Biography for Frank Cohen

Biography

Frank Cohen, Founder of PushToTest, Author of FastSOA

Through his speaking, writing and consulting, Frank Cohen is the expert that information technology professionals and enterprises go to when they need to understand and solve problems in complex interoperating information systems, especially Service Oriented Architecture (SOA,) Ajax, and Web services. Frank is Founder of PushToTest, the open-source test automation solutions business, and maintainer of the popular TestMaker open-source project. PushToTest customers include Jackson Labs, eBay, General Motors, TIBCO, BEA, Microsoft and other Fortune 1000 companies. Frank is the author of several books, including FastSOA, the way to use native XML technology to build scalable service oriented architecture, and Java Testing and Design. For the past 25 years he has developed and marketed some of the software industry's most successful products, including Norton Utilities for the Macintosh, Stacker, and SoftWindows.

Extended Biography

Frank Cohen is the "go to" guy when enterprises need to test and solve problems in complex interoperating information systems, especially Web Services.

Using trained graphics-arts, music, and computer programming skills, Cohen became one of the first software developers to create award-winning video game products for Atari and Commodore home computers in the early 1980's. In 1984, Cohen founded Regent Software to develop and market business application software products on the Atari ST platform.

In 1989 he joined Peter Norton Computing to bring the company into the Macintosh market with the Norton Utilities. In 1990, Cohen managed the successful merger with Symantec. At the Symantec Peter Norton Group, he grew Symantec's Macintosh utility products into an $18 Million product line.

He joined Stac Electronics as Group Product Manager in 1991 to manage the launch of Stacker, the single product that grew Stac revenues from $3 Million to $14 Million in less than one year. He left Stac to help Portfolio Software and Central Point Software write and execute business plans for their utility software products for Windows, DOS, and Macintosh platforms.

As director of product marketing for Insignia Solutions, the leading PC compatibility solution vendor for Macintosh, PC, and UNIX workstations, Cohen launched SoftWindows and grew revenue from $18 Million to $34 Million in preparation for the firm's IPO.

From 1995-1996, Cohen led Apple Computer's middleware, networking and connectivity product lines as senior manager. In Summer 1996, Frank Cohen joined the founding executive team of TuneUp.com, a Silicon Valley start-up company offering the world's first online one-stop service center to maintain your personal computer, as senior director of products and principal architect.

After successfully selling TuneUp.com to Symantec, Cohen co-founded Inclusion Technologies a Silicon Valley start-up company building Internet technologies that add interactive personalized communication and workflow functions to Web sites. Inclusion began at Sun Microsystems where Cohen was principal architect of the Sun Community Server. Inclusion went public (OTC: IINC) in 2002.

Cohen maintains the open-source TestMaker project and is CEO for PushToTest, the open-source test automation solutions company. More information is available at www.PushToTest.com. You can reach Frank at fcohen@pushtotest.com.

Cohen is a published author, including FastSOA (Morgan Kaufmann,) Java Testing and Design: From Unit Testing To Automated Web Tests(Prentice Hall,) Java Web Services Unleashed (SAMS), and Java P2P Unleashed (SAMS,) and many articles on IBM developerWorks.

He is an active member and past board member of the Software Entrepreneurs Forum, an industry association known as the heart of the Silicon Valley software development community.

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Publications

	FastSOA: Solve SOA's Performance Problems, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Without the right controls to govern SOA development, the right set of tools to build SOA, and the right support of exciting new protocols and patterns, your SOA efforts can result in software that delivers only 1.5 transactions per second (TPS) on expensive modern servers. This is a disaster enterprises, organizations, or institutions avoid by using Frank Cohen's FastSOA patterns, test methodology, and architecture.
	Java Testing and Design: From Unit Tests To Automated Web Tests, Prentice Hall Publishing This book describes the architectural choices to build Web-enabled applications in Java and how each choice affects scalability and reliability. The book shows how to test and optimize these systems in the reader's own environment. Cohen goes further to describe the need for intelligent test agents in Web-enabled environments, describes a test agent framework with a tutorial on the latest Web test techniques, and presents TestMaker. Cohen presents case studies and immediately useful code of how Elsevier Science, 2Wire, Sun Microsystems and BEA successfully use intelligent test agent technology to build scalable Java applications and assure confidence in their Web-enabled Java projects.
	Automating Web Tests with TestMaker, Author, PushToTest Press, 2003 Written by an authority in the field of Web-enabled application architecture, design and testing, Frank Cohen's book Automating Web Tests with TestMaker is a comprehensive guide for software developers, quality testers and engineers and IT managers. It is filled with must-have knowledge of the protocols, APIs and standards that are needed to effectively test user success in Web-enabled applications, especially Web Services. Cohen takes the unique and seminal approach to testing Web applications by looking at what J2EE and .NET-based applications are capable of doing and then building client-side tests of these complex interoperating systems. The book shows how to test Web-enabled applications, especially Web Services, for scalability, functionality, and performance. While the examples show how to use TestMaker, the open-source framework and test environment, the concepts may apply to any test environment.
	Java Web Services Unleashed, Contributing Author, SAMS Publishers, 2002 Web Services are specifications that were written to be implemented on many different platforms. Java developers will find an introduction to Java-based Web Service toolkits (especially the Java JAX Pack APIs: JAXM, JAXRPC, JAXP.) This is a good introductory text with many practical code-level examples and a unique approach to testing Web Services.
	Java P2P Unleashed , Contributing Author, SAMS Publishers, 2002 Most Web Service implementations are designed around a centralized datacenter. Peer-To-Peer (P2P) developers flip that model around: computing power comes from networking together independent systems, not buying big servers. To build and test P2P systems requires a wide knowledge of Internet protocols, network designs and cutting edge techniques. This book presents the issues, techniques in use today and practical code-level examples to build P2P applications.