Patrick Niemeyer became involved with Oak (Java's predecessor) while working at Southwestern Bell Technology Resources. He is an independent consultant and author in the areas of networking and distributed applications. Pat is the author of BeanShell, a popular Java scripting language, as well as various other free goodies on the Net. Most recently, Pat has been developing enterprise architecture for A.G. Edwards. He currently lives in the Central West End area of St. Louis with various creatures.