About the Authors

Cliff Binstock has more than twenty years of software development experience. His current roles range from hands-on architecture and code development to mentoring and managing large groups of developers. Cliff’s object-oriented experience began with relatively unknown languages in the 1980s and culminated in years of development in the extremely popular C++ and Java languages. Cliff has also spent many years working with multiple SQL databases. In 2000 and 2001, Cliff helped deliver shrink-wrap software for a biotech firm. The software used multiple XML schemas to provide the software contracts for various modules. XML, along with appropriate supporting XML schemas, provided a programmatic pipeline. The pipeline architecture not only supplanted many lines of Java, but it turned many “code changes” into trivial XML edits. The expertise acquired during this development effort led to the writing of this book. Cliff is the owner of the consulting firm Robust Software.

Dave Peterson is principal consultant with his own firm, SGMLWorks!, providing SGML and XML solutions for publishing and database systems worldwide. Dave has been working with SGML since before the ISO Standard was published in 1986, and with XML since it was just a gleam in a few people’s eyes. He’s been programming and architecting systems professionally since 1967. He helped design the system that produces and processes the largest SGML document in the world—more than three billion characters, markup, and text in one document (not counting graphics). He ran the document analysis that ultimately defined the document structure used by the New Zealand Parliament for legal publications, and has done the same for other legal and pharmaceutical publishers, as well as for publishers of journals and military and civilian technical documents. Dave’s first job with SGML in 1986 involved using SGML (XML was not around yet) to transfer data from one database to another. He has designed and programmed numerous SGML and XML processing systems. Dave served on the ISO committee that oversaw the continuing development from 1990 through 1998. Since then, he has served on the W3C Schema Working Group, which produced the XML Schema Recommendation in 2001 and is now working on the 1.1 version. He has given numerous presentations and tutorials at SGML and XML conferences, and has written about forty articles on various SGML and XML topics. He was on the editorial board of the journal Markup Languages: Theory and Practice.

Mitchell Smith is Chief Software Architect at Array BioPharma Inc., in Boulder, Colorado. He has seventeen years of experience developing software solutions and has been working with relational databases for more than twelve years. He is currently developing rapid software solutions to integrate chemists’ processes, integrating hardware/software products with the existing chemo-infomatics infrastructure, and assisting chemists (in a small way) to produce breakthrough drug candidates. Prior to joining Array BioPharma Inc., Mitch worked for Rational Software Corporation, where he co-architected a next-generation requirements management system using J2EE and XML technologies. Mitch holds an A.B. from Harvard College and an M.S. in computer science from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Mitch is a member of the ACM and senior member of the IEEE. He votes on IEEE software standards and is currently secretary of the IEEE Denver/Boulder Computer Society chapter. Mitch is a co-inventor on patent number 6,199,047, entitled “Apparatus and method for an event rating engine.” Outside work, Mitch is an avid year-round mountain biker; he also enjoys camping and overseas vacations.

Mike Wooding has been in the computer industry for twenty years. He has authored several courses for Learning Tree International, including Enterprise Active Server Pages and Microsoft Transaction Server. He was involved with the ActiveServerPages.com site and speaks regularly at industry conferences. As a partner at Kiefer Consulting, Mike focuses on delivering advanced architectures using Internet standards and leveraging Microsoft’s .NET Framework using many tools, including COM+, .NET, Visual Studio .NET, and .NET Web Services. Prior to joining Kiefer Consulting, Mike developed products with Intel, Baxter Healthcare, and several smaller Silicon Valley start-up companies. Mike holds two patents for work in robotics and DNA probe analysis. In his spare time, Mike enjoys snow skiing, wind surfing, basketball, and automating his house with a combination of custom and off-the-shelf hardware.

Chris Dix has been developing software for fun since he was ten years old, and doing it for a living for the past eight years. Chris recently made the transition from C++ and COM to C# and .NET and is finding he likes it better than he expected. He’s written magazine articles on SOAP and Windows development, and he has contributed to two books on XML and Web Services. Chris is lead developer for Navtrak, where he designs and develops products for mobile data access and asset tracking.

Chris Galtenberg is a writer, inventor, and methodologist. His interests lie in the realms of extending human intelligence through philosophy and software. Galtenberg poetry, which explores this philosophy, can be found at http://www.deiforming.com.