Ask the Experts

Rajeev Angal is an architect for access and federation management at Sun Microsystems. He started a stint in security software in 1999. Rajeev joined Sun about a decade ago and has closely followed the evolution of proprietary and standards-based authentication systems, also the standards themselves: Liberty Alliance, Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), WS-Federation.

Richard Bair is a Swing Engineer at Sun Microsystems, lead of the SwingLabs project, and all around "funky demo guy". He is a frequent speaker at JavaOne, Javoxx, and other Java conferences. His background prior to joining Sun is in rich enterprise application development and writing database front ends. He was one of the principle engineers on the new Nimbus LookAndFeel and currently is working on JavaFX client APIs.

Mark Basler is a senior software engineer who is currently part of the Java Blueprints team that created the Java Blueprints Solution Catalog and Java Pet Store 2.0 which are reference applications that demonstrate how to design and develop AJAX-enabled Web 2.0 applications. His other contributions include the design and development of key components for Sun's Download Center, eCommerce suites, and Sun Java System Application Server. Before joining Sun, Mark was a consultant on Web development, specializing in high-volume eCommerce software.

Alan Bateman is an engineer in the Java SE Core Technologies team at Sun Microsystems. He is currently leading "NIO.2", the effort to develop more New I/O APIs for the Java Platform. Prior to this, Alan worked in the JDK serviceability team on the development of diagnosability, monitoring and management, and tool interfaces. In a prior life, Alan worked in the JDK networking team.

David Botterill has over 24 years of software development experience and currently works as a staff software engineer for Sun Microsystems. He has been active on the Java platform since version 1.0. David has held many positions at Sun Microsystems including working on one of the NetBeans engineering teams. Currently working as a NetBeans Evangelist, David helps spreads the good news about Sun's development tools.

Martin Brehovsky is a software engineer in Sun's Software Systems Group, where he works as an architect for JavaFX tools. Previously he worked as a project lead for NetBeans Mobility SVG tooling and for the Visual Mobile Designer. Prior to joining Sun, he was a freelance consultant and a lecturer for the University of West Bohemia, Pilsen, Czech Republic, where he focused on geographical information systems. Martin has presented many times at various developer events around the world, including JavaOne, SVGOpen, Sun Tech Days, and NetBeans Days.

Ed Burns is a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems. He has worked on a wide variety of client and server-side web technologies since 1994, including NCSA Mosaic, Mozilla, the Sun Java Plugin, Jakarta Tomcat, and most recently JavaServer Faces technology. Ed is currently the co-spec lead for JavaServer Faces technology.

Chris Campbell is an engineer on the Java 2D Team at Sun Microsystems, working on OpenGL hardware acceleration and imaging related issues. He will be out the door as soon as his rock and roll career takes off. Anyone that knows Chris understands that he is full of contradictions and that his music career will never come to fruition. Therefore, you can trust that he will be working hard for years to come to make Java the perfect platform for rich graphical applications and games.

Harold Carr is the engineering lead for enterprise web services interoperability at Sun Microsystems - enabling atomic transactions, reliable messaging and security between Java and Windows Communications Foundation. Previous to this role, he was responsible for RMI-IIOP load-balancing and fail-over in the Sun Java System Application Server (SJSAS). He designed the core architecture used in Sun's CORBA ORB and in the JAX-RPC 2.0 reference implementation and the scalable socket communications architecture used in SJSAS HTTP and IIOP remoting. He helped write the OMG Portable Object Adapter specification and was chairperson of the OMG Portable Interceptor specification. Previous to Sun, he did distributed computing research at Hewlett-Packard Research Laboratories and Schlumberger Research Laboratories, was Chief Architect of Visual Lisp technology at Autodesk, and was a logic simulation consultant for Cirrus Logic. He holds a Ph.D., in Computer Science from the University of Utah.

Sharat Chander is the Product Line Manager for Sun Java Studio Creator at Sun Microsystems. In his 5 years at Sun, he has managed several developer efforts including Community Outreach, Learning & Event Programs, Partner Recruitment, and Software Development. He is also one of Sun's participants and contributors to the newly founded OpenAjax Alliance.

Qingwen Cheng is a senior staff engineer with Access Manager/Federation Manager/OpenSSO team at Sun Microsystems Inc. He is currently the technical lead for federation services in the team, working on the implementation of federation and web services standards, including OASIS SAML 1.x, Liberty ID-FF/ID-SIS/ID-WSF, OASIS SAML v2 and WS-Federation. Previously, Qingwen was the technical lead for the SDK and Authentication group in the Access Manager team.

