Professional Portal Development with Open Source Tools

W. Clay Richardson is a software consultant specializing in distributed solutions, particularly portal solutions. He has fielded multiple open-source Web and portal solutions, serving in roles ranging from senior architect to development lead. He is a co-author of More Java Pitfalls, also published by Wiley & Sons. As an adjunct professor of computer science for Virginia Tech, he teaches graduate-level coursework in object-oriented development with Java. He holds degrees from Virginia Tech and the Virginia Military Institute. Donald Avondolio is a software consultant with over seventeen years of experience developing and deploying enterprise applications. He began his career in the aerospace industry developing programs for flight simulators, and later became an independent contractor, crafting healthcare middleware and low-level device drivers for an assortment of mechanical devices. Most recently, he has built e-commerce applications for numerous high-profile companies, including The Home Depot, Federal Computer Week, the U.S. Postal Service, and General Electric. He is currently a technical architect and developer on several portal deployments. Don also serves as an adjunct professor at Virginia Tech, where he teaches progressive object-oriented design and development methodologies, with an emphasis on patterns. Joe Vitale has been working with the latest cutting-edge Java technology intensely. His most recent focus has been on Java portals and object-relational mapping tools. One of these projects was writing a content management system that contained role-based authentication of users and the capability for users to upload, delete, and manage files, and secure resources. The whole system was designed to plug right into a portal's interface and enable the portal to directly communicate with it to obtain its resources. Object-relational mapping technologies have also been a focus, using Apache's Object Relational Bridge (OJB). Peter Len has over seven years' experience performing Web-based and Java application development in a client-server environment. He has designed, coded, and implemented data and Web site components for each aspect of a three-tier architecture. Mr. Len has been developing with Java for over five years and has recently been involved with portal and Web-service development. He holds a master's degree in both international affairs and computer information systems. Kevin T. Smith is a technical director and principal software architect at McDonald Bradley, Inc., where he develops security solutions for Web service-based systems. He has focused his career on building enterprise solutions based on open-source tools. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in computer science, software systems engineering, and information security. He has taught undergraduate courses in computer science, given technical presentations on Web services and Java programming at numerous technology conferences, and authored several technical books, including Essential XUL Programming (Wiley 2001), More Java Pitfalls (Wiley 2003), and The Semantic Web: A Guide to the Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management (Wiley 2003).