About the Authors

Norman Richards is a JBoss developer at JBoss, Inc., and is a strong believer in the professional open source model which allows him to earn a living creating open source software. He is the coauthor of XDoclet in Action and JBoss 4.0: The Official Guide. Norman graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and has been happily living in Austin, Texas ever since.

Sam Griffith, Jr. has been doing software development since 1979 and object-oriented development since 1987, starting with MacApp with the MacPIG group at Texas A&M. He transitioned to NeXSTEP, C++, Objective-C, and Smalltalk and did some mentoring in object-oriented development methods. He worked as a mentor and developer with those tools through the 1990s. In 1995, he began working with the first version of Java. In 1996, he and some friends started their own consulting company. That company delivered several commercial Java solutions for Nortel Networks, as well as becoming a Microsoft Solutions Partner in less than one year. In 1997, he taught Java at Southern Methodist University. He then sold his share of the company and went back to consulting, which led to working at Capital One in 1999, where he started selling the architecture team on the idea that Java was mature enough for enterprise use. He next worked on the first J2EE project at Capital One, and that project (case-based credit collections) was one of the first that used a business rules engine together with J2EE.

Since then, Sam has been doing consulting, training, and other odds and ends with Java and other languages, including Smalltalk and Ruby. He is a big fan of dynamic languages and systems. He is currently a developer at Dell, Inc. and a dad (his most important job).