What's Next : All the best IT experts for you

Neal Gafter

Neal Gafter was a primary designer and implementer of the Java SE 4 and 5 language enhancements, and his Java Closures implementation won an OpenJDK Innovator’s Challenge award. He continues to kibitz on the language changes in progress for SE 7 and 8. Neal previously worked on Google’s online Calendar. He was a member of the C++ Standards Committee and led the development of C and C++ compilers at Sun Microsystems, Microtec Research, and Texas Instruments. Today, Neal works for Microsoft on .NET platform languages. Neal is coauthor of "Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases" (Addison Wesley, 2005). He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Rochester..

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Jonas Bonér

Akka: Simpler Scalability, Fault-Tolerance, Concurrency & Remoting through Actors

Jonas Bonér is a programmer, teacher, mentor, speaker and author who spends most of his time consulting, hacking on open source as well as lecturing and speaking at developer conferences world-wide. He has worked at Terracotta, the JRockit JVM at BEA and is an active contributor to the Open Source community; most notably created the Akka Project, AspectWerkz Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) framework, committer to the Terracotta JVM clustering technology and been part of the Eclipse AspectJ team. Blog: jonasboner.com.

You can follow Jonas on Twitter as .

Brad Drysdale

HTML5 WebSockets - the Web Communication revolution, making the impossible, possible

Brad Drysdale is the Technical Director in EMEA for Kaazing, a software company enhancing the way business and customers communicate across the Web using the new HTML5 WebSocket standard. Brad works closely with customers to architect and deploy the best possible web communication solutions. He is a keen technical evangelist and company spokesperson at various seminars and industry events.

Before joining Kaazing, Brad was Technical Director for Azul Systems in EMEA, working with large customers to realise the benefits of virtualised, high-scale, network-attached Java computing. Brad also was the EMEA technical evangelist for Azul and spoke at several Java developer and industry analyst events.

Prior to Azul, Brad managed a team of pre-sales professionals at BEA Systems in Australia, and was also the company's technical spokesperson, spending a lot of time with customers, industry analysts and at marketing events extolling the virtues of J2EE, SOA and standards-based infrastructure.

Brad has also worked at Openwave and Netscape Communications in various pre-sales and technical evangelist roles. He is a proficient speaker and tries his best to describe new and revolutionary technologies in a way easily understandable by audiences ranging from very technical to more business focused.

Brad founded and runs the London HTML5 User Group and is a regular speaker at other local technical meet ups.

Jevgeni Kabanov

Do you really get memory?

Jevgeni Kabanov is the founder and CTO of ZeroTurnaround, a development tools company that focuses on productivity. Before that he worked as the R&D director of Webmedia, Ltd, the largest custom software development company in the Baltics. As part of the effort to reduce development time tunraround he wrote the prototype of the ZeroTurnaround flagship product, JRebel, a class reloading JVM plugin.

Jevgeni has been speaking at international conferences for over 5 years, including JavaPolis/Devoxx, JavaZone, JAOO, QCon, TSSJS, JFokus and so on. He also has an active research interest in programming languages, types and virtual machines, publishing several papers on topics ranging from category theoretical notions to typesafe Java DSLs.

Besides the commercial products made for ZeroTurnaround, Jevgeni is a co-founder of two open-source projects -- Aranea and Squill. is a web development and integration platform based on strong object-oriented principles. Squill is a typesafe internal DSL for constructing and executing SQL queries.

You can follow Jevgeni on Twitter as .

Howard Lewis Ship

Clojure: towards the Essence of Programming

Howard Lewis Ship is the creator and lead developer for the Apache Tapestry project, and is a noted expert on Java framework design and developer productivity. He has over twenty years of full-time software development under his belt, with over ten years of Java. He cut his teeth writing customer support software for Stratus Computer, but eventually traded PL/1 for Objective-C and NeXTSTEP before settling into Java.

Howard is respected in the Java community as an expert on web application development, dependency injection, Java meta-programming, and developer productivity. He is a frequent speaker at JavaOne, NoFluffJustStuff, ApacheCon and other conferences, and the author of "Tapestry in Action" for Manning (covering Tapestry 3.0). Lately, he's been dipping his toes into alternate languages, including Clojure.

Howard is an independent consultant, offering Tapestry training, mentoring and project work as well as training in Clojure. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Suzanne, and his son, Jacob.

You can follow Howard on Twitter as .

Theo Schlossnagle

Service Decoupling in Carrier-Class Architectures

Theo excels at developing elegant solutions to complicated problems as well as applying emerging technologies to solve everyday problems. As a hands-on executive of the company, he applies his experience and ingenuity to deliver innovative solutions to OmniTI clients.

A widely respected industry thought leader, Theo is the author of Scalable Internet Architectures (Sams) and a frequent speaker at worldwide it conferences. He was also the principal architect of the Momentum mta, which is now the flagship product of OmniTI’s sister company, Message Systems. Born from Theo’s vision and technical wisdom, this innovation is transforming the email software spectrum.

Theo is a member of the IEEE and a senior member of the ACM. He serves on the editoral board of the ACM’s Queue Magazine.

You can follow Theo on Twitter as .