Our presenters are not simply vendor representatives --
they are industry recognized subject matter experts. They are published authors.
They are the people writing the software you use on a daily basis.
Ben Galbraith
- Book author, Ajaxian-at-Large, and Consultant
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 Sam-Bodden
- Java author, Ruby geek and Open Source Advocate
Brian Sam-Bodden is an author and recognized international speaker that has spent over twelve years working with object technologies, with an emphasis on the Java platform and in recent times falling in love with Ruby. He holds dual bachelor degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University in computer science and physics and is the president and chief software architect for Integrallis http://www.integrallis.com, where he focuses on building great applications with Java and Ruby. Brian has worked as an architect, developer, mentor, and trainer for several Fortune 500 companies in the tax, insurance, retail sciences, telecommunications, distribution, banking, finance, aviation, and scientific data management industries. As an independent consultant, he has promoted the use of open source in the industry by educating his clients on the cost benefits and productivity gains they can achieve. He is a frequent speaker at user groups and conferences nationally and abroad. Brian is the author of "Beginning POJOs: Spring, Hibernate, JBoss and Tapestry" and has also co-authored the Apress Java title "Enterprise Java Development on a Budget: Leveraging Java Open Source Technologies".
Bruce Tate
- Author of 3 JavaOne best sellers
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.
Dave Thomas
- Pragmatic Programmer, Ruby, Rails, Process Improvement
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
- Author of Graphic Java and co-author of Core JSF
David Geary is the president of Clarity Training, Inc. (corewebdevelopment.com), where he teaches developers to implement web applications using JSF, GWT, and Grails.
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.
Jason Hunter
- Author of Java Servlet Programming
Jason Hunter is Principal Technologist with Mark Logic, specializing in large-scale XML content manipulation using XQuery. He's probably best known as the author of "Java Servlet Programming" (O'Reilly Media). He's also an Apache Member and as Apache's representative on the Java Community Process Executive Committee he established a landmark agreement allowing open source Java. He's publisher of Servlets.com and XQuery.com, an original contributer to Apache Tomcat (and Apache Ant committer), the creator of the JDOM open source project, a member of the expert groups responsible for Servlet, JSP, JAXP, and XQJ API development, and was recently appointed Sun Java Champion. In 2003, he received the Oracle Magazine Author of the Year award, and in both 2005 and 2006, the JavaOne Outstanding Talk award. His largest audience was 15,000 at a JavaOne conference keynote.
Ramnivas Laddad
- Author of AspectJ in Action, Principal at SpringSource
Ramnivas Laddad is an
Interface21 Principal. He has over a decade of experience in applying his enterprise Java and aspect-oriented programming (AOP) expertise to middleware, design automation, networking, web application, user interface, and security projects.
Ramnivas is a well-known expert in enterprise Java, especially in the area of AOP. He is the author of
AspectJ in Action, the best-selling book on AOP and AspectJ. His book is highly recommended by leading industry experts for its practical and innovative applications of AOP solving a wide range of real-world problems. Ramnivas is also one of the industry's leading conference speakers, who has given over one hundred talks at conferences such as JavaOne, No Fluff Just Stuff, JavaPolis, and EclipseCon. Ramnivas hosts the
Aspectivity blog, where he shares his thoughts on AOP and related topics. He is an active member of the AspectJ community and has been involved with AOP since its early form.
Ramnivas’ role at SpringSource includes working with the Spring community and SpringSource clients to help them leverage the power of AOP. He is currently involved in interesting work combining ideas in domain-driven design with AOP and DI. He is also working on creating reusable aspects to simplify development of typical Spring-based projects. His work at SpringSource is expected to drive major new innovations atop the Spring 2.0 platform.
Ramnivas lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
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
- Enterprise, Virtual Machine and Language Wonk
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.