Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Pritham Shetty and his colleagues at Macromedia have helped create a unique and powerful new way to develop richer and more compelling Internet applications. Working with their creation has been a wonderful opportunity for me to rediscover the value of the Internet and how it can facilitate communications between people. Looking back through the emails I've filed away from many engineers and others, I'm surprised by how many Macromedians have so patiently answered questions and been so generous with information since FlashCom was released. My thanks to Pritham Shetty, Srinivas Manapragada, Giacomo "Peldi" Guilizzoni, Brad Edelman, Brian Payne, Manish Anand, Slavik Lozben, Jonathan Gay, David Simmons, Chris Hock, Sarah Allen, Edward Chan, Peter Ryce, Elliot Winard, Colin Cherot, Asa Whillock, Rick Jashnani, Damian Burns, Peter Santangeli, Hava Edelstein, Jim Whitfield, Mike Chambers, and Stephen Cheng.

This book took a long time to write. When I first read that Bruce Epstein was interested in receiving proposals for an O'Reilly book on the FlashCom Server, I knew there was no way I could write the book alone. I worked with a few other people to produce a proposal and start work. Some of the original coauthors had to drop out of the project because of other commitments. So I am especially appreciative of the efforts of my coauthors: Giacomo Guilizzoni, Joey Lott, Robert Reinhardt, and Justin Watkins, who saw this project through with me. All of them, like me, worked many long hours trying to balance work, family, and the extra effort of writing a book about a new technology for O'Reilly. See the About the Authors section in the back of the book for each author's biography and a list of the chapters each contributed .

My coauthors and I are all indebted to the people who took time to carefully review chapters in the book: Srinivas Manapragada, David Simmons, Asa Whillock, Edward Chan, Brian Robbins, Nigel Pegg, Will Law, and Brad Edelman. The book is so much better because of their efforts. The book also benefited from reviews, comments, or short contributions from Craig Moehl, Graeme Bull, and Chafic Kazoun.

The FlashComm mailing list available at http://chattyfig.figleaf.com has been an excellent resource for developers using the Flash Communication Server. Contributions to the list by Pritham Shetty, Srinivas Manapragada, Giacomo Guilizzoni, Jonathan Gay, David Simmons, Chris Hock, Edward Chan, Mike Chambers, and Asa Whillock at Macromedia have been tremendously helpful. But the list has also seen valuable questions, experiments, sample code postings, and other contributions from Samuel Wan, Justin Watkins, Branden Hall, Brian Hogg, Robert Reinhardt, Joey Lott, Aral Balkan, aYo Binitie, Jesse Warden, John Robinson, Jorge Maiquez, Peter Hall, Greg Burch, Marc Vezina, Nick Kuh, Phillip Kerman, Fernando Fl ³rez, Chris Harper, Bill Sanders, and many others. I am thankful for being able to correspond with so many interesting people with so many different perspectives. The archives of the FlashComm mailing list can be searched at http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/private/flashcomm.

Thanks to Ryuichi Matsuse for inspiring me to look more seriously at remote objects that are also locally persistent.

Bruce Epstein made this book possible. From his original request for proposals, through his guidance in shaping our work, to his tireless work as the editor of the book itself, he never failed to astonish me with his knowledge, attention to detail, and energy. Bruce is always working for the reader so if you enjoy reading this book it is partly because of his hard work.

Thanks to the entire O'Reilly staff who contributed to this book's publication, including the production editor, Adam Witwer; the copyeditor, Norma Emory; the proofreader, Sada Preisch; as well as Rob Romano, Bill Takacs, and Julie Hawks.

I have the privilege to work with many talented and hardworking people at Ryerson University who were quite understanding when my work on this book took me away from spending extra hours on other projects. My thanks to Renee Lemieux, Larry Lemieux, Grace Chan, Robin Whittamore, Wendy Freeman, Ken Woo, and Ira Levine, and to everyone in CCS and my students.

Thank you so much, Norma and Emma.

Brian Lesser

Toronto, Canada

December 2004