Center for Multiethnic and Transnational Studies at the University of Southern California, where he participated in a geographic information systems (GIS) project mapping the ethnic populations of the world and the diverse demography of southern California. Frank's interests include parallel and distributed computing, data management, programming languages, cluster and grid computing, and the theoretic foundations of computation. He is a member of the ACM and IEEE, and the American Musicological Society.

Working with Java since the early days, Bruno F. Souza has become the number one Java Evangelist in Brazil, responsible for hundreds of Java presentations throughout the country. As a Java consultant, Bruno helped some of the largest Java projects in Brazil to became a reality, and as the founder and coordinator of Brazil's largest Java User Group (SouJava - the Java Users Society), Bruno helped drive the growth of the Brazilian Java community.

Sue Spielman is President and Senior Consulting Engineer for Switchback Software LLC (www.switchbacksoftware.com), elevation 10,000 ft. Switchback Software provides a full range of software consulting services and development of enterprise business, web, and wireless applications for companies large and small. She frequently speaks at industry conferences on all sorts of topics, writes for a variety of publications, and is the author of a number of books including: 'The Struts Framework: Practical Guide for Java Programmers', 'JSTL: Practical Guide for JSP Programmers', and 'The Web Conferencing Book'. When she isn't coding, writing or speaking, she can be found traveling around the world or riding her bike through the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

Bill Venners is president of Artima, Inc., publisher of Artima Developer (www.artima.com). He is author of the book, Inside the Java Virtual Machine, a programmer-oriented survey of the Java platform's architecture and internals. His popular columns in JavaWorld magazine covered Java internals, object-oriented design, and Jini. Active in the Jini Community since its inception, Bill led the Jini Community's ServiceUI project, whose ServiceUI API became the de facto standard way to associate user interfaces to Jini services. Bill is also the lead developer and designer of ScalaTest, an open source testing tool for Scala and Java developers, and coauthor with Martin Odersky and Lex Spoon of the book, Programming in Scala.

David Vydra specializes in test-driven development, continuous integration, QA automation, and QA/developer collaboration. He has used Agile methods since 1998 and runs the testdriven.com on-line community.

Jim Waldo is a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems, where he is the lead architect for Jini, a distributed programming system based on Java. Prior to Jini, Jim worked in JavaSoft and Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he did research in the areas of object-oriented programming and systems, distributed computing, and user environments. Before joining Sun, Jim spent eight years at Apollo Computer and Hewlett Packard working in the areas of distributed object systems, user interfaces, class libraries, text and internationalization. While at HP, he led the design and development of the first Object Request Broker, and was instrumental in getting that technology incorporated into the first OMG CORBA specification.

Dick Wall is a software engineer at Navigenics, Inc. a silicon valley startup that specializes in bringing genetic health information to people: http://navigenics.com - he also co-hosts the Java Posse podcast which covers news, interview and more in the Java community space: http://javaposse.com, and furthermore runs the Bay Area Scala Enthusiasts (BASE) user group: http://svscala.ning.com.

Barry Warsaw has been developing software and playing music for more than 25 years. Since 1995 he has worked in Guido van Rossum's Pythonlabs team. He has been the lead developer of the JPython system, and is now the lead developer of GNU Mailman, a mailing list management system written primarily in Python. He's also a semi-professional musician. Python and the bass are his main axes. Music and software are both at their best when enjoyed, participated in, and shared by their enthusiastic fans and creators.

Mark Williamson has been a software developer since the late 80's. He is currently working as Development Manager for Vamosa managing the team building their product Vamosa Content Migrator which is a powerful application for migrating unstructured content into CMS's. He has worked on a wide variety of projects over the years including AI based education tools for the Electric Brain Company and real time telemetery for the Williams Formula 1 team.

Matthew Wilson is a software development consultant and creator of the FastFormat, Pantheios and STLSoft libraries. He is author of the books Imperfect C++ (Addison-Wesley, October 2004) and Extended STL, volume 1 (Addison-Wesley, 2007), and is currently working on his third, Breaking Up The Monolith: Advanced C++ Design Without Compromise. He has published over 60 articles on C++ and other topics, and has served as columnist and contributing editor for C/C++ Users Journal. Matthew believes that code should be discoverable and largely self-documenting, and lives up to that by being a hopeless documentor. He can be contacted via http://www.imperfectcplusplus.com/ or stlsoft@gmail.com.

Gregg Wonderly graduated from Oklahoma State University in 1988 with an MS in COMSCI. His areas of concentration include Operating Systems and Languages. His first job was at the AT&T Bell Labs facilities in Naperville IL working on software retrofit for the 5ESS switch. He designed a procedure control language in the era of the development of Java with similar motivations that the Oak and then Java language development was driven by. Language design is still at the top of his list, but his focus tends to be on application languges layered on top of programming languages such as Java. Some just consider this API design, but there really is more to it! Gregg now works for Cyte Technologies Inc., where he does software engineering and design related to distributed systems in highly available environments.

Kevin Wright has finally settled back in London to work on market analysis for the telecoms industry after having worked his way around Europe in manufacturing, finance and even online gaming. He's a self-appointed Scala Evangelist and an active participant in every forum he can find, where he's currently trying to build interest in the London Scala Users' Group.