Tim Francis is a Senior Technical Staff Member,
Tech Lead, and Development Manager working on the WebSphere Studio
product at the IBM Canada Toronto Lab. He has been one of the lead
architects for the Eclipse-based WebSphere Studio since it was
first conceived, and has played a key role in its evolution and
development since then. Tim currently leads the development of the
WebSphere deployment tools, including the EJB deployment codegen
and the server tools unit test environment.
Previously Tim has led development teams for a number of different
products, including VisualAge for Java, and the Component Broker
Object Builder. Tim holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in
Electrical Engineering and Master of Mathematics in Computer
Science, both from the University of Waterloo (Canada).
Eric Herness is a Distinguished Engineer with
IBM in Rochester, Minnesota. He is currently the lead architect for
WebSphere Application Server Enterprise. Eric has also been
involved in implementing the EJB 2.0 specification in the base
application server, especially those parts that enable
container-managed persistence.
Eric has been involved in object tech nology and servers that host
objects since the late 1980''s. In the early years, he drove work
on object analysis and design methods, defining how to practically
leverage these concepts in large-scale software projects within and
outside IBM. Eric played a lead role in the implementation of
Component Broker and in the associated component model definition
work that planted many of seeds we now see flourishing in
J2EE.
Eric holds a Masters in Business Administration from the Carlson
school of Management at the University of Minnesota. He has also
been an adjunct computer science faculty member at Winona State
University in Rochester, MN.
Rob High Jr. is a Distinguished Engineer and
the Chief Architect for the WebSphere Application Server product
family. He has 26 years of programming experience and has worked
with distributed, object-oriented, component-based transaction
monitors for the last eight years, including SOMObject Server and
Component Broker prior to WebSphere. He helped to define, and then
later refine the basic concepts of container-managed component
technology, which is now intrinsic to the EJB specification and
implemented by WebSphere and other J2EE application servers.
Rob started his career with IBM in 1981 in Charlotte, NC. During
his 12 years in Charlotte, Rob primarily worked in Finance Industry
as a developer on the 4700 controller, in 4730 and 4736 ATM
microcode development with responsibility for the device access
methods, led the development of Application Foundation PC software
for Retail Branch computing, and culminating in responsibility for
the Financial Application Architecture. He moved to Austin, TX in
1993 to lead IBM''s participation in the Open Software
Foundation''s Object Management Framework, which lead eventually to
his involvement in SOMObjects, and later Component Broker and
WebSphere.
Rob has a bachelor degree in Computer and Information Science from
the University of California at Santa Cruz. He graduated from UCSC
in 1981.
Jim Knutson is WebSphere''s J2EE Architect. He
has been responsible for delivering EJB and J2EE technology in IBM
products such as Component Broker and WebSphere since the
technology''s inception and his accomplishments include the first
CORBA-based EJB server.
Prior to this, Jim led IBM''s BeanExtender project, a rapid
development environment for JavaBeans component-based distributed
applications, and has been building distributed object systems for
over ten years.
Kim Rochat is a Senior Software Engineer at
IBM''s WebSphere development lab in Austin, TX. He was the project
leader for the Web Services Technology Preview and participated in
the JSR-101 and JSR-109 standards efforts. Prior to WebSphere Web
Services, he implemented Java and CORBA support for WebSphere''s
predecessor, Component Broker. He has worked for a number of
companies in his 27 years in the industry, and joined IBM in
1994.
Chris Vignola is a senior software engineer
with IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY. He is presently a lead architect for
the WebSphere Application Server product, specializing in WebSphere
integration on the z/OS and OS/390 platform and systems management.
His experience with WebSphere includes work in the areas of EJB
persistence, EJB Container, and JNDI. Chris has been working on
distributed, object-oriented, transaction systems since 1995,
including work on Distributed SOMObjects and Component Broker,
where he lead the team that first brought WebSphere EJB technology
to the z/OS and OS/390 platform. His prior experience includes ten
years developing the MVS operating system, where he worked on
operations console, sysplex, and workload manager. Chris joined IBM
in 1984 after graduating from the State University of New York with
a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science. Chris lives and
works in New York state, where he resides with his wife and three
children.