Ted Husted is a software engineer and team mentor. His specialty is building agile web applications, for either Java or .NET, with open source products like Struts, Spring, iBATIS, MySQL, and the Yahoo! User Interface Library, and helping others do the same. Ted provides onsite training to software development teams through the Struts Mentor site.

Ted is a member of the Apache Software Foundation, an active member of the Apache Struts and Apache iBATIS Projects, and co-founder of the Jakarta Commons. His books include JUnit in Action, Struts in Action, and Professional JSP Site Design. Ted has consulted with teams throughout the United States, including CitiGroup, Nationwide Insurance, and Pepsi Bottling Group. He is currently working with the Oklahoma State Department of Environmental Services to improve their permitting system.

Ted has been writing business applications since 1984, first for the desktop and then for the Internet. In the mid-1980s, he also became interested in hypertext applications and took to distributing "shareware" programs via bulletin board systems and diskette libraries. In 1991, Ted's Dart shareware application (for MS DOS) won an industry award, the Digital Quill. In 1994, Dart was bundled with the McGraw-Hill book Paperless Publishing.

In the early 1990s, Ted began installing local area networks, first, so that business could share applications, and later, so that businesses could also access the Internet. In April 1996, he launched www.husted.com and ventured into website development. Ted began working with the local PBS station, WXXI, to improve their web presence. Before long, with his help, WXXI had pages for all its major programs, streaming audio for two radio stations, and streaming video for special television events. In 1999 and 2000, the WXXI website won PBS awards for excellence.

For the 2000 Elections, Ted worked with the WXXI news department to launch the state's first online "Election Finder": a Cold Fusion application which helped voters check on their registration and find their polling place via the Internet. In the year 2001, he launched a full-featured online auction application for WXXI, written with the Struts framework. About that time, Ted dropped LAN support from his list of services, so as to focus on application development.

Along the way, Ted became involved in the Apache Struts project, and he worked with several other Apache committers to create the Jakarta Commons. Both Struts and the Commons have grown beyond anyone's expectations. (It's interesting to note that even Microsoft has a software "sandbox" now, a term coined while drafting the original Commons charter.) As a member of the Apache Software Foundation, he helped incubate the Apache iBATIS and Apache MyFaces projects. Ted currently serves as the PMC chair for Apache iBATIS. In 2005, he worked closely with Don Brown, Patrick Lightbody, and Jason Carreira to bring about a merger of the Apache Struts and Open Symphony WebWork communities. Ted served as the release manager for the initial production release of Apache Struts 2.

Ted's first book, Professional JSP Design, came out in 2001, followed by the very popular Struts in Action at the end of 2002. The following year, he co-authored JUnit in Action with Vincent Massol (and discovered the joys of test-driven development). From 2002 thru 2004, Ted spent a lot of time on the road, consulting with teams all over the United States. In 2004, he entered into an extended consulting contract with one of those teams, the Oklahoma State Department of Environmental Quality (OK DEQ).

During the course of the contract, the OK DEQ switched from the Java to the .NET development platform, and Ted stuck around for the ride. Most weeks, he now works in .NET fulltime with the OK DEQ development team, often pair-programing with team members in Oklahoma Via Skype and Unyte, while faithfully following other Extreme Programming practices.

In January 2007, Ted's team switched new user interface development from ASP.NET to Ajax, while keeping the same business backend. After looking at several products, the team chose the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library as an Ajax foundation. After hours, he continues to help with open source products, including the YUI companion site, Planet Yazaar.