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Westy Rockwell

Westy Rockwell is a senior developer at tarent GmbH, a Web development company in Bonn, Germany. Westy has more than 15 years of experience as a professional software developer, but his real software education came from deeply hacking many microcomputers, including the ZX80, the Osborne, the Vic20, the C64, various Amigas, and, of course, IBM PCs. His career, meanwhile, involved him with more respectable software and hardware, including Unix, workstations, minicomputers, mainframes, and IBM PCs. Interest in hardware design, along with C and assembly languages, culminated in 1994 when he built the prototype for an extremely successful dual-processor alcohol analyzer, including the PCB design, operating system, and application software.

Soon afterward, while developing man-machine interfaces, the prerelease version of Borland Delphi turned Westy into a Windows developer. He went on to work on three-tier systems based on Windows NT, including corporate asset management, document imaging, and work management systems. For more than a year now he has refused to touch SQL or Visual tools, and he is enthusiastically pursuing Web browser- and server-based applications using Java, Tomcat, Xerces, and Xalan.