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).

Brian Sletten is a liberal arts-educated software engineer with a focus on using and evangelizing forward-leaning technologies. He has a background as a system architect, a developer, a security consultant, a mentor, a team lead, an author and a trainer and operates in all of those roles as needed. His experience has spanned the online game, defense, finance, academic, hospitality, retail and commercial domains. He has worked with a wide variety of technologies such as 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. He is President of Bosatsu Consulting, Inc. and lives in Los Angeles, CA.

He focuses on web architecture, resource-oriented computing, social networking, the Semantic Web, scalable systems, security consulting and other technologies of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

Ted Neward is an Architectural Consultant with Neudesic, LLC as well as the Principal with Neward & Associates. He speaks on the conference circuit discussing Java, .NET and XML service technologies, focusing on Java-.NET interoperability, programming languages, and virtual machine technologies. He has written several widely-recognized books in both the Java and .NET space, including the recently- released "Professional F#" and widely-acclaimed "Effective Enterprise Java". He lives in the Pacific Northwest.

Neal is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery.

Before joining ThoughtWorks, Neal was the Chief Technology Officer at The DSW Group, Ltd., a nationally recognized training and development firm. Neal has a degree in Computer Science from Georgia State University specializing in languages and compilers and a minor in mathematics specializing in statistical analysis.

He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, video presentations, and author of 6 books, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. His language proficiencies include Java, C#/.NET, Ruby, Groovy, functional languages, Scheme, Object Pascal, C++, and C. His primary consulting focus is the design and construction of large-scale enterprise applications. Neal has taught on-site classes nationally and internationally to all phases of the military and to many Fortune 500 companies. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, having spoken at over 100 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 600 talks. If you have an insatiable curiosity about Neal, visit his web site at http://www.nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

Joe Walker is a developer and consultant working on advanced web development techniques like AJAX.

He recently developed Direct Web Remoting, (DWR) which has become the most popular Ajax toolkit for Java by making browser/server interaction intuitive for web developers. See http://www.directwebremoting.com

He currently works through his consultancy, Getahead (http://getahead.org/), which is supplying a growing number of customers with AJAX and advanced web solutions.

As Head of Grails Development for SpringSource, 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.

Simon Ritter specialises in looking at emerging technologies including grid computing, RFID, wireless sensor networks, robotics and wearable computing. Simon has been in the IT business since 1984 and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Brunel University in the U.K.Originally working in the area of UNIX development for AT&T UNIX System Labs and then Novell, Simon joined Sun in 1996 and started working with Java technology; he has spent time doing both Java development and consultancy.

Dan Haywood is well-known as an advocate of Naked Objects, having been a lead contributor for the past 5 years. He was instrumental in the success of the first large-scale Naked Objects systems which now delivers pensions and other benefits to over 250,000 senior citizens in Ireland. Dan is also lead developer of the Naked Objects IDE and a committer to the Naked Objects Framework.

Dan provides consulting and training services on domain driven design and agile development through his own company, in particular with respect to the use of Naked Objects. Previously Dan has worked as a technical consultant at Sybase UK and on large-scale projects at Accenture. Dan has presented at numerous conferences, most often on Naked Objects but also on topics that have included AspectJ, TogetherJ, MDA and SQLj. He has also written various articles on TheServerSide and elsewhere, and in 2002 he co-authored Better Software Faster, a book on best practice using TogetherJ. Right now he is currently writing a book on Domain Driven Design and Naked Objects for the Pragmatic Bookshelf, due 2008.

Ben Hale is a senior software engineer with Springsource and a core developer on the SpringSource dm Server project. Ben specializes in middleware development with using technologies such as OSGi and Aspect Oriented Programming as well as directing the build and release processes for all products in the Spring and SpringSource portfolios.

His interests include middle-tier architecture and effective build and release management strategies.

Prior to joining SpringSource, Ben spent several years leading teams in architecture and development of large-scale enterprise management applications for the telecommunications industry.

Mark Goodwin is a web applications security specialist at a major financial institution.

Over the years Mark has worked in systems administration as well as applications software development on variety of platforms from mobile handsets to mainframes. He now works in a team of application security specialists carrying out security testing, providing advice and training for software developers on security techniques and developing tools for security testing and events analysis. Mark is a Certified Ethical Hacker.

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

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. David's Graphic Java Swing was the best-selling Swing book, and is 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 David is currently on the JSF 2 Expert Group, helping to vastly improve JSF in version 2.

Besides serving on the JSF and JSTL Expert Groups, David has contributed to open-source projects and he has written questions for two of Sun's Certification Exams: Web Developer Certification and JavaServer Faces Certification. 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 the Apache Shale project.

David has spoken at more than 100 NFJS symposiums since 2003, and he also speaks at other conferences such as TheServerSide Java Symposium, JavaOne, JavaPolis, and JAOO. David has taught at Java University for the past three years, and is a three-time JavaOne rock star.

Paul Fremantle is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and a committer on the Apache Synapse project. An expert on reliable messaging and lightweight SOA, Paul co-founded the SOA startup, WSO2 in 2005. He also plays the tin whistle.

Erik Doernenburg is a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks Inc. where he is helping clients with the design and implementation of large-scale enterprise solutions. Building on his experience with J2EE, Microsoft .NET and other environments, Erik is continually exploring patterns of enterprise software. He is an advocate of agile development and Open Source software, holds a degree in Informatics from the University of Dortmund and has studied Computer Science and Linguistics at the University College Dublin

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.

Geert is a developer at Terracotta Inc., is the CEO and founder of Uwyn bvba/sprl and created the RIFE project which provides a full-stack Java Web application framework for quickly building maintainable applications. He started or contributed to open-source projects like Bla-bla List, OpenLaszlo, Drone, JavaPaste, Bamboo, Elephant, RelativeLayers, and Gentoo Linux. Geert is also an official Sun Java Champion.