I first met Aleks Seović in 2005. I was attending the Javapolis (now Devoxx) conference in Antwerp with the express purpose of persuading Aleks to create the .NET implementation of Coherence. I had known of him through his work in creating the Spring.NET framework, and knew that there was only one person whom I wanted to lead the creation of our own product for .NET. As they say, the rest is history: We hit it off smashingly, and found a great deal of common ground in our experiences with enterprise systems, the challenges of distributed computing, architecting for scalable performance and high availability, and the need for seamless and reliable information exchange between Java and .NET applications.

Aleks has such a great ability to understand complex systems, and such a compelling manner of reducing complexity into simple concepts, that I was ecstatic when he told me that he was writing this book. Starting a book is no challenge at all, but finishing a book is a great feat. Many years of work have gone into these pages. May you enjoy and profit from this book as deeply as I have enjoyed and profited from my conversations with Aleks over these past years.

Cameron Purdy Lexington, MA January 2010