Ben Galbraith is a frequent technical speaker, occasional consultant, and author of several Java-related books. He is a co-founder of Ajaxian.com, an experienced CTO and Java Architect, and is presently a consultant specializing in Java Swing and Ajax development. Ben wrote his first computer program when he was six years old, started his first business at ten, and entered the IT workforce just after turning twelve. For the past few years, he’s been professionally coding in Java. Ben has delivered hundreds of technical presentations world-wide at venues including JavaOne, The Ajax Experience, JavaPolis, and the No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposium series; he was the top-rated speaker at JavaOne 2006.

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a mentor and a trainer. His experience has spanned defense, finance and commercial domains with security consulting, network matrix switch controls, 3D simulation/visualization, Grid Computing, P2P and Semantic Web-based systems. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary and currently lives in Fairfax, VA. He is a partner in Zepheira, LLC, a new services company focused on using semantic-oriented technologies to solve architectural and data integration problems not handled by conventional tools and techniques.

Bruce Tate is a father, kayaker, author and independent consultant in Austin, Tx. He worked for 13 years at IBM, in roles ranging from a database systems programmer to Java consultant. He left IBM to work for several startups in roles ranging from director to CTO. He now is building his own consulting practice, with emphasis on lightweight development in Java and Ruby, and persistence strategies. He is the author of nine books, including Rails Up and Running, From Java to Ruby, Beyond Java, the best selling Bitter series, the Jolt-winning Better, Faster, Lighter Java, and the Spring Developer's Notebook.

Chris Richardson is a developer, architect and mentor with over 20 years of experience and is the author of the recently published book "POJOs in Action". He runs a consulting company that helps development teams become more productive and successful by adopting POJOs and lightweight frameworks. Chris has been a technical leader at a variety of companies including Insignia Solutions and BEA Systems. Chris has a computer science degree from the University of Cambridge in England. He lives in Oakland, CA with his wife and three children.

Dave Thomas is recognized internationally as an expert who develops high-quality software--accurate and highly flexible systems. He helped write the now-famous Agile Manifesto, and regularly speak on new ways of producing software. He is the author of six books, including the best selling The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master (Addison-Wesley) and Programming Ruby: A Pragmatic Programmer's Guide (Pragmatic Bookshelf).

David Geary is the president of Clarity Training, Inc. (corewebdevelopment.com), where he teaches developers to implement web applications using JavaServer Faces and the Google Web Toolkit.

A prominent author, speaker, and consultant, David holds a unique qualification as a Java expert: He wrote the best-selling books on both Java component frameworks: Swing and JavaServer Faces (JSF). David's Graphic Java Swing was one of the best-selling Java books of all-time and Core JSF, which David wrote with Cay Horstman, is the best-selling book on JavaServer Faces.

David was one of a handful of experts on the JSF 1.0 Expert Group (EG) that actively defined the standard Java-based web application framework, and he's currently helping to define the next version of JSF on the JSF 2.0 EG.

Besides serving on the JSF and JSTL Expert Groups, David has contributed to open-source projects and co-authored Sun's Web Developer Certification Exam. He invented the Struts Template library which was the precursor to Tiles, a popular framework for composing web pages from JSP fragments, was the 2nd Struts committer and contributed to Shale.

A regular on the NFJS tour, David also speaks at other conferences such as JavaOne and JavaPolis. David has taught at Java University and was twice voted a JavaOne rock star, for presentations in 2005 and 2007.

Eitan Suez is an independent software developer based in Austin, Texas. Some of the more visible work Eitan has done includes the open source project 'ashkelon' (sourceforge), a system for Java API documentation management; more recently, the open source framework JMatter (jmatter.org), a framework for constructing rich domain-driven workgroup applications (Java, Swing). Eitan has spoken at various NFJS events in years past, is active with his local JUG, and passionate about the practice of software development.

