Burt Beckwith has been a software developer for over 15 years, most of that as a JVM developer but more recently working with a wide variety of platforms and frameworks. He is a Grails core committer and plugin developer and has created over 50 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 is the author of Programming Grails and blogs at http://burtbeckwith.com/blog/