Thomas Van de Velde has extensive experience developing high-traffic public-facing web sites across a wide range of industries. As a consultant and project manager for one of the leading global technology consulting firms, he has worked on delivering the French online tax declaration and one of the United States’ largest sports sites. Thomas is passionate about finding ways to leverage open source in the enterprise, and in his free time tries to catch a wave in southern California where he lives with his wife and daughter.

Bruce Snyder is a veteran of enterprise software development and a recognized leader in open-source software. Bruce has experience in a wide range of technologies including Java EE, messaging, and serviceoriented architecture. In addition to his role as a principal engineer for IONA Technologies, Bruce is also a founding member of Apache Geronimo and a developer for Apache ActiveMQ, Apache ServiceMix, and Castor, among other things. Bruce serves as a member of various JCP expert groups and is the co-author of Professional Apache Geronimo from Wrox Press. Bruce is also a frequent speaker at industry conferences, including the Colorado Software Summit, TheServerSide Java Symposium, Java in Action, JavaOne, ApacheCon, JAOO, SOA Web Services Edge, No Fluff Just Stuff, and various Java users groups. Bruce lives in beautiful Boulder, Colorado with his family.

Christian Dupuis is working for one of the world’s leading consulting companies and is a member of the Technical Architecture capability group. Christian has been working as a technical architect and implementation lead to design and implement multi-channel, mission-critical financial applications that leverage Spring and other open-source frameworks across all tiers. Christian is co-lead of the Spring IDE open-source project (http://springide.org), providing tool support for the Spring Portfolio.

Sing Li (who was bitten by the microcomputer bug in the late 1970s) has grown up in the Microprocessor Age. His first personal computer was a $99 do-it-yourself Netronics COSMIC ELF computer with 256 bytes of memory, mail-ordered from the back pages of Popular Electronics magazine. A 25-year industry veteran, Sing is a system developer, open-source software contributor, and freelance writer specializing in Java technology and embedded and distributed systems architecture. He regularly writes for several popular technical journals and e-zines, and is the creator of the Internet Global Phone, one of the very first Internet phones available. He has authored and co-authored a number of books across diverse technical disciplines including Geronimo, Tomcat, JSP, servlets, XML, Jini, media streaming, device drivers, and JXTA.

Anne Horton has worked in the software industry for 24 years as a software engineer, textbook technical editor, author, and Java architect. She currently works for Lockheed Martin and spends her weekends working with Sing Li (author) and Sydney Jones (editor) in developing bleeding-edge books such as this one. You can email her at abhorton@comcast.net.

Naveen Balani works as an architect with IBM India Software Labs (ISL). He leads the design and development activities for the WebSphere Business Service Fabric product out of ISL. He likes to research upcoming technologies and is a regular contributor to IBM developer works covering such topics as web services, ESB, JMS, SOA, architectures, open-source frameworks, semantic web, J2ME, persuasive computing, the Spring series, AJAX, and various IBM products. You can e-mail him at naveenbalani@rediffmail.com.