Robert Brunner is a technical systems analyst with a 12-year successful track record in consulting, training, and developing cross-platform solutions. His areas of specialization include Internet technologies, object- and relational-database management systems, and object-oriented design and analysis on UNIX and WinNT/2000. He is now serving as a Senior Post-Doctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. Robert is also a frequently contributing columnist for the Java developer journal, Java Basics.