Acknowledgments

While writing this book, I made many promises to myself and others about what I’d do when I finished. The most important of those promises was to acknowledge everyone who made this book possible. Of course, I’m grateful to have you as a reader. But you should appreciate those people who got this book out on the shelves and into your hands.

The first and last person I want to thank is my wife, Sarah. If it weren’t for her help, you wouldn’t be holding this book. I have no idea where to even begin thanking her. She pushed me to believe in myself, kept me motivated when the end kept moving further away, tolerated being inundated with Seam and my relentless questioning about how to structure the book, edited drafts, assembled the index, provided therapy, made sure I ate, and took care of countless chores I let slip. What meant the most is that she put my project before her own, something I look forward to doing for her now. Please help me in thanking her.

Writing a book puts a tremendous strain on relationships. I would like to thank all my friends and family for supporting me in this endeavor and having faith that I would eventually come out of my hole and once again answer phone calls, hang out, and talk about something other than writing a book. I am forever indebted to my parents, James and Mary Allen, for extending me every opportunity in my life to be successful. You only get one childhood and they made it both a rewarding and a memorable one. Mom and Dad, thanks for passing on to me your relentless perseverance and strong desire to learn and for always being there to support me in my endeavors.

Rewinding to the origin of this book, I want to thank Andrew Glover for introducing me to Jennifer Aloi from IBM developerWorks, who in turn launched my technical writing career by sponsoring the Seamless JSF series. Much of the credit for that series’ success goes to Athen O’Shea for doing a superb job of editing and helping me find the right words. Little did I know that I would soon be buried deep in turning those ideas into a book.

I want to thank Marjan Bace and Michael Stephens for taking a chance on me and trusting that I would finish as I blew past one deadline after the next. Something tells me they had the real schedule hidden in a drawer and had already anticipated the 15 months that would elapse over the course of this project. I’m also grateful to Andy Kapit and Andrew Van Etten of CodeRyte, Inc., for endorsing this book in its early stages.

Moving along chronologically, I’d like to acknowledge Cynthia Kane for helping me see the big picture and for reminding me that I had a book to write when I started to daydream. I was fortunate to have an ambitious and talented set of reviewers who donated their time and insight to help make this the best Seam resource available: Peter Johnson, Doug Warren, Peter Pavlovich, Devon Hillard, Nikolaos Kaintantzis, Hung Tang, Michael Smolyak, Benjamin Muschko, Kevin Galligan, Judy Guglielmin, Valentin Crettaz, Carol McDonald, Ara Abrahamian, Horaci Macias, Norman Richards, Ted Goddard, Costantino Cerbo, Mark Eagle, Carlo Bottiglieri, and Jord Sonneveld. Thanks to Karen Tegtmeyer for seeking out the reviewers, conducting the reviews, and scaring the volunteers into actually sending back their comments. Special thanks to Benjamin Muschko, Pete Pavlovich, and Ray Van Eperen for thoroughly reading the book and giving me line-by-line edits and advice; thanks to Michael Youngstrom for reviewing chapter 15; thanks to Ted Goddard and Judy Guglielmin for their help with chapter 12 and the development of the source code for the ICEfaces example; and thanks to Valerie Griffin and Daniel Hinojosa for providing last-minute corrections and feedback. I also want to thank all my loyal MEAP readers and forum participants, especially those who were there from the very beginning, patiently waiting for this book to materialize into print.

The heroes of this project are the production team, under the leadership of Mary Piergies, who coaxed me out of rewriting hell and worked in overdrive to get this book into print. The person who took on the biggest burden in this transition was Liz Welch, my copy editor. I want to extend enormous thanks to Liz for weeding out all the inconsistencies in the book and tolerating my pursuit of perfection. I also want to thank Norman Richards, my technical editor, for challenging me to get all my facts about Seam straight and steering me away from giving readers impractical advice. I’d like to recognize the tremendous work done by the remaining members of the production and postproduction team: Katie Tennant for proofreading the manuscript, squashing all of those “writing bugs”; Dottie Marsico and Gordan Salinovic for morphing the chapters from office document format into the professional layout that you see in front of you in record time; Leslie Haimes for making the book look eye-catching on the shelves and enticing readers, like yourself, to dive into it; Tiffany Taylor for maintaining the document templates; Gabriel Dobrescu for handling the book’s web presence on manning.com; and Steven Hong for continued support in publicizing the book and preparing marketing materials.

Join me in thanking Gavin King for sharing his vision of Seam and its contextual component model with the world as an open source project and to all the Seam developers that matured his vision into the robust integration framework that it is today.

I would like to thank Panera Bread in Laurel, MD, for serving as my retreat/second office when my house was trying to stifle my writing. I am grateful for the bottomless tea and free wireless internet. I wish more companies were as progressive as yours.

I’m happy to say that each and every person mentioned in this passage, and sadly those I overlooked, helped me complete the most ambitious goal of my life. Thanks again to my wife for standing by me during this project.