Howard Lewis Ship is the creator and lead developer for the Apache Tapestry project, and the creator of the Apache HiveMind project. He has over fifteen years of full-time software development under his belt, with over nine years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.

Howard is the author of Tapestry in Action for Manning Publications (which covers Tapestry 3.0), and is currently the Director of Open Source Technology for Formos Software Development. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, a novelist.

Howard is polishing the last rough edges of Tapestry 5 in anticipation of a final 5.0 release.

Mike Cohn is the founder of Mountain Goat Software, a process and project management consultancy and training firm. He is the author of User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development and Agile Estimating and Planning, as well as books on Java and C++ programming. With more than 20 years of experience, Mike has previously been a technology executive in companies of various sizes, from startup to Fortune 40. A frequent magazine contributor and conference speaker, Mike is a founding member of the AgileAlliance, and serves on its board of directors. He can be reached at mike@mountaingoatsoftware.com.

Neal Ford is an Application Architect for ThoughtWorks. He is an architect, designer, and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, and video/DVD presentations. Neal is also the author of Developing with Delphi: Object-Oriented Techniques (Prentice Hall PTR, 1996), JBuilder 3 Unleashed (SAMS Publishing, 1999), and Art of Java Web Development (Manning, 2003). His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Object Pascal, C++, and C. Neal’s primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 30 developers’ conferences worldwide.

Scott Davis is an internationally recognized author and speaker. He is passionate about open source solutions and agile development. He has worked on a variety of Java platforms, from J2EE to J2SE to J2ME (sometimes all on the same project).

Scott's books include Groovy Recipes: Greasing the Wheels of Java, GIS for Web Developers: Adding Where to Your Web Applications, The Google Maps API, and JBoss At Work.

Scott is the Editor in Chief of aboutGroovy.com, a news and information website that tracks the latest developments in Groovy and Grails. He also writes a regular column for IBM DeveloperWorks -- Mastering Grails.

Scott is a frequent presenter at national conferences (such as No Fluff, Just Stuff) and local user groups. He was the president of the Denver Java Users Group in 2003 when it was voted one of the top-ten JUGs in North America. After a quick move north, he is currently active in the leadership of the Boulder Java Users Group. Keep up with him at http://www.davisworld.org.

Stuart Halloway is the CEO of Relevance, Inc. (www.thinkrelevance.com). With co-founder Justin Gehtland, Stuart helps enterprises adopt emerging best practices such as Ruby on Rails. Justin and Stuart founded the Streamlined Framework (www.streamlinedframework.org), and authored Rails for Java Developers. Stuart is also the author of Component Development for the Java Platform. Prior to founding Relevance, Stuart was the Chief Architect at Near-Time, and the Chief Technical Officer at DevelopMentor.

Ted Neward is an independent consultant specializing in high-scale enterprise systems, working with clients ranging in size from Fortune 500 corporations to small 20-person shops. He speaks on the conference circuit, including the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium tour, discussing Java, .NET and XML service technologies, focusing on Java-.NET interoperability. He has written several widely-recognized books in both the Java and .NET space, including the recently-released "Effective Enterprise Java". He lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife, two sons, four video-game consoles, thousands of books (on programming and otherwise), and eight PCs.

Tom Marrs is a Principal Architect with CIBER, where he specializes in Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), JavaEE, Open Source, and AJAX/Web 2.0. He designs and implements mission-critical business applications using the latest technologies, leads technical teams, and trains and mentors other developers.

Tom is the co-author of JBoss At Work: A Practical Guide (O?Reilly, 10/2005), speaks regularly at software conferences, and reviews best-selling technical books for major publishers. An active participant in the local technical community, Tom founded the Denver Open Source Users Group (http://www.denveropensource.org) and has served as President of the Denver Java Users Group (http://www.denverjug.org).

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. He is author of ".NET Gotchas" (O'Reilly), coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Practices of an Agile Developer" (Pragmatic Bookshelf), and author of "Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer" (Pragmatic Bookshelf).