Mariano Nicolas De Maio is a software engineer who graduated from the Argentinian Enterprise University (UADE). He has been working on Java-based projects and open source frameworks for over a decade. He became involved in the jBPM and Drools projects as a community contributor 4 years ago—first as a project architect for a company investigating the feasibility of a few rules and processes, and eventually as a community contributor on several components that are now part of the open source release components of jBPM, such as the jBPM5 JMS connectors for Human task services, the Infinispan implementations of Drools and the jBPM6 persistence scheme, the Form Builder project and its initial migration to UberFire, the jBPM rollback API, and a number of bug fixes for the core components of several other projects.

For the last 3 years, he has been teaching and consulting for jBPM and Drools. Currently, he is the CTO at Plugtree (http://www.plugtree.com), a company that provides consultancy and training around the world on Drools, jBPM, and any artificial intelligence concept where they can lend a hand to different companies. Since then, he has provided both private and public training on both Drools and jBPM to a large number of companies all over the world.

He lives in Buenos Aires. He is happily married to Tamara and they are raising a beautiful baby daughter, Sofia. In his free time, he likes to work on contributions for the open source projects he is using. He also has a personal blog about jBPM, Drools, and Decision Management (http://marianbuenosayres.wordpress.com). You can find him through the official jBPM IRC channel #jbpm at http://webchat.freenode.net, under the nickname mariano or mariano84.

Besides writing this book, he has previously collaborated in the review of several other books, including jBPM5 Developer Guide, Mauricio Salatino and Esteban Aliverti, Packt Publishing, and A Practical Guide to jBPM5: JBoss Business Process Management Framework, Venkataganesh Thoppae.