We’ve learned firsthand that it takes a village to publish a book. Although we get the privilege of seeing our names on the front cover, dozens of other people have contributed to putting it all together. We’d like to thank everyone at Manning, especially our publisher, Marjan Bace, and our development editors, Howard Jones, Joyce King, Jackie Carter, and Nermina Miller (we were really hard on our editors, so we went through a lot of them), for their continuous support and help on so many aspects of the manuscript. Thanks also to the others at Manning who worked with us in different stages of the project: Andrea Kaucher, Katie Tennant, Gordan Salinovic, Gabriel Dobrescu, Steven Hong, Leslie Haimes, and Mary Piergies.

Many reviewers read the chapters during various stages of completion and provided valuable feedback and input that helped to make the book what it is today. We would like to thank Anil Saldhana, Tray Scates, David Strong, Scott Dawson, Patrick Dennis, Norman Richards, Andrew C. Oliver, Scott Stirling, John Tyler, Nathan Slippen, Michael Abney, Deepak Vohra, TVS Murthy, Sumit Pal, Bas Vodde, Goldy Lukka, and Riccardo Audano. We especially want to thank David Strong and Rod Coffin who provided detailed notes on things that needed to be corrected. Rod also did a final pass through the manuscript just before publication, ensuring that the technical content and code were up to date and correct.

Thanks to Vo Blinn, Bongos, Robert Jackson, Alan C, Jan Nielsen, James Hood, Vulinh Nguyen, and many others for picking up the book as part of the Manning Early Access Program (MEAP), and providing input such as spelling corrections, references to sections that had moved or been deleted, and input on various topics that they’d like to see covered.

Javid Jamae

To my wife Elizabeth—I love you, and I couldn’t have done this without you. Words cannot express my gratitude. To my kids Austin, Sina, and Kian—I’m glad I’ll have much more time to spend with you now. Thanks to my parents for all their support. And a big thanks to my in-laws Jack and Pam for helping us out so much over the course of the last several years.

Thanks to all the folks at Manning (especially Andrea and Nermina) for helping form the book into what it is. Thanks to Rod Coffin for his excellent technical review of the book. And last but not least, thanks to Peter for joining me to write this book. It’s been a pleasure working with you.

Peter Johnson

I would like to thank my wife Sandy for her support and understanding over the course of this project. You are my number one cheerleader, and I love you for it. I also want to thank my daughters, Cheryl and Alexa, who provided welcome diversion when I needed to step away from the book.

I also want to thank Tony Sarris, my manager at Unisys, and the rest of the Unisys management team, for supporting me in this effort.

I had several technical reviewers of my chapters that I want to thank. Julien Viet took time off from coding the JBoss Portal to review the portal chapters. Tray Scates and Scott Dawson reviewed and provided technical input for all of the chapters that I wrote. I even want to thank Jim Fontana for reviewing the chapter that did not make it into the book. Those are the breaks, Jim.

Finally, I would like to thank my mom and dad, Erika and Jerry, who at a very early age taught me that one plus one was zero with one to carry.