Professional Portal Development with Open Source Tools

W. Clay Richardson is a software consultant specializing indistributed solutions, particularly portal solutions. He hasfielded multiple open-source Web and portal solutions, serving inroles ranging from senior architect to development lead. He is aco-author of More Java Pitfalls, also published by Wiley& Sons. As an adjunct professor of computer science forVirginia Tech, he teaches graduate-level coursework inobject-oriented development with Java. He holds degrees fromVirginia Tech and the Virginia Military Institute. Donald Avondolio is a software consultant with overseventeen years of experience developing and deploying enterpriseapplications. He began his career in the aerospace industrydeveloping programs for flight simulators, and later became anindependent contractor, crafting healthcare middleware andlow-level device drivers for an assortment of mechanical devices.Most recently, he has built e-commerce applications for numeroushigh-profile companies, including The Home Depot, Federal ComputerWeek, the U.S. Postal Service, and General Electric. He iscurrently a technical architect and developer on several portaldeployments. Don also serves as an adjunct professor at VirginiaTech, where he teaches progressive object-oriented design anddevelopment methodologies, with an emphasis on patterns. Joe Vitale has been working with the latest cutting-edgeJava technology intensely. His most recent focus has been on Javaportals and object-relational mapping tools. One of these projectswas writing a content management system that contained role-basedauthentication of users and the capability for users to upload,delete, and manage files, and secure resources. The whole systemwas designed to plug right into a portal's interface andenable the portal to directly communicate with it to obtain itsresources. Object-relational mapping technologies have also been afocus, using Apache's Object Relational Bridge (OJB). Peter Len has over seven years' experienceperforming Web-based and Java application development in aclient-server environment. He has designed, coded, and implementeddata and Web site components for each aspect of a three-tierarchitecture. Mr. Len has been developing with Java for over fiveyears and has recently been involved with portal and Web-servicedevelopment. He holds a master's degree in both internationalaffairs and computer information systems. Kevin T. Smith is a technical director and principalsoftware architect at McDonald Bradley, Inc., where he developssecurity solutions for Web service-based systems. He hasfocused his career on building enterprise solutions based onopen-source tools. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees incomputer science, software systems engineering, and informationsecurity. He has taught undergraduate courses in computer science,given technical presentations on Web services and Java programmingat numerous technology conferences, and authored several technicalbooks, including Essential XUL Programming (Wiley 2001),More Java Pitfalls (Wiley 2003), and The Semantic Web: AGuide to the Future of XML, Web Services, and KnowledgeManagement (Wiley 2003).