About the authors
Todd Fast
Todd Fast is chief architect of Sun Microsystems' Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud offerings, and CTO and founding principal of zembly.com, Sun's cloud application platform and browser-based, extensible, social development environment.
Prior to zembly, Todd was Chief Architect of Java Enterprise Tools at Sun, where he shipped three major product releases and shepherded the integration of the SeeBeyond Technology Corp. acquisition into Sun's developer tools platforms. As part of his responsibilities, he coordinated and oversaw the activity of forty plus engineers and architects across four geographical regions.
His previous experience includes lead architecture and engineering for SOA and XML tools in the NetBeans IDE. He also conceived and built the world's first real-time developer collaboration tools in a mainstream development environment, including patent-pending features such as integrated presence and media-aware chat, pair programming at a distance, simultaneous co-editing, and remote builds.
While working for the Sun-Netscape Alliance (iPlanet), Todd was architect and lead engineer on JATO, iPlanet's high-performance J2EE framework. JATO was used to build thousands of commercial websites between 1999 and 2003 and pioneered many of the concepts behind JavaServer Faces (JSF) technology. More recently, Todd is the founder of the popular Java Native Access (JNA) library, a Java-only bridge to native code from the Java VM which now powers core functionality in popular frameworks like JRuby.
Prior to Sun, Todd held positions as Principal Consultant and Engineer with NetDynamics, Inc., the company that invented and popularized the application server. There, in addition to developing high-performance application server runtimes, he worked with a diverse range of companies ranging from Silicon Valley startups to Fortune 100 enterprises architecting and building both enterprise and commercial websites.
As a senior architect and technical leader, Todd has deep expertise in cloud and web application development; app server runtimes; developer tools, frameworks, and platforms; and is a veteran at leading product teams through the tricky process of creating ground-breaking, innovative products. He is a co-author, JavaOne Rock Star, and a provocative and engaging speaker. Todd currently holds two patents and is named on more than ten patents pending. He earned a B.S. of Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.
In the 1980s at the age of 13, Todd whiled away his free time programming games in 6510 assembly. In the '90s, he moved on to compose the score for a famous Hollywood director's first student film, and found a bug that crashed Microsoft.com for several hours.
Jiri Kopsa
Jiri Kopsa is a social platform developer at Sun Microsystems, where he co-founded zembly.com, Sun's cloud application platform and browser-based, extensible, social development environment. Among numerous other contributions throughout the platform and user interface, he developed the basis of zembly's Facebook application development support.
Prior to zembly, Jiri was Interaction Designer for the NetBeans IDE, where he worked with a distributed team of about 20 engineers, and was responsible for the overall design of the Java EE and SOA features. Jiri started his professional career as a Java EE engineer at Cleverlance, where he earned experience in Swing programming and Java EE.
Among other things, Jiri is a rookie kiteboarder, designed a superior semantic wiki that was never implemented, and at the age of 16 created a shoot'em up arcade DOS game that never made it to the market.
Jiri holds an M.S. of Software Engineering from the Czech Technical University in Prague.
