Acknowledgments

This book is the result of many people's efforts. In particular, we want to thank the following people for taking the time to extensively review the contents of this book, often more than once: Smitha Kangath, Roberto Chinnici, Randy Thomas, and Matthias Weidmann. Other reviewers include Yutaka Yoshida, Mark Roth, Phil Goodwin, Arun Gupta, Jon Ellis, Bill Shannon, Sang Shin, Leslie McNeill, and Debra Scott.

Smitha Kangath, while not listed as an author, contributed content throughout the book. She was also instrumental in implementing many of the concepts presented here and verifying their accuracy.

Mark Hapner contributed many of the ideas that are presented in the book. He also reviewed a number of chapters.

Arun Gupta, in addition to reviewing a good part of the book, also guided us on SOAP interoperability issues. Joe Fialli extensively reviewed the XML chapter and provided clarifications for a number of issues. In a similar manner, Ram Jeyaraman provided an insightful review of the integration chapter, and Manveen Kaur did likewise with the security chapter. Rajiv Mordani provided helpful comments on several of the chapters, including the XML chapter. Ron Monzillo did an extensive review of the security chapter and also contributed some key ideas.

We would also like to thank John Crupi, Deepak Alur, and Dan Malks for reviewing many chapters and providing insightful comments.

Other reviewers whose comments helped us bring a much better book to market are Peter den Haan, Kevin P. Davis, Vijay S. Phagura, Rich Wardwell, Bob Withers, and Vartan Piroumian.

We would also like to thank the J2EE group at Sun Microsystems. Some of the key resources for us were Ken Saks, Tony Ng, Harpreet Singh, Vivek Nagar, Bill Shannon, Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart, Craig McClanahan, Doug Kohlert, and Linda DeMichiel. Hans Muller reviewed the client chapter and Eve Maler reviewed the security chapter.

Our special thanks go to our management, Larry Freeman, Jim Driscoll, Vivek Nagar, Karen Tegan, and Jeff Jackson, for their whole-hearted support and commitment to the BluePrints program and to this book in particular. Larry was always very supportive, encouraging, and resourceful whenever we hit a road block. This book would not have been possible without his support and commitment. We also want to especially thank our program manager, Jennifer Douglas. She kept us on track during this project while at the same time encouraging us to have fun with it, too.