Rod Johnson is the founder of the Spring Framework and a well-known expert on Java and J2EE. Rod holds a Ph.D. from Sydney University. Originally from a C/C++ background, he has been involved with Java and J2EE since their releases as a developer, architect, and consultant. He is the author of two of the most popular and influential books on J2EE: Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (Wrox, 2002), and J2EE without EJB (Wrox, 2004, with Juergen Hoeller). Both have played a major role in the rise of "agile" J2EE, and the move away from overly complex traditional J2EE architecture. Rod is co-lead of the Spring Framework. He is a popular conference speaker and regularly appears at leading Java events in the US, Europe, and Asia. He serves in the Java Community Process (JCP) on the expert groups of several JSRs. He also has wide consulting experience in banking and finance, insurance, software, and media. He is CEO of Interface21 (www.interface21.com), a consultancy devoted to providing expert J2EE and Spring Framework services. He is actively involved with client projects as well as Spring development. Juergen Hoeller is co-founder of Interface21, the company providing commercial Spring services from the source. He is a key driver of Spring development and has been release manager since Spring's inception. His special interests and responsibilities in the project cover a wide variety of topics, from the core container to transaction management, data access, and lightweight remoting. Juergen has a Master's degree in computer science from the University of Linz, specializing in Java, OO modeling, and software engineering. He is co-author of Expert One-on-One J2EE Development without EJB (Wiley, 2004) and regularly presents at conferences and other events. He is also active in many community forums, including TheServerSide. Alef Arendsen studied computer sciences at the University of Utrecht. Later, also in Utrecht, Alef started his first company. After this turned out to be too little a challenge, Alef went to work for SmartHaven, an Amsterdam-based VCfunded company providing J2EE components for knowledge management applications. He was responsible for streamlining the development process and designing parts of the component infrastructure. In early 2002, together with Joost van de Wijgerd, Alef founded JTeam, a software company providing J2EE development services. Alef is a core Spring committer and, while remaining involved with JTeam, he is now a consultant for Interface21. He is a frequent speaker at public conferences. Alef can be reached by email at
[email protected]. You can also read his blog at http://blog.arendsen.net. Thomas Risberg is a database developer working for TargetrRx, a pharmaceutical market research company located in Horsham, Pennsylvania. He has many years of experience working with both large and small organizations on various database-related projects ranging from simple data entry programs to large data warehousing implementations. Thomas is a reformed COBOL programmer who came to Java via Xbase, Visual Basic, and PL/SQL. He served as an Oracle DBA for a couple of years but decided that software development was really where his heart was. Thomas has a B.A. degree in information processing from the University of Stockhom, Sweden. He is a certified Oracle Professional DBA and a Sun Certified Java Programmer and J2EE Architect. Thomas joined the Spring Framework development team in early 2003 and is mostly involved in evolving the JDBC layer. His non-computer-related interests are soccer, photography, and travel. Colin Sampaleanu has had a long and varied career spanning almost two decades-after a childhood spent tinkering with computers and software-including experience developing for and managing his own retail software company, other years in the C++ shrinkwrap and enterprise software space, experience with Java since the early days of the language, and a complete focus on enterprise Java since the late nineties. Colin is a currently a principal partner at Interface21, which specializes in Spring training, consulting, and support. Prior to joining Interface21, Colin was Chief Architect at a software incubator / VC. As a core Spring developer and Interface21 principal, Colin spends much of his time talking and writing about the benefits of Spring, and promoting agile software development architectures and methodologies in general.
