Acknowledgments

We first want to thank Cynthia Kane, our development editor at Manning, who put up with our many missed deadlines and gave great feedback during the writing process. We’d also like to thank our awesome copy editor, Andy Carroll, for catching an amazing number of grammatical errors in the early revisions of the book. The greater Manning team deserves kudos as well; they’ve made for a very pleasant writing experience over the past year and a half.

Big thanks to our team of reviewers, who provided invaluable feedback during various stages of the book’s development: Bruce Snyder, Charles Moulliard, Christophe Avare, Christopher Hunt, Domingo Suarez Torres, Doug Tillman, Fintan Bolton, Gordon Dickens, Gregor Hohpe, Jeroen Benckhuijsen, John S. Griffon, Kevin Jackson, Marco Ughetti, Martin Gilday, Martin Krasser, Michael Nash, Mick Knutson, Roman Kalukiewicz, Tijs Rademakers, and Willem Jiang.

Special thanks to Willem Jiang for being our technical proofreader, catching those bugs we missed, and helping improve the source code for the book.

Thanks to Martin Krasser for contributing appendix E, which is all about using Camel from the Akka project. We couldn’t think of a better person to write about Camel and Akka.

We’d also like to thank Hadrian Zbarcea for getting this book project started—who knows when this book would have been written or by whom if he hadn’t gotten us together!

We’d like to thank Gregor Hohpe and James Strachan for writing the forewords to our book. Gregor’s book, Enterprise Integration Patterns, has been one of our favorite tech books for years now, so it’s an honor to have Gregor on board to write the foreword. Without the EIP book, Apache Camel would look a lot different than it does today, if it existed at all.

In our opinion, James is an inspiration to many developers out there—including us. He has co-founded tons of successful open source projects; Camel is just one of them. If James and the other Apache Camel co-founders had not decided to create Camel, we wouldn’t be writing this book. So, again, thanks!

Finally, we’d like to give a big warm thank you to the community. Without the community, the Apache Camel project wouldn’t be as successful as it is today. In fact, without the success, both of us would have different kinds of jobs today, which wouldn’t involve hacking on Camel all day along.

Claus

I would like to thank my beautiful wife, Christina, for her understanding of the long hours I needed to spend during evenings and weekends working on the book. Knowing that you would never let my hand go, that the family life is safe and secure, is exactly the support any writer needs in taking up such a big challenge as writing a book.

A warm thank you goes to our dog, Bambi, who patiently sleeps in my office, and occasionally wakes up and politely “asks” me for a break and a walk. I must admit many of the ideas and thoughts behind this book came to me during my walks with Bambi.

Jon

I would like to thank my amazing wife, Lisa, for the patience, support, and encouragement I needed throughout the writing of this book. It simply would not have happened if it wasn’t for you. To Georgia, my beautiful daughter: thank you for cheering me up when the writing got the better of me. I love you both!