Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my wife Jennifer for tolerating my absence during the past six months, as I have locked myself in the basement researching, writing, and thinking. I also feel fortunate that my two-year-old son Aidan goes to bed early; a vast majority of this tutorial was written well after 8:30 P.M.!

Coming up with a list of people to thank is a difficult job because so many have influenced the material in this tutorial. I only hope that I do not leave anyone out. All of the technical reviewers did an amazing amount of work, each offering a unique perspective and useful advice. The official reviewers were Dean Wette, Kevin Heifner, Paul Jensen, Shane Curcuru, and Tim Brown.

I would also like to thank Weiqi Gao, Shu Zhu, Santosh Shanbhag, and Suman Ganesh for help with the internationalization example in "Additional Techniques". A technical article by Dan Troesser inspired my servlet filter implementation, and Justin Michel and Brent Roberts reviewed some of the first chapters that I wrote.

There are two companies that I really want to thank. Anonymous has this little link on their home page called "Write for Us." This tutorial came into existence because I casually clicked on that link one day and decided to submit a proposal. Although my original idea was not accepted, Mike Loukides and I exchanged several emails after that in a virtual brainstorming session, and eventually the proposal for this tutorial emerged. I am still amazed that an unknown visitor to a website can become an Anonymous author.

The other company I would like to thank is Object Computing, Inc. (OCI), my employer. They have a remarkable group of highly talented software engineers, all of whom are always available to answer questions, offer advice, and inspire me to learn more. These people are the reason I work for OCI and are the reason this tutorial was possible.

Finally, I would like to thank Mark Volkmann of OCI for teaching me about XML in the first place and for answering countless questions during the past five years.