Martin Brampton is now primarily a software developer and writer, but he started out studying mathematics at Cambridge University. He then spent a number of years helping to create the so-called legacy, which remained in use far longer than he ever expected. He worked on a variety of major systems in areas like banking and insurance, spiced with occasional forays into technical areas such as cargo ship hull design and natural gas pipeline telemetry.

After a decade of heading IT for an accountancy firm, a few years as a director of a leading analyst firm, and an MA degree in Modern European Philosophy, Martin finally returned to his interest in software, but this time transformed into web applications. He found PHP5, which fits well with his prejudice in favor of programming languages that are interpreted and strongly object oriented.

Utilizing PHP, Martin took on development of useful extensions for the Mambo (and now also Joomla!) systems, and then became leader of the team developing Mambo itself. More recently, he has written a complete, new generation CMS named Aliro, many aspects of which are described in this book. He has also created a common API to enable add-on applications to be written with a single code base for Aliro, Joomla! (1.0 and 1.5), and Mambo.

All in all, Martin is now interested in many aspects of web development and hosting; he consequently has little spare time. But his focus remains on object-oriented software with a web slant, much of which is open source. He runs Black Sheep Research, which provides software, speaking and writing services, and also manages web servers for himself and his clients.