-->Robert Fischer--> is an independent contractor specializing in web application development and technical leadership. He is a regular presenter at conferences on the topic of Groovy and Grails, development best practices, and functional programming. He also is a regular contributor to open source in many languages, with his key contributions being the JConch library for Java concurrency, a plug-in for Grails for background thread processing, and a plug-in for Grails for automatic database updating. He resides in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife.