Acknowledgments

Many people contributed to this book's development. We're grateful to Mike Loukides, our editor, for his experience, guidance, and direction. We'd like to thank him for believing in us and being patient with two first-time authors as we learned our craft.

We had a great team of expert technical reviewers who helped ensure sure that the material was technically accurate, approachable, and reflected the spirit of the JBoss, J2EE, and Open Source communities. Our reviewers were Norman Richards, Greg Ostravich, Andy Ochsner, and Dan Moore. Their suggestions and corrections greatly improved the quality of the book. We're especially thankful to Norman Richards of JBoss, Inc. for his quick turnaround on show-stopper issues and for all his great advice.

We owe a great debt to the Open Source community who made the tools for this book:

• To JBoss, Inc. for creating and maintaining JBoss, an outstanding and reliable J2EE application server that we use on our jobs every day. JBoss is great and we love it. We hope that the concept of Professional Open Source will continue to blossom and grow.

• To the Ant, XDoclet, Log4J, Apache Jakarta, Hibernate, and (numerous) Apache and SourceForge projectsyou guys rock! Your tools keep the Java community going.

Tom's Acknowledgments

I am especially thankful to Scott Davis, my co-author, for exhorting me to finish the book, holding me accountable, and for pushing me to improve my writing style. This book would've been impossible without him.

Thanks to Richard Monson-Haefel, Sue Spielman, Bruce Tate, Brett McLaughlin, Frank Traditi (my business coach), the Denver Java Users Group (DJUGhttp://www.denverjug.org), and everyone else who encouraged me along the way.

Thanks to Jay Zimmerman, coordinator of the "No Fluff Just Stuff" (http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com) conferences, for enabling me to take my message on the road.

Thanks to The One Way Café in Aurora, COkeep the lattes and good advice flowing.

Most importantly, I am deeply grateful to my wife, Linda, and daughter, Abby, for supporting me during the writing process. I love you and look forward to spending more time together.

Scott's Acknowledgments

Tom came to me with an opportunity to co-author a book for O'Reilly. How could I possibly turn down a gig like that? Tom and I have known each other for years, and we knew from the start that we brought complimentary skills to the table. This book was a collaborative effort in every sense of the word, but it never would have happened if Tom hadn't planted the first seed.

What started out as a wildly optimistic (and in retrospect, totally unrealistic) attempt to map out the entire known world of Open Source J2EE development eventually got distilled down to the book you are now holding. Even though this book is far more modest in scope than our original idea, I think that it still captures the spirit of what we set out to accomplish. Without getting bogged down in the whole commercial versus free versus open source quagmire, we wanted to show you that it is possible to create a production-quality application using nothing but freely available tools.

Thanks go out to the Denver and Boulder JUG communitieshanging out with all of you (too numerous to mention individually) has made me a better programmer and a better person. When I was a lone wolf contractor, your emails and IMs, phone calls and lunches, but especially the post-meeting pints and horror story-swaps are what kept me sane through all of it. When I was new to a city and a programming language, you made me feel like I belonged.

A very warm thanks goes out to Jay and the whole NFJS crew (Ted, Bruce, Erik, Jason, James, Mike, Stu, Justin, Glenn, David, Eitan, Dion, Ben, Dave, and the rest of y'all). After attending my first conference, I knew that I wanted to be a part of it professionally. The collective talent and charisma of the speakers is breathtaking. During a Fourth of July celebration, my three year-old son Christopher said in awe, "Daddy, the fireworks are too big for my eyes." No exaggerationI feel the same way when I'm on the NFJS tour.

But my deepest thanks and love goes to my family: Kim, Christopher, and little soon-to-be-born Baby X. I did my best to keep my writing hours limited to after bedtime and during naptime (Mom's and son's both), but I know that it crept into the waking hours as well. Thanks for pretending for my benefit that it didn't matter. You are my everything.