Acknowledgments

Writing a book about software is similar to a software project. There’s much more emphasis on documentation, but it’s still essential to have an application that works.

Writing a second edition of a book is a form of software maintenance. You have existing code and documentation—information that needs to be updated to match a changed world. And how the world has changed! Since the last edition, what people write has evolved: weblogs, REST services, XMPP-based communications, and other technologies are now on the feature lists of many projects, while deadlines remain as optimistic as ever. The Java building, testing, and deployment ecosystem has evolved to match.

I’ve had to go back over every page in the first edition and rework it to deal with these changes, which took quite a lot of effort. The result, however, is a book that should remain current for the next three-to-five years.