Andrea Fiorentini graduated in Multimedia Systems and Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Siena in the year 2003. He attended a course for an internship at the company for which he works since June 2004 as a systems engineer and programmer.

The company for which he works is dedicated to providing services to the cooperative credit banks in Italy. He has a sound knowledge of the Oracle database, Application Server (iAS), WebLogic Server, and Business Intelligence software. He has also finished a training course in Oracle named "Developing Oracle Web Services Using Java Technology".

For the last two years he has been the head of the development team at the company that he works for, which specializes in technology-oriented Java using instruments such as GWT+, GXT, and EJB 3.0.

Michel Schildmeijer was born in the Netherlands, in the hot summer of 1966. He has lived his entire life in the capital, Amsterdam. After middle school, he started studying Pharmacy. After 4 years, he had to fulfill his military duty at the Royal Dutch Air force, where he worked in a pharmacy.

After this period, he got a job as a Quality Inspector at a pharmacy company; but after about two years he switched his job for a position in a hospital pharmacy, where he has worked for over 10 years.

In the meantime, he married his wife, Tamara, and had two kids, Marciano and Robin. His personal life wasn't always that easy, as his wife got extremely ill for a brief period and he had to take the entire responsibility of managing his family. Fortunately, he got plenty of support from his parents-in-law, who took great care of his kids.

While on his pharmacy job, around 1994, he got acquainted with the Medical Information System that was taking care of structuring patients' medical history and other information. This was a system running on HP UNIX, a MUMPS SQL database and text-based terminal. He started learning UNIX and MUMPS to give operational support. By then he became very enthusiastic, so he made a job switch and started working for some IT companies. Around the year 2000, he started using Oracle on a big banking application for settlements and clearance. The system was running on Oracle 7, AIX UNIX, BEA WebLogic, and BEA Tuxedo. This was the first time that he had worked with WebLogic. From then on, he gained more and more specialized knowledge in Middleware and Oracle. He has worked on many projects for the same. Around 2006, he started working on several projects for IBM in the Oracle Middleware team, administering, configuring, and tweaking large Oracle Middleware systems with Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Portal, Oracle HTTP, and many more.

In 2008, he started working for Randstad Holding, and gained more and more expertise in developing the middleware infrastructure around applications. He began research on migrating the Oracle Application Server 10g and SOA Suite 10g to the 11g platform. Around that same period, Oracle acquired BEA.

From working in Brussels for Belgacom—a large Telco company in Belgium—he started his own as an Oracle Fusion Middleware Architect, for AMIS, an IT company specializing in Oracle and JAVA.

His focus was always on developing the infrastructure for many companies and advising them how to migrate or build a new middleware platform based on the latest 11g techniques. He also became an instructor, teaching all the basics of Oracle WebLogic.

For him, the reason to review this book was to get familiar with the new features in WebLogic 12c, because he thinks it's a great product with a lot of new features, especially the new JAVA EE 6 features and the Exalogic optimizations.

Michel is now working for Qualogy as a member of the Exalogic Squad Team.