Calvin Cheung has been with Sun for over 7 years. He is a Staff Engineer in the Java SE Deployment team working on the Java Plug-in technology. Previously, he worked in the Java SE sustaining team. He holds a B.S. degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from U.C. Davis and a M.S. degree in Computer Science from USC.

Sandip Chitale is a Senior Staff Engineer in Sun Java Studio Creator group. He is currently working on the language modeling, refactoring and two-way editing of JavaServer Faces artifacts in the Sun Java Studio Creator IDE. He has developed several modules/plugins for the NetBeans IDE. In the past he has worked on several IDEs and was an active contributor to JGuru.com in the areas of AWT/Swing. His current interests are Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), GUIs, and language modeling.

John Clingan is the Sun Application Server Group Product Manager in the Application Platform group at Sun Microsystems, Inc. He is responsible for strategy, messaging and positioning of the Sun Java System Application Server and works with the GlassFish community to do the same. John has been at Sun for over 10 years and prior to his current role has been a pre-sales Systems Engineer and a Software Solutions Architect. John is also an active blogger discussing the virtues of Solaris Containers, Project GlassFish and the Sun Java System Application Server.

Danny Coward is the Chief Architect for Sun's Client Software. In the past he has led the development of several technologies in the Java EE and Java ME platforms. He's currently the specification lead for the Java SE 7 platform, and drives the JavaFX product family for Sun. Danny is also Sun's representative on the JCP Executive Committee for Java SE and Java EE.

Cheng Dan is a member of technical staff in the Java Deployment team in J2SE. He has worked primarily on Java Web Start technology.

Neil Davis has worked with SunOS/Solaris for the past 20 years, and spent the past 8 years as a consultant specializing in web-based architectures. Neil has used and advised on the deployment architectures of Sun's application server products from iAS 6.0 through to Sun Java System Application Server 8.1 for a number of industry verticals. For the past 2 years, Neil has been working on a large IT project, which not only uses the majority of the Java Enterprise System stack, but also uses the Java Web Services Developer Pack extensively. Neil says "I've failed to learn a foreign language in life, but apart from Java, my other favorite languages are Smalltalk, Algol, oh and C."

David Dice is a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems. He was technical lead for threading and synchronization for the HotSpot virtual machine and is now a researcher in Sun Laboratories, focusing on transactional memory and its applications to Java. Dave has published various papers in peer-reviewed journals.

Dilli Dorai is a technical lead at Sun Microsystems responsible for the authentication, session, and authorization modules of OpenSSO and Sun Access Manager. He has been following the evolution of Liberty, SAML and XACML specifications and has contributed to the product implementations. Dilli has worked with XACML interop teams and participated in XACML interops.

Ken Drachnikis a Community Development and Marketing Manager in the Open Source Group at Sun Microsystems where he coordinates Sun's participation with the Free and Open Source Communities to release open source versions of Sun's middleware software products and Enterprise Java (Java EE). With more than 20 years of technical industry marketing experience, Ken has been in Sun's software organization for more than 4 years, marketing solutions and products based on Java EE and Java ME. Last year he launched Project GlassFish; an open source community led by Sun to develop the next generation Java EE 5 application server which was released in May of 2006.

Jim Driscoll has been at Sun for nearly nine years, ever since he joined JavaSoft to work on the Java Web Server and the first version of Servlets. At various times, he has been the manager of the J2EE RI, the Java Web Services Developer Pack, and a host of Open Source, web and XML projects that Sun has either participated in or led. His current job title is Manager, Project GlassFish. He lives and works in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay area.

Margarita Fisher has been working at Sun for over 6 years. She is an engineer in Java SE Deployment group, and works on Java Plug-in Technology, the Java Control Panel, and various user interface aspects of deployment.

Mikhail Gorshenev is a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems working in the Java conformance testing team. He has been crafting test suites for the Java platform since 1996, most recently for the Java ME technologies. Mikhail's primary area of focus is the Technology Compatibility Kits (TCKs) for the Java Community Process specifications. He has lead TCK development for more than a dozen JSRs, including MSA (JSR 248), JTWI (JSR 185) and MIDP 2.0 (JSR 118).

Dennis Gu is a member of technical staff in the Java Deployment team in J2SE. He has worked at Sun Microsystems for five years, and has been involved with each major JRE release since JRE 1.3. Dennis works primarily on Java Plug-In and Java Web Start technologies, especially in the areas of security, and SSL connection and authentication. Currently Dennis is focused on ease-of-deployment features in Java SE 6 and Java SE 7.

