<Floyd Marinescu>

Mark Hapner - J2EE 1.4 specification lead. Mark has been and is still driving direction for the J2EE platform.

Scott McNealy - Ultimately the guy who can call the shots at Sun.

Aslak Hellesoy - Aslak's work with the Pico container is an innovation that is starting an important new trend.

Billy Newport - Billy Newport is the spec lead of the new Work Manager for J2EE containers JSR, and a key engineer on Websphere Enterprise. For years Billy has been pushing to get this type of functionality into the spec and now it might happen.

Martin Fowler - Martin is in a position of power and influence, and his continued work is impacting the way people develop. His latest book is a contribution to the community.

Rod Johnson - Rod's book was another contribution to the community, as was the Spring framework, which is setting new trends.

Alfred Chuang - CEO of BEA, the vendors have major influences on the platform!

Gavin King - Gavin King brought us Hibernate, nuff said.

Ted Farrell - Architect and director of strategy for Application Development Tools at Oracle. Ted is very involved in the community and is pushing for things behind the scenes, such as databinding support in tools, etc.

Mike Cannon-Brookes - Mike brought us and continues to run javablogs.com, and leads the OpenSymphony Group.

Marc Fleury - Marc represents the open source vanguard, and is a key driver at JBoss and keeps Sun on it's toes.

Onno Kluyt - The Chair and driver of the Java Community Process.

<Cameron Purdy>

Rob Woolen - BEA - A one man army on the newsgroups.

Mike Spille - Pyrasun - He keeps marketing claims in check, knows his XA stuff

Andreas Mueller - IIT.de/SwiftMQ - A personality that's hard to keep under wraps, and a nice JMS impl.

James Strachan - CDN - This guy is groovy .. no, really, he is!

Greg Wilkins - Mortbay - He sails, so he has to be cool! He also supports JBoss, even though they piss on him.

Bill Venners - Artima - A community for topics on distributed computing in Java.

Graham Glass - TME (oops, he sold out to webMethods!) - XML visionary.

Crazy Bob - Asylum, Inc. - Early AOP advocate, was AOPing WebLogic before the rest of us figured out the acronym.

Rolf Tollerud - Real Ultimate Power, Inc. - If it weren't for Rolf, everyone would have switched to .NET by now.

<Another>

Jim Waldo(JavaSoft)- for his contributions to distributed programming system based on Java

Amy Fowler(JavaSoft) - many of you might remember her from the days of AWT. She brought a lot to the world Java UI.

Dr.Urs Hoelzle - Univ of California, Santa Barbara - principal designer of the "Hotspot" Java implementation

<Eric Ma>

Educators

Jason Hunter - Servlets
Richard Monson-Haefel - EJB
Duane Fields, Mark Kolb - JSP
Ted Husted - Struts
Erik Hatcher - Ant
Rob Woollen - WebLogic

Framework and Tool Invetors

Gavin King - Hibernate
Craig McClanahan - Struts
James Duncan Davidson - Ant and Tomcat
Rickard Oberg - XDoclet and JBoss
Rod Johnson - Spring Framwork
The Eclipse Team
Ceki Gulcu - Log4j

Technology Evangelists

Salil Deshpande, Tyler Jewell - TMC
Floyd Marinescu - TSS
Cameron Purdy


<Another one:>
Rickard Oberg -- drew a lot of people towards J2EE and open source. He's been working on AOP for Enterprise systems since mid-late 2002. He blogged that his AOP was not mature (yet) for an open source release -- I look forward to the day he releases it (soon!). Every new industry needs people of his calibre that leads other to believe that it's possible.

Craig McClanahan -- made J2EE adopters use mature technology.

Rod Johnson -- educated J2EE developers and reminded them of the fundamentals (much like WRITING SOLID CODE points to core developmental issues).

Gavin King -- very needed ORM layer for Java. The future will tell how important Hibernate's contribution to J2EE/Java.

Bill Joy -- Jini and JLS.

Doug Lea -- for util.concurrent. A lot of Java/J2EE products benefitted from this. A newer more readable(for the average java developer) version of your book will go a long way in more scalable software.

Terence Parr -- for ANTLR. Starting from Weblogic, a lot of products have used it. If he insisted (like Apache does) that everyone acknowledge, then we would really see how many products use it.

Guy Steele -- for JLS. You should share your knowledge through a more friendly book sometime (soon).

Joshua Bloch -- for Collections and Effective Java and for SVJUG presentations AND JavaOne presentations.

Howard M. Lewis Ship -- for Tapestry(.NET has similar components (more integrated) and few J2EE developers know much about it). And for HiveMind( your idea of using it for Eclipse plugins is really cool -- pls. do more to get it released)

BEA -- for being the First One to get us all excited :-)

Kent Beck & Eric Gamma -- As Martin Fowler says, "Never in the field of software development was so much owed by so many to so few lines of code"

Kent Beck and the eclipse team -- For Eclipse. This and the lot of eclipse plugins will ultimately realize SUN's dream of pervasive Java.

Crupi et al -- for Core J2ee. A new version using JDO/Hibernate would be very useful to the J2EE community.

Martin Fowler -- for showing that there is (and was) more to Enterprise systems than J2EE.