Bruce Tate is a kayaker, mountain biker, and father of two. In his spare time, he is an independent consultant in Austin,Texas. In 2001, he founded J2Life, LLC, a consulting firm that specializes in Java persistence frameworks and lightweight development methods. His customers have included FedEx, Great West Life, TheServerSide, and BEA. He speaks at conferences and Java user's groups around the nation. Before striking out on his own, Bruce spent thirteen years at IBM working on database technologies, object-oriented infrastructure and Java. He was recruited away from IBM to help start the client services practice in an Austin start up called Pervado Systems. He later served a brief stent as CTO of IronGrid, which built nimble Java performance tools. Bruce is the author of four books, including best-selling Bitter Java. First rule of kayak: When in doubt, paddle like Hell. Justin Gehtland is a programmer, author, mentor and instructor, focusing on real-world software applications. Working as a professional programmer, instructor, speaker and pundit since 1992, Justin has developed real-world applications using VB, COM, .NE.