Jean-Louis Leroy, from Sound Object Logic, is the original author of Tangram, an object-relational mapping tool.

Jean-Louis was born in 1963 in Liège, Belgium. His first programming experiences were in the Forth language, nearly 20 years ago. He ported Forth to several MC68000-based computers, then extended it with object-oriented features after reading the famous issue of Byte on Smalltalk.

Jean-Louis relocated to Brussels in 1989 and began a carreer as a professional programmer. He worked as an employee for seven years in a small marketing company, developing software in C, then in C++. His work then consisted mainly in writing caracter-based and MS Windows user interfaces around FORTRAN code. At that time he began very interested in code reuse; he published several articles in Dr Dobbs and Windows Developer Journal.

In 1996 Jean-Louis became an independant consultant; he worked several years on the Appeal Court Automation Project. This is where he discovered the Perl language and developed the early versions of Tangram, a tool for implementing object persistence on top of relational databases. After its release as Free Software, Tangram became a popular tool in the Perl community; it is still in use.

During the Appeal Court years, Jean-Louis met the two founders of Sound Object Logic, Yves Steyt and Jacques Lauzeral. A couple of years later, he joined the company as a partner. Sound Object Logic acquired the intellectual property on Tangram the decision was taken to set new, ambitous goals for the continuing development of Tangram.

Aside his work on Tangram, Jean-Louis has been regularly giving courses in Perl and in C++ and has worked as a consultant in many projects.