Acknowledgments

Where do we even start in thanking all the people who made this book possible? You fed us, encouraged us, and taught us. Going back to the beginning, this project wouldn’t even have gotten off the ground without the good folks at Manning. Thanks to Marjan Bace, our publisher, Michael Stephens, our editor, and Sebastian Stirling and Frank Pohlmann, our development editors. You helped us figure out what makes a good book and guided, coaxed, and nudged us in the right direction. Thanks also to Christina Rudloff and Nick Chase.

The quality of this book has been hugely improved by the detailed comments we received from our reviewers. We really appreciate you taking the time to read our efforts and tell us what we got right and wrong. Thanks to Alasdair Nottingham, Andrew Johnson, Charles Moulliard, David Bosschaert, Felix Meschberger, John W. Ross, Kevin Sheehan, Kin Chuen, Tang, Marcel Offermans, Mirko Jahn, Paul Flory, Pierre De Rop, Teemu Kanstrén, and Tim Diekmann.

Thanks also to everyone who participated in the Manning Early Access Program. Special thanks to our technical proofer, Mark Nuttall, who went over the book several times with an eagle eye, and was patient with silly mistakes and last-minute improvements.

We couldn’t have written this book without the help of our colleagues at IBM. Thank you, Ian Robinson. Without your vision and commitment, it’s likely that neither of us would have had the opportunity to work so closely with enterprise OSGi. Thanks to Andy Gatford and Nickie Hills for supporting us. We’d like to thank Jeremy Hughes, Alasdair Nottingham, Graham Charters, Zoe Slattery, Valentin Mahrwald, Emily Jiang, Tim Mitchell, Chris Wilkinson, Richard Ellis, Duane Appleby, and Erin Schnabel for the many valuable discussions we shared with them.

We borrowed the phrase “bundle flake” from Alex Mulholland, who deserves credit for bringing the fun back into debugging OSGi fragments. We’d also like to give special mention to Sarah Burwood, who possibly didn’t realize what she’d signed up for when she offered to review the book as an OSGi beginner! We’ve learned loads from all of you, so thank you.

In addition to our IBM colleagues, we thank the members of the OSGi Alliance Expert Groups and Apache Aries. You put up with our ideas and questions and built the enterprise OSGi programming model with us, many of you donating your time to do so. There are too many names to even begin to list here, but particular thanks are deserved by Peter Kriens and David Bosschaert, both for direct help with the book and for their years of support building the OSGi Enterprise Specifications.

On a personal level, we’re indebted to our partners, Paul and Ruth, who picked up a great deal of domestic slack, as well as provided apparently limitless encouragement and support. At the times when this book didn’t seem possible, you persuaded us it was (and then fed us a snack). Holly would like to apologize to Paul for the six application servers and four IDEs now installed on his laptop; everyone knows not to let software engineers touch one’s computer! Tim would like to apologize to Ruth for all the times that “I just need to finish this paragraph” took rather longer than the implied five minutes; it turns out that writing prose is more like writing code than you might think...

Tim would like to thank the rest of his immediate family, Pauline, Gareth, Ron, Eve, Sarah, and Maurice, for their interest and their unwavering belief that not only would the book eventually be finished, but that it would also be worth reading. He also thanks them for helping him “remember to bring the funny.” He’s sure many of the readers will want to thank them for that, too.

Holly would also like to thank her mom, dad, John, Ioana, Heather, and Phil for helping her find the time and space for writing. Acknowledgment is also owed to Laurie Hodkinson, who has spent many hours helping write this book, and occasionally throwing up on the keyboard. Holly has every expectation that his first word will be “OSGi.”

As with many books, some of the people and things that helped make it possible probably aren’t even aware of their contribution. The writing of this book was fueled by coffee—lots of coffee—and cheese. Holly would like to thank the makers of her Beco Gemini baby carrier, which is essentially a concurrency framework for infants. Tim would like to thank the makers of his Vi-Spring mattress, which is essentially the cure to hunching over a laptop all day.

Finally, our thanks wouldn’t be complete without thanking you, the readers, for buying our book. We hope that you enjoy it, and that maybe you’ll end up liking OSGi just as much as we do.