Arun Gupta is a staff engineer at Sun Microsystems and works in the Web Technologies and Standards team. In his current role, Arun is a technology evangelist for Web Services and Next Generation Web Applications. He has been involved with the web services effort at Sun since the beginning and contributed to multiple technologies. He has represented Sun in W3C, WS-I and SOAP Builders. Arun holds a BS in Electronics from Delhi University, India and an MS in Computers from Delhi University, India. Arun has presented at multiple conferences and has one patent awarded and three pending related to XML technology.

Andy Herrick is a Staff Engineer and technical lead for the Java Web Start project in the Java Deployment group. He has over 25 years of industry experience and has been working at Sun for over 15 years. For the past 10 years he has worked in several Java groups, and has been in the Java Deployment group since it's inception.

Shannon Hickey is Technical Lead for the Swing team at Sun Microsystems. As a member of the team for the last five years, he has become intimately familiar with the toolkit, of which he now guides the technical direction. Shannon is also personally responsible for enhancing multiple areas, including the Swing drag and drop experience. You'll find him frequenting the Swing & AWT forum on JavaDesktop.org where he loves chatting with the community and answering questions.

Lily Hou is a Senior Architect in the Global Expertise Center in Client Solutions at Sun Microsystems. She has worked with several large customer deployments and has lead the effort to assist customers in migrating to the Sun Java System Application Server.

Dave Johnson is the co-founder and CTO of Nitobi Software, a Vancouver-based AJAX component vendor and consulting firm. Dave spends most of his time on architecting and building high performance AJAX components for use in web-based applications. A core focus of Nitobi is building AJAX components and user interfaces that deliver real value to customers through increased productivity and higher efficiency. Dave is going to share his 8 years of AJAX (of course, it wasn't called AJAX back then) knowledge in an upcoming book, titled "Enterprise Ajax", that is to be published in early 2007.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi is a staff engineer at Sun Microsystems. He is the Reference Implementation and specification lead for JAXB. He also participates in the JAX-WS RI architecture design and implementations.

Roger Kitain is the co-spec lead for JavaServer Faces technology. Roger has been extensively involved with server-side web technologies and products since 1997. He started working on JavaServer Faces technology in 2001, as a member of the reference implementation team. He has experience with Servlet technology, JSP technology, and most recently has been involved with different rendering technologies for JSF.

Jitendra Kotamraju is a staff engineer at Sun Microsystems. He has been working in Java web services, including JAX RPC, JAX-WS, and SAAJ implementations. He has extensive experience in distributed and networking technologies.

Satish Kumar is the module owner and technical lead for the Sun Java System Application Server Migration tool at Sun Microsystems. He has over 8 years of experience in the design and development of large scale, web-based, enterprise applications. He holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Manchester.

Brian Leonard works as a senior software engineer with Sun Microsystems. Most of his experience is with Java application servers, working on Java EE servers before there was a standard. Today, Brian leverages his experiences to evangelize technologies such as Java, Ruby and NetBeans and has the enviable job of getting to discuss these technologies with developers around the world.

Judith Lilienfeld is the Director of Tools Evangelism at Sun Microsystems. She has held various technical and management positions at Sun Microsystems, including Senior Product Manager for Web Services, and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE) Compatibility Marketing Manager. Prior to joining Sun, Judith held technical and management positions in engineering, marketing and support at Sybase, Inc. Before her career in software technology, Judith was a structural engineer. She has a Bachelor's degrees in both English and Civil Engineering.

Ana Lindstrom-Tamer is a software engineer in Sun Microsystem's Web Technologies and Standards Organization. She is currently a developer of the Java Web Services Developer Pack and has developed graphical user interfaces using Java, C, C++, XSL, and TCL for stand-alone and Web applications.

Ramesh Mandava is Senior Staff Engineer in Web Technology and Standards group of Sun Microsystems. Ramesh has over eleven years of experience in the software industry, working in telecommunications, web and web services-related technologies. In his current role, Ramesh is the lead engineer of Java Web Services Developer Pack, which is an integrated toolkit containing the latest web services technologies and standards implementations.

Joshua Marinacci first tried Java in 1995 at the request of his favorite TA and never looked back. He has spent the last ten years writing Java user interfaces for wireless, web, and desktop platforms. After tiring of web programming at a certain home improvement retail center, a wireless carrier, and a document management company he joined the Swing team at Sun to finally get back to into high-quality user interfaces. Joshua recently co-authored O'Reilly's Swing Hacks with Chris Adamson. He also leads the Flying Saucer open source project and helps out with JDIC and SwingLabs. Joshua holds a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and recently moved to San Jose, California.

