A Sun Java Champion, software developer and designer who has over 15 years commercial experience. Peter's expertise lies in Java enterprise development on the server-side. It also extends to web design, object oriented design and aspects of architecture. Peter has a Physical Sciences & Computing honours degree from South Bank University. He has been instrumental in software development projects for financial services, especially for investment banks like UBS, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank.

Just before his first visit to JavaONE, in 2004, Peter sent out an invitation email on the then struts-users mailing list. He, thereby, founded and organised the first London Struts Meet-up in London at the infamous Waxy O'Connors Irish pub in Soho, London. The success of the subsequent meet-ups eventually led to the formation of the JAVAWUG, a Java User Group dedicated to every enthusiast who is interested in all things Java web enterprise technology based.

Peter Pilgrim is your "Java Enterprise Software Design Artist"!

URLs:

http://jroller.com/peter_pilgrim

http://jroller.com/javawug

Dalibor Topić is a graduate student at the University of Saarland, Saarbrücken, Germany and works at the Max-Planck Institute for Computer Science.

He is a well-known and outspoken thought leader for the free software movement and a co-maintainer of the kaffe.org virtual machine project.

A member of the Free Software Foundation, Dalibor participates in the GNU Classpath project and has been instrumental in bringing several Java-oriented free software projects together including GNU Classpath, Kaffe, and GCJ.

Patrick Curran is Chair of the JCP. In this role he oversees the activities of the JCP Program Office including driving the process, managing its membership, guiding specification leads and experts through the process, leading the Executive Committee meetings, and managing the JCP.org web site. Patrick has worked in the software industry for more than 20 years and at Sun for 15 years. He has a long-standing record in conformance testing, and most recently led the Java Conformance Engineering team in Sun's Client Software Group. He was also chair of Sun's Conformance Council, which is responsible for defining Sun's policies and strategies around Java conformance and compatibility.

Patrick has participated actively in several consortia and communities including the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) (member of the W3C's Quality Assurance Working Group, co-chair of the W3C Quality Assurance Interest Group), and the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS)(co-chair of the OASIS Test Assertions Guidelines Technical Committee). Patrick maintains a blog at http://blogs.sun.com/pcurran/

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 Mark Little is Engineering Director at Red Hat, where he is also the Technical Development Manager of the SOA Platform. Mark is also Director of Standards and Red Hat's representative on the Java Executive Committee.

He has over 20 years of experience working in the area of reliable distributed systems. While at Red Hat/JBoss Mark has been the lead of the JBoss ESB and JBoss Transactions products as well as working from the office of the CTO.

Prior to joining JBoss, he was Chief Architect and co-founder at Arjuna Technologies, a Hewlett-Packard spin-off company specialising in the area of transactions and messaging for J2EE and Web Services. There he lead the transactions teams and provided technical vision for their pioneering Web Services transactions work. While at HP Mark was a Distinguished Engineer, leading the development of the world's first Web Services transactions product.

He is co-author and contributor on several books, has numerous published papers and presented at a range of conferences for over 20 years. During this period he has also found time to chair standards groups in the OMG, JCP and OASIS and co-authored several of the WS-* series of specifications.

Stephen Colebourne is a hands-on Technical Architect at SITA ATS Ltd, where he oversees the development of e-commerce systems for airlines. He has been developing in Java since version 1.0 and has both client and server side experience.

In his spare time he keeps himself very busy. Dates and times have become a passion, and he is co-spec lead of JSR-310 Date and Time API and project lead of Joda-Time. The second major area of interest is Java language change, where he is the co-author of FCM closures and founder of the Kijaro project where language change ideas can be implemented in javac. Finally, he is a member of the Apache Software Foundation following work on Commons Collections, Lang and IO.

Stephen is now a regular conference speaker and a frequent blogger at http://www.jroller.com/scolebourne/ . He was elected a Java Champion in 2007.