James Luceno was born in 1947. His works include the Star Wars novels Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader, Cloak of Deception, Labyrinth of Evil, Millennium Falcon, and Darth Plagueis as well as the New Jedi Order novels Agents of Chaos I: Hero's Trial, Agents of Chaos II: Jedi Eclipse, and The Unifying Force. He also writes the Web Warrior series.
As the executive leader of DataDirect Technologies, John is responsible for daily operations, business development, product direction, and long-term corporate strategy. John was a principal engineer at Data General for seven years, working on their relational database product, DG/SQL. Since joining DataDirect Technologies in 1992, he has held positions of increasing responsibility in research and development, technical support, and marketing. John is a well-known and respected industry luminary and data connectivity expert. For more than 15 years, he has worked closely with Sun Microsystems and Microsoft on the development and evolution of database connectivity standards including J2EE,… JDBC, .NET, ODBC, and ADO. John has been involved with the ANSI NCITS H2 Committee, which is responsible for building the SQL standard, and the X/Open (Open Group) SQL Access Group, which is responsible for building call-level interfaces into relational databases. He is actively involved in Java standards committees, including the JDBC Expert Group. In addition, John has published numerous articles and spoken publicly on topics related to data management. John is also a patent holder in the area of distributed transactions for Microsoft SQL Server Java middleware. John holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg,Virginia.