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.

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.

Andrew is the founder of the easyb BDD framework and the co-author of Addison Wesley's "Continuous Integration", Manning's "Groovy in Action" and "Java Testing Patterns". He is an author for multiple online publications including IBM's developerWorks and Oreilly's ONJava and ONLamp portals. He actively blogs about software at thediscoblog.com.

Stuart Halloway is the CEO of Relevance, Inc. (www.thinkrelevance.com). With co-founder Justin Gehtland, Stuart helps companies adopt agile, as well as innovative technologies such as Clojure and Ruby on Rails. Stuart is the author of Programming Clojure, Rails for Java Developers, and 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.

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 is a SpringSource Principal Enginner. 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 Laddad is a well-known expert in enterprise Java, especially in the area of AOP and Spring. He is the author of AspectJ in Action, the best-selling book on AOP and AspectJ that has been lauded by industry experts for its presentation of practical and innovative AOP applications to solve real-world problems. Ramnivas, a Spring framework committer, is also an active presenter at leading industry events such as JavaOne, JavaPolis, No Fluff Just Stuff, SpringOne, Software Development, and has been an active member of both the AspectJ and Spring communities from their beginnings.

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.

Brian Sam-Bodden is an author, instructor, speaker and hacker that has spent over fifteen years crafting software systems. He holds dual bachelor degrees from Ohio Wesleyan University in computer science and physics and heads Integrallis http://www.integrallis.com. 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", co-author of the "Enterprise Java Development on a Budget: Leveraging Java Open Source Technologies" and a contributor to O'reilly's "97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know".

Bruce Tate is a kayaker, mountain biker, and father of two from Austin, Texas. Currently at RapidRed, his focus is on rapid development and Ruby applications. Bruce was the chief technology officer behind the sites ChangingThePresent.org and ClassWish. His current project is DigtheDirt, a social gardening site. The international speaker has coauthored more than a dozen books including Rails Up and Running, Deploying Rails Applications, Beyond Java, and From Java to Ruby. His firm seeks to improve total application quality through the use of small teams, expressive programming language and agile development practices.

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).