Capstone People: Will Provost

Will Provost is an independent consultant in software architecture and design, and President of Capstone Courseware. He is the chief author and editor of Capstone's Java, J2EE, and XML curricula, and an active instructor in Java and XML topics.

Will's career in the software industry began, naturally, with a degree in something unrelated — biophysics, as it happened — from Harvard College. Further straining the probability curves, he spent his first few post-graduate years immersed in songwriting and musical performance. He rediscovered his inner geek in the early 1990's, and began working with C++ and a fledgling Microsoft technology called OLE.

He began working with Java and CORBA in 1996, creating a Java code generator for Riverton's HOW development tool, along with a portable toolkit to facilitate object persistence. He has designed and built Java implementations of several CORBA services for various clients, including an Externalization service framework. It was during this effort that he first developed an interest in XML, as it seemed to be an ideal standard format for externalization/serialization.

Will has built many J2SE, J2EE, and XML-based systems as a consultant to software, healthcare, financial and IT companies. He began teaching Java topics at Sun Microsystems in 1997 and has since been writing and presenting educational materials in topics in Java, J2EE, CORBA, and XML, as a complement to his consulting work. Oh, and he hasn't quite put the guitar in the storage room yet, either.