Burt Beckwith has been a software developer for 15 years, most of that as a JVM developer, and for the last four years working with Grails and Groovy. He is a core developer on the Grails team at SpringSource, and has created over 35 Grails plugins. Burt is a frequent speaker at conferences and user groups where he shares his passion for Grails and other Groovy-based technologies, in particular those that are related to persistence, security, and performance. He blogs at http://burtbeckwith.com/blog/ .