Biographical sketches of authors

Eric N. Herness IBM Software Group, 3605 Highway 52 North, Rochester, Minnesota 55901 (herness@us.ibm.com). Mr. Herness is a Distinguished Engineer with the IBM Software Group. He is currently the chief architect for WebSphere Business Integration. He is a senior member of the WebSphere Foundation Architecture Board and a member of the Software Group Architecture Board. He has also been heavily involved in championing and implementing the EJB 2.0 specification in WebSphere, especially those parts that enable container-managed persistence. Mr. Herness has been involved in object technology and servers that host objects since 1989. 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. He played a lead role in IBM's implementations of CORBA and the early component model definition work that planted many of the seeds we now see flourishing in J2EE. He holds a B.S. degree in business administration with an information systems emphasis from the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire and an M.S. degree 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.

Rob H. High, Jr. IBM Software Group, 11501 Burnet Road, Austin, Texas 78758 (highr@us.ibm.com). Mr. High is a Distinguished Engineer and the chief architect for the WebSphere Application Server foundation. He has 26 years of programming experience and has worked with distributed, object-oriented, component-based transaction monitors for the last nine 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. He started his career with IBM in 1981 in Charlotte, North Carolina, and during his 12 years there, he primarily worked in the finance industry sector as a developer on the 4700 controller and on 4730 and 4736 ATM microcode with responsibility for the device access methods. He led the development of Application Foundation PC software for retail branch computing, culminating in responsibility for the Financial Application Architecture. In 1993 he moved to Austin to lead IBM's participation in the Object Management Framework of the Open Software Foundation, which led eventually to his involvement in SOMObjects^®, and later Component Broker and WebSphere. Mr. High received a B.S. degree in computer and information science from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1981.

Jason R. McGee IBM Software Group, 4205 South Miami Boulevard, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina 27709 (jrmcgee@us.ibm.com). Mr. McGee is a Senior Technical Staff Member and chief architect for the Base and Network Deployment versions of WebSphere Application Server. He is also a senior architect on the WebSphere Foundation Architecture Board and an associate member of the Software Group Architecture Board, focusing primarily on WebSphere family programming model design issues. He joined IBM in 1997 and has been a member of the WebSphere Application Server product team since its inception. He helped to define the concepts of servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSP) for processing Web presentation logic on the server and has been instrumental in leading those parts of the J2EE specification. He was responsible for the design and implementation of the Web container in WebSphere Application Server. Mr. McGee has been heavily involved in leading the architecture for key parts of the WebSphere Application Server, including the server runtime framework and the XML-based systems management architecture. He graduated with a B.S. degree in computer engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in 1995.