Colophon
Our look is the result of reader comments, our own experimentation, and feedback from distribution channels. Distinctive covers complement our distinctive approach to technical topics, breathing personality and life into potentially dry subjects.
The image on the cover of Java Message Service is a passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius), an extinct species. Although these birds had some personality quirks that might have doomed their existence anyway, it was humans who proved their ultimate undoing.
In the mid-1800s, passenger pigeons were the most numerous birds in North America. Several flocks, each numbering two billion or more birds, lived in various habitats east of the Rocky Mountains. Flocks migrated en masse in search of food, without regard to season, and a good food source might keep a flock in one place for years at a time. (In fact, John James Audubon observed that nearly the entire passenger pigeon population once stayed in Kentucky for several years and were seen nowhere else during this time.)
Whole flocks roosted together in small areas, and the weight of so many birds—often up to 90 nests in a single tree—resulted in destruction of forests, as tree limbs and even entire trees toppled. (The accumulated inches of bird dung on the ground probably didn't help, either.) These roosting habits, combined with high infant mortality and the fact that female passenger pigeons laid a single egg in a flimsy nest, didn't bode well for the long-term survival of the species.
It was the harvesting of passenger pigeons for food, however, that drove them to extinction. In 1855, a single operation was processing 18,000 birds per day! Although even Audubon himself thought that the prodigious pace of passenger pigeon processing wouldn't have an adverse effect on the birds' population, he was wrong, because the last passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914.
Colleen Gorman was the production editor and the copyeditor, and Clairemarie Fisher O'Leary was the proofreader, for Java Message Service . Catherine Morris and Rachel Wheeler provided quality control. Matt Hutchinson and Rachel Wheeler provided production support. John Bickelhaupt 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 the Dover Pictorial Archive. 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 Nancy Priest. Mike Sierra implemented the design in FrameMaker 5.5.6. The heading font is Bodoni BT, the text font is New Baskerville, and the code font is Constant Willison. The illustrations that appear in the book were produced by Robert Romano using Macromedia FreeHand 8 and Adobe Photoshop 5. This colophon was written by Leanne Soylemez.
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.