Colophon
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The animal on the cover of Java Management Extensions is an octopus, an eight-armed cephalopod mollusk of the order Octopoda. Octopi are found worldwide in tropical and warm temperate waters. There are many species of octopus, ranging from the massive Giant Pacific octopus, which scientists believe can reach up to 30 feet in length, to the miniscule Californian octopus, which grows to be only one inch long. The common octopus is about 2-3 feet long. The octopus’s brain is the most complex of the invertebrates', with long- and short-term memories, providing it with the ability to solve problems by trial-and-error methods -- a trick that comes in handy when evading or robbing fishermen’s traps. Octopi are completely deaf but they have complex eyes, with vision approximately as acute as a human’s. The hundreds of suckers that line each of their tentacles are very sensitive and allow octopi to hold onto almost anything. If an octopus loses a tentacle, it soon grows another in its place.
Octopi feed primarily on crustaceans and mollusks, often luring their prey by wiggling the tip of a tentacle like a worm. Once it catches its victim, the octopus bites it, injecting it with a poisonous venom and digestive enzyme. It then sucks out the flesh and discards the shell (an easy way to identify an octopus’s den is by the pile of shells outside its entrance). One of the octopus’s defense mechanisms is the release of a purple-black ink cloud as a smokescreen or decoy. Octopi can also change color for camouflage (as well as to reflect mood change) and dart away quickly by jetting water through their siphons. These abilities keep the octopus from being an easy target for predators, even though they have no hard exterior shell. This lack of solid body matter also allows octopi to squeeze into very small spaces.
The male octopus usually dies soon after mating; the female, who usually foregoes eating for several weeks while caring for the large number of eggs she lays, often dies of starvation soon after they hatch. Only a few young out of what may be more than 200,000 eggs survive to adulthood. The lifespan of an octopus is short, ranging from 6 months to 3 years, depending on species and water temperature.
Rachel Wheeler was the production editor and copyeditor for Java Management Extensions. Sarah Sherman was the proofreader, Linley Dolby provided quality control, and Phil Dangler provided production assistance. Tom Dinse wrote the index.
Hanna Dyer designed the cover of this book, based on a series design by Edie Freedman. The cover image is a 19th-century engraving from Old Fashioned Animals. Emma Colby produced the cover layout with QuarkXPress 4.1 using Adobe’s ITC Garamond font.
Melanie Wang designed the interior layout, based on a series design by David Futato. This book was converted to FrameMaker 5.5.6 with a format conversion tool created by Erik Ray, Jason McIntosh, Neil Walls, and Mike Sierra that uses Perl and XML technologies. The text font is Linotype Birka; the heading font is Adobe Myriad Condensed; and the code font is LucasFont’s TheSans Mono Condensed. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read using Macromedia FreeHand 9 and Adobe Photoshop 6. The tip and warning icons were drawn by Christopher Bing. This colophon was written by Rachel Wheeler.
The online edition of this book was created by the Safari production group (John Chodacki, Becki Maisch, and Madeleine Newell) using a set of Frame-to-XML conversion and cleanup tools written and maintained by Erik Ray, Benn Salter, John Chodacki, and Jeff Liggett.