Acknowledgments

To my wife Angela: I am still amazed by you and always will be. Thanks for being such a great wife and mother to our children. You’ve helped me make it through this book, as your inspiration always keeps me moving forward.

To my children Kaitlyn, Jacob, Matthew, and Zachary: I love you all so much and I cherish every moment we have together. We will read through this book together one day, and you, too, can learn the joy of developing successful software. For now, I will enjoy all the time we have together as you continue to grow and learn more each day.

I want to thank my family for their continued support in my career. I also want to thank my co-workers at Fermilab for allowing me to guide the organization’s application development efforts and build successful solutions to keep us moving forward.

To the folks at Apress, I thank you for providing me with the chance to share my knowledge with others. I especially thank Jonathan Gennick for the continued support of my work and for providing the continued guidance to produce useful content for our readers. You’ve become a good friend over the last couple of years and I really enjoy working with you. I also thank James Markham for his hand in editing this book. I thank Kathleen Sullivan and Kevin Shea for doing a great job coordinating this project. The technical reviewers, David Coffin and Mark Beaty, have done an excellent job of solidifying the book content. Thanks again for your hard work and technical expertise. Lastly, I’d like to thank everyone else at Apress who had a hand in this book.

To the Java community: thanks for helping to make the Java platform such an innovative and effective realm for application development. We all have the privilege of working with a mature and robust platform, and it would not be successful today if it weren’t for everyone’s continued contributions to the technology. I also thank all the Oracle Java experts: the roadmap for the future is still looking great. I am looking forward to using Java technology for many years to come.