Alex Antonov is a very passionate technologist with a hunger to learn new tools, languages, techniques, and concepts behind enterprise application design. His specialty lies in designing highly scalable distributed large-scale enterprise systems. He is also a frequent presenter on the topics of architecture and design at conferences such as UberConference, JavaOne, and SpringOne 2GX.
Alex joined Orbitz Worldwide in 2004 and in his current role of senior principal engineer, he is responsible for providing technical leadership and guidance in the development of foundational technologies, core libraries, and APIs for enterprise-wide use, as well as being responsible for web application frameworks and developing common practices.
Alex has been a long-time Spring user, starting with Spring 2.0.8 all the way to the latest and greatest—Spring Boot. Besides Java, he is also proficient in Ruby/Rails, PHP, and Groovy, and is currently learning Erlang and Go.
I would like to thank all the people who have inspired, supported, and encouraged me through the book writing process. For me, this book represents the ability to take my passion for building software, my appreciation of the Spring family of frameworks, and the amazing work that was done by their creators, combine it with my many years of first-hand experience building complex applications, and share all the thoughts and best practices that I’ve developed over time and always wanted to share, with the community to help them build better, more elegant, robust, and performant applications.
I want to specially thank my wife, Alla, for constantly being there for me, for supporting me in writing this book, for being understanding when I spent countless evenings and weekends working on the chapters, for giving me an extra push to the finish line when I was close to being done, and for just being there for me! Honey, I love you very much!!!
A special thank you goes to my parents for giving me the opportunity to pursue my career dreams, for my education, and for raising me to become the person I am. All your hard work is now paying off and I would not be able to achieve what I have, or written this book, if it weren’t for you. I love you guys a lot, and while you are around, I can still be a child.