Author Biography: Subrahmanyam Allamaraju is a Senior Engineer with BEA Systems. His interest in modeling led him from his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering to object-oriented programming, and then to distributed computing and software architecture. In this process, he drifted from his one-time home - the Indian Institute of Technology, to Computervision, and Wipro Infotech, and later to BEA Systems. You can find more about his current activities at his home http://www.Subrahmanyam.com.

Ronald Ashri is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Southampton, working in the "Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia" group that is part of the Department of Electronics and Computer Science. His research is focused on infrastructures for agents in heterogeneous network environments, which range from the typical PC to Palm-style devices and mobile phones. This work is jointly funded by British Telecom and the University of Southampton. Other interests include the use of Jini network technology for the support of agent-based systems.

Earlier, Ronald worked for a short period at Adastral Park, BT's research center, focusing on security issues for mobile agents. He graduated from Warwick University with a First Class Honours degree in Computer Systems Engineering.

Chád Darby is the founder of J9 Consulting, a Java consulting firm. He has experience developing n-tier web applications for Fortune 500 companies and the Department of Defense. Chád has published articles in Java Report, Java Developer's Journal, and Web Techniques. He has also been an invited speaker at conferences including SD West 99, XML DevCon 2000, and JavaCon 2000.

Chád recently gave a presentation on WAP and XML in Sydney, Australia. In between consulting and writing projects, he teaches Java courses for Learning Tree International. Chád is a Sun certified Java developer and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Robert Flenner is an active author, independent contractor, and software developer. He has been involved in defining and designing E-Commerce systems for large enterprises. He has successfully coordinated application architecture strategies and led projects utilizing local and well as geographically dispersed development teams. He has extensive experience consulting with global companies on both strategic and tactical IT development and deployment. His technical consulting experience includes Web, CORBA, distributed object modeling, workflow, and high availability transaction processing. He is currently promoting and developing a framework for distributed development and collaboration. He can be contacted at rflenner@metronet.com.

Tracie Karsjens is a Minneapolis-based consultant working primarily in web based applications. She has been working with Java since 1996 and her experience covers every tier of enterprise Java applications. Tracie is a strong advocate for lightweight methodologies and techniques such as refactoring and unit testing.

Mark Kerzner has degrees in Math and in Computer Science, and 20 years of software development experience. He likes taking all available exams, so by now he has Microsoft, Java, and Weblogic certifications. He loves learning languages, both computer and human. He can be reached at kerzner@shmsoft.com.

Alex Krotov just defended his PhD at the University of Sheffield, UK in Computational Linguistics. He now lives in Portland, Oregon and works for the Center for Human-Computer Communication at Oregon Graduate Institute. His research interests include Natural Language Processing, and, in particular, language parsing and statistical NLP.