James Duncan Davidson

Who is James Duncan Davidson?

James Duncan Davidson is an American photographer and former software developer. While a software engineer at Sun Microsystems, Davidson created Tomcat, a Java‐based webserver application and the Ant Java‐based build tool. Davidson is the author or co-author of several books on both using and writing software, including Learning Cocoa with Objective-C, Cocoa in a Nutshell, Running Mac OS X Panther, and Mac OS X Panther Hacks, all published by O’Reilly Media. He also contributed to Agile Web Development with Rails, published by The Pragmatic Programmers.

He was raised in Oklahoma and Texas, and is currently self‐employed as both a software consultant and a photographer. He is a resident of Portland, Oregon.

Duncan has in the recent past turned his programming interests and attention in the direction of Ruby on Rails. In tandem with well‐known Rails guru Mike Clark, Davidson has designed and built some of the most complex and robust early Rails applications.

Starting in 2005, Duncan added photography to his other professional focuses. He has served as the primary event photographer at several high-profile technology conferences.