Larry McDonough is Engineering Manager for JavaFX Runtime and is responsible for delivering the cross-device Rich Internet Application (RIA) runtime for JavaFX applications. Prior to this role at Sun, Larry was the engineering manager for the Java Client Graphics Team. Before that he was the product line manager for Java ME and brought Sun's first MSA-ready CLDC/MIDP stack to market. Larry has over 15 years experience in computer graphics, animation, motion capture, and graphics for mobile devices.

Carla Mott is the community lead for Project GlassFish. She has worked on J2EE for the last 7 years. She started out as the Software Quality Engineering lead for the J2EE 1.2 and 1.3 releases of the J2EE SDK. Later moved to development as the technical lead on the Java Application Verification Kit for the Enterprise (AVK). She has presented at several conferences including JavaOne.

Vivek Mody is the Community Marketing Manager and Senior Product Marketing Manager for Java ME technologies at Sun Microsystems, Inc. He is responsible for the strategy, messaging and positioning of the recently launched Java ME platform open source community. Vivek is a part of the Java ME marketing team and a member of Sun's Open Source Group. He is responsible for marketing the Mobile & Embedded community, a successful developer community for all Java ME technologies including source code for the Java ME platform. Vivek has been with Sun for over 3 years, working in the software marketing organization. He has over 14 years of software industry experience with over 8 years in telecommunications and wireless software marketing in roles ranging from product management, outbound marketing, partner management, technical marketing and business and product strategy.

Mark Mundy has worked for Sun for over 8 years in both support and consultancy. He is currently working in the Client Solutions Delivery organization, based in the UK, fully engaged on a large project that utilizes much of the Java Enterprise System product stack. Mark is currently working on a Sun Message Queue architecture and implementation project, but also works closely with Sun Java System Application Server 8.1 and other related technologies.

Greg Murray is Sun's AJAX Architect. He is also the servlet specification lead. Greg is a former member of the BluePrints team for which he was responsible for the web tier recommendations. He has experience with internationalization, web services, J2SE standalone clients, and AJAX-based web clients.

Thomas Ng is a software engineer in the Java Deployment team at Sun Microsystems. He has worked on developing Java Web Start software since version 1.0.

Tor Norbye is a principal engineer at Sun Microsystems. He is currently working on the Ruby and JavaScript editors in NetBeans, and has previously worked on Sun Java Studio Creator and AJAX JSF components. Tor blogs regularly at http://blogs.sun.com/tor, and is a cohost of the Java Posse.

Scott Oaks is the lead engineer for Sun's Java Enterprise Performance group. He has worked on a variety of technologies during his almost 20 years at Sun -- including everything from kernel device drivers to X to olvwm to Java. He is also the co-author of four books in the O'Reilly Java Series.

Charles Oliver Nutter co-leads the JRuby project. Since joining Sun Microsystems in 2006 he's worked with the other JRuby contributors to turn JRuby into a fast, compatible implementation of the Ruby language. During that time, JRuby has become more and more popular for both web and desktop-based Ruby applications, leveraging the best of the Ruby and Java worlds. Charles has developed in Java for the past decade, and now hopes to make the JVM and the Java platform the best home for many languages, using the lessons of JRuby as a guide.

Vivek Pandey is a Senior Staff Engineer at Sun Microsystems. He works on XML and web services technologies and is the Technical Lead of the JAX-WS Reference Implementation. He also represents Sun in the Basic Profile Working Group at WS-I.

Valerie Peng works in the Java Security group at Sun Microsystems, Inc. For the past seven years, she has worked mainly on cryptography and other security components of the J2SE platform as well as contributing to Java platform security audits and incidents. Valerie currently leads the Java PKCS11 area.

Danielle Pham is a senior staff engineer at Sun Microsystems. Danielle has been with Sun's Java Deployment team for the past 2.5 years. She works primarily on Java Plug-In technology.

Marek Potociar is a staff engineer in the Web Technologies and Standards team working on Web Services Interoperability Technology (WSIT). In his current assignment, Marek is primarily responsible for the design and implementation of the WSIT core policy engine in compliance with WS-Policy specifications.

Aravindan Ranganathan is a software architect at Sun. He is currently designing identity services for SOA. Previously, Aravindan developed solutions for securing Web-service communications and for implementing SSO within and across enterprises. Aravindan has also actively participated in standards bodies, such as the Liberty Alliance Project in defining the Identity Federation Framework (ID-FF); and OASIS Technical Committees in developing SAML, XACML, and SPML specifications.

