We wish to thank our colleagues in the Distributed Software Engineering research section for many helpful discussions over the years, and for their contributions to the work on software architecture. In particular, we gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Shing Chi (SC) Cheung and Dimitra Giannakopoulou to the work on behavior analysis. SC had the insight to select LTS as an appropriate modeling formalism, provided much of the ground-work and was a prime contributor to our investigation of safety properties. Dimitra has contributed crucial work in the theory and analysis of safety, liveness and progress properties, and the semantics of FSP.

Our thanks are due to Steve Crane, Nat Pryce, Wolfgang Emmerich and the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestion, on early drafts of the book. Their encouragement, and the enthusiasm of our students, is greatly appreciated. We would like to thank Storm Thorgerson, the cover designer, who worked beyond the call of duty and even friendship to produce a cover worthy of a trainspotter extraordinaire.

We would like to thank our families for their tolerance during the writing of this book. Our children – Lisa, Alon, Thomas and John – were kind enough to feign enthusiam for the examples and demonstration applets. Let us hope that the delusion of future fortune, with which we placated our wives Nitza and Judith, is not revealed as such too soon.

We take this opportunity to thank those many readers who have offered us their encouragement and suggestions. In particular, we are indebted to David Holmes who provided the motivation for Chapter 13 to address the problem of verifying the Java implementations. We also thank Alexander Höher for his comments on the bounded allocator of Chapter 9, and Paul Stroop for his many useful comments and suggestions. Finally we would like to express our thanks to the more recent members of the Distributed Software Engineering research group for their comments and contributions. In particular, we gratefully acknowledge the further contribution of Dimitra Giannakopoulou on fluents, and of Sebastian Uchitel to the work on model synthesis.

Jeff Magee & Jeff Kramer

January 2006