Gregor Hohpe is a software architect with Google, Inc. Gregor is a widely recognized thought leader on asynchronous messaging and service-oriented architectures. He co-authored the seminal book "Enterprise Integration Patterns" (Addison-Wesley, 2004), followed by "Integration Patterns" and "Enterprise Solution Patterns", both published by Microsoft Press. He was nominated a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) Solution Architect for his contributions to the developer community and recognized as an active member of the patterns community by the Hillside Group. In 2005, Joel Spolsky selected Gregor's article "Starbucks Does Not Use Two-phase Commit" for his "Best Software Writing" (APress).

Gregor speaks regularly at technical conferences around the world. He likes to cut through the hype surrounding service-oriented architectures and captures nuggets of advice in the form of design patterns that can help developers avoid costly mistakes. Find out more about his work at eaipatterns.com

Rod is the father of Spring. The Spring Framework open source project began in February 2003, based on the Interface21 framework published with Rod's best-selling Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development.

Rod is one of the world's leading authorities on Java and J2EE development. He is a best-selling author, experienced consultant, and open source developer, as well as a popular conference speaker.

Rod's best-selling Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development (2002) was one of the most influential books ever published on J2EE. The sequel, J2EE without EJB (July 2004, with Juergen Hoeller), has proven almost equally significant, establishing a comprehensive vision for lightweight, post-EJB J2EE development.

Rod has extensive experience as a consultant in a wide range of industries: principally, finance, media and insurance. He has specialized in server-side Java development since 1996. Prior to that, he worked mainly in C and C++. His experience as a consultant has led him to see problems from a client's perspective as well as a technology perspective, and has driven his influential criticism of bloated, inefficient, orthodox approaches to J2EE architecture, which have delivered very poor results for stakeholders.

Rod is the founder of the Spring Framework, which began from code published with Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development. Along with Juergen Hoeller, he continues to lead the development of Spring.

He regularly speaks at conferences in the US, Europe and Asia, including the ServerSide Symposium (2003, 2004, 2005 and 2006), JavaPolis (Europe's leading Java conference) in 2004 and 2005, JavaZone (2004 and 2005) and JAOO (2004). He was awarded a prize for giving one of the top 20 presentations (by evaluation) at JavaOne in 2005, and delivered keynotes at the JavaWorld conference in Tokyo, June, 2005, the JAX conference in Munich (October, 2005) and the Spring Experience conference in Bal Harbour, Florida, in December 2005.

Rod serves in the JCP on the Expert Groups defining the Servlet 2.4 and JDO 2.0 specifications. His status as a leader in the Java community has been recognized through his invitation to Sun's Java Champions program. Rod continues to be actively involved in client projects at Interface21, as well as Spring development, writing and evangelism.

Dr. Parsons has more than 20 years of application development experience in industries ranging from telecommunications to emergent internet services. She has been published in language and artificial intelligence media, served on numerous program committees, and currently reviews academic articles for several journals.

Before coming to ThoughtWorks she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida. She also worked as director's post doctoral fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory researching issues in parallel and distributed computation, genetic algorithms, computational biology and non-linear dynamical systems.

Dr. Parsons holds a [Ph.D] in Computer Science from Rice University.

I'm an author, speaker, consultant and general loud-mouth on software development.

I concentrate on designing enterprise software - looking at what makes a good design and what practices are needed to come up with good design. I've pioneered object-oriented technology, refactoring, patterns, agile methodologies, domain modeling, the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and Extreme Programming.

I'm the Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks - an international application development company. I've written five books on software development: Analysis Patterns, UML Distilled (now in its 3rd edition), Refactoring, Planning Extreme Programming (with Kent Beck), and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. I also write articles regularly on my site at Martin Fowler.