Amy Roh has been working on Java 2 Enterprise Edition at Sun Microsystems since 2000 where her focus has been on web tier technologies including Servlet and Web Container. She is also a community leader for the java-enterprise community on java.net, a project owner for GlassFish, a committer for the Jakarta Tomcat project at the Apache foundation, and an honorary member of the BluePrints team. She has presented at several conferences including JavaOne, the O'Reilly Open Source Software Convention, and JUG meetings.

Ken Russell is a Staff Engineer in the Java SE Deployment Group at Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he has worked since 1999. He is the architect of the next-generation Java Plug-In. His background and interests include high-performance 3D graphics and programming in dynamic languages, especially the Java(TM) programming language. He is one of the principal authors of the JOGL Java programming language binding to OpenGL and is a member of the JSR 231 expert group. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer science and electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master of Science degree in media arts and sciences from the Media Lab, MIT.

Richard Sands is the Community Marketing Manager for Java SE technologies at Sun Microsystems. He is responsible for marketing Sun's successful and active developer community built around the source code for the Java SE Platform. As part of his role, Rich helps to develop the strategy and market positioning for Sun's recently announced initiative to open source its Java SE implementation. He is part of the Java SE marketing team and a member of Sun's Open Source Group, a team of marketing professionals tasked with creating and implementing Sun's open source software marketing strategy. Rich has been with Sun for more than 18 years, and has held a wide range of positions in product and field marketing, including product management, technical evangelism, competitive intelligence, and business strategy roles. He holds an MBA from Boston University.

E-ming Saung is the Product Line Manager in the Java ME Marketing group. He is mainly responsible for managing the product delivery of Java ME SDKs to all mobile Java developers. He works closely with the NetBeans Mobility Team to make sure the developers have what they need to develop compelling applications for the Java ME platform.

Petr Suchomel is a software engineer in Sun's Software Systems Group. He is an engineering technical lead for NetBeans Mobility, concentrating on high level issues such as usability and performance. Prior to that, Petr was responsible for Java support tools in the Java and Repository team in the NetBeans group. Before he joined Sun in 2001, Petr was responsible for developing location systems based on GPS/GSM, and other enterprise systems.

Oleg Sukhodolsky is Technical Lead for the AWT team at Sun Microsystems. He has been a member of the team for the last seven years. He special focus (appropriately enough) is on focus management in AWT.

Ron Ten-Hove is a senior staff software engineer with Sun, and is a co-spec lead of JSR 208 - Java Business Integration. Previously at Sun, he developed integration, business process automation, web service, and 4GL products. Prior to working at Sun, Ron worked in a variety of industries, producing software for industrial automation and utility information systems vendors. He has also found employment designing control and power systems for oil and gas production, mines, pulp and paper plants, and other resource extraction industries. Ron holds a BSc in electrical engineering from the University of Calgary, Canada. (For Java trivial pursuit fans, that is the same school where James Gosling did his undergraduate work.)

Sridatta Viswanath is a Senior Engineering Manager in the GlassFish team. He has been with Sun for more than 8 years and has worked on various projects in various roles as engineer, lead architect, and manager. Most recently he was the manager responsible for the delivery of GlassFish v2.

Peter Walker, a Senior Staff Engineer at Sun, is the co-spec lead of JSR 208 - Java Business Integration. He worked previously in Sun's J2EE Application Server group. Peter joined Sun at the start of 1999 and is Alternate Voter for Sun on the JCP Executive Committee and Sun's Technical Representative to the Object Management Group.

Prior to joining Sun, Peter was a consultant systems architect with a Florida-based consultancy, creating and implementing enterprise solutions for companies in the financial (ChicagoBoard Options Exchange, USAA and various banks), travel (SABRE, Galileo and WORLDSPAN,) and Utility (SoCal Edison) sectors. Prior to that, he was architect of TMN-based solutions for the management of SDH/Sonet networks implemented for sale around the globe at the culmination of a twelve year career in the telecommunications sector in the United Kingdom. Peter has a BSc from Edinburgh University in Scotland.

Hinkmond Wong is a senior staff engineer with the Java Micro Edition (Java ME) group at Sun Microsystems, Inc. He is one of the current project owners of the phoneME open source project and was the past specification lead for the Java Community Process (JCP) Java Specification Requests (JSRs) 36, 46, 218, and 219, Java ME Connected Device Configuration (CDC) and Foundation Profile. He holds a B.S.E in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and an M.S.E in computer engineering from Santa Clara University.