I want to send out sincere grateful thanks to all of the reviewers of the book, who pointed out my many egregious errors. Their dedication to the task helped produce this high quality text that you are reading stand out. It is indeed a privilege to have these smart people who will prevent you going out into the public technical literary crowd with egg on your face, due to bad copy and mistaken content. I say thank you to my external reviewers, Antonio Gomes Rodrigues and Manjeet Singh Sawhney.

I want to thank members of the Packt Publishing team including Abhishek Kori, Kevin Colaco, Neha Mallik, Joel Noronha, Gloria Amanna, Ritika Dewani, Kranti Berde, and Kapil Hemnani. All of these folks worked hard to get this text into your hands. Finally, a special thank you goes to Dhwani Devater, who was the acquisition editor that approached me with the book concept and with whom I could not turn down such a challenging project. This book became my personal agenda known as "the project".

During the Devoxx UK 2013 conference, I discussed several ideas about Java EE 7 and beyond with David Blewin of Red Hat. I also met Aslak Knutsen from the Arquillian development team also from Red Hat. I want to thank those of you out in the wider community who saw the earlier presentations about Java EE 7; your feedback helped to derive the best quality for this book. I express gratitude to those followers and interested parties on the social networks of Twitter, Linked-In, Facebook, and Google+, who had kind words to say about writing a technical book.

I also want to say a big thank you to Markus Eisele for accepting my invitation to write the foreword for this, my first book. Markus is an excellent enterprise guy who happens to be an Oracle ACE Director and works for Msg in Germany. During 2013, I had a couple of tough months at times and Markus was there in spirit for me valiantly and graciously.

I thank members of the extended Pilgrim family, Mum and Dad and my sister for their support.

I wrote this book on a happenstance inquiry from Packt Publishing to help educate software developers, designers, and interested architects in Enterprise Java development. I gladly accepted the commission to write. I sieged this great opportunity. The book become the goal, the goal become "the project". I knew my life would change drastically from the regular software developer to a technical educator. It did whilst still holding down professional Java contracting gigs. I could not afford to let anyone down. The project became the mission, which was to give developers quality information, demonstrating good practice, and providing fair explanations around the concepts. I wanted to provide clear guidance in this fascinating area of technology. I am sure you have heard the saying about putting back good into the community. Well, this is true for me, too. Yet I wanted to give more than a return gift. I hoped to engage the worldwide Java community with a product, a concise and worthy Java EE 7 book. This is my first technical book.

The project was approximately 15 months in the making to get an initial schedule of promises to the real context of programming, testing and writing content. Emotionally and technically it was tough; I lived the rivers deep and mountains high.

Finally, I thank my wonderful Scottish lady, the love of my life, my dear partner, Terry for putting up with me and pushing me on, especially in the early phases of the project, saying several times in broad Glaswegian Patter, "Haud yer wheesht an' get oan wae it!". Thank you, I have done it.