Luca Masini is a Senior Software Engineer and Architect who started as a Game Developer for Commodore 64 (Football Manager) and Commodore Amiga (Ken il Guerriero); he soon switched to object-oriented programming and, from its inception in 1995, he was always attracted to the Java language.
He worked on this passion as a consultant for some major Italian banks, developing and integrating major software projects for which he has often taken on the technical leadership role. He adapted Java Enterprise in environments where COBOL was the flagship platform, converting them from mainframe-centric to distributed.
He then shifted his focus to open source, starting from Linux, and then enterprise frameworks, with which he was able to introduce concepts like IoC, ORM, and MVC with minimum impact. He was an early adopter of Spring, Hibernate, Struts, and a whole host of other technologies that in the long run have given his customers a technological advantage and because of which development costs have also lowered.
Lately, however, his attention has been completely directed towards the simplification and standardization of development with Java EE, and for this reason he's now working at the Information and Communications Technology department of a large Italian company to introduce advanced build tools (Maven and Continuous Integration), archetypes of projects, and Agile Development with plain standards.
He has worked on the following books published by Packt Publishing:
Google Web Toolkit
Spring Web Flow 2
Spring Persistence with Hibernate
Vincenzo Rinaldi was born in Milan, Italy, and continues to live and work there. He has over 10 years of experience with system administration in critical contexts, where he contributes with designing, managing, and supporting internal IT infrastructures. He studies and researches many technologies, products, Operating Systems, and custom implementations on a daily basis to meet the business processes. He works with many suppliers, internal teams, and customer services in a mass retail company and coordinates a team to work in the middleware, Operating Systems, and DB stack.
He is an RHCE Certified Engineer and also has great experience in WebLogic setup and administration, generally in the middleware layer.
You can read more about him on his Linkedin profile at http://www.linkedin.com/in/vincenzorinaldi.