Acknowledgments

One thing I quickly learned during this endeavor is that writing a book is not something you do alone. I would like to thank the whole team at Apress for their support; without you this book would have never seen the light of day. I also learned that writing a book is harder than I ever expected. Nevertheless, it was quite an experience. I thank Manuel Jordan for introducing me to the people at Apress, which started this endeavor.

I owe a big thanks to Koen Serneels for helping me out writing this book and sitting it out all the way, you wrote more than you, initially, signed up for. Thanks for helping me out Koen!

Another big thanks goes to Chris Nelson for keeping all of us focused and for his advice on the book; it was a pleasure working with you. The same thanks go to the coordinating editors, Stephen Moles and Jennifer Blackwell, who in addition to the focus on quality tried to keep everything within the schedule (sorry for slipping past the initial date).

This book would never have seen the light without the comments and suggestions given by Manuel Jordan and Erwin Vervaet. Although at times the comments drove me to desperation, without your comments and suggestions this book would never have become what it is now. So thanks for the comments and suggestions and keeping a clear vision.

The appendix was written entirely by Christophe Vanfleteren, who took on this task with great dedication and determination. He did an excellent job of making our application deploy on Cloud Foundry and writing down the steps it took. Thanks, Christophe, for fulfilling this task.

Thanks also to my family and friends for the times they missed out on me, and to my dive-buddies for all the dives and trips I missed in the last months.

Last but definitely not least I thank my wife, Djoke Deinum, for her endless support, love and dedication, despite the long evenings, sacrificed weekends and holidays to finish the book. Without your support I probably long ago would have abandoned the endeavor.

Marten Deinum

I thank Erwin Vervaet for giving me the chance to coauthor this book and for being a great colleague and mentor over the last years. With Erwin on your side there are no problems, only solutions. Thank you Erwin.

Thanks to Marten Deinum for having me as coauthor and Chris Nelson, Manuel Jordan, Jennifer Blackwell and Stephen Moles for their endless dedication and advice. Without you guys this project would never have reached this paper version; thank you all. After all these months of hard work I realize that writing a book is even harder than writing good software. In fact, writing a book is comparable to a software project without the luxury of automated testing.

Christophe Vanfleteren did an excellent job investigating Cloud Foundry and helping us out writing the appendix. I had the pleasure to work together with Christophe before, and he is by far one of the most talented developers I have worked with in my career. Thank you Christophe for your time and dedication.

Special thanks to everyone who keeps Spring alive, by developing for it or by using it. I have been using Spring since 2004, and to this day it still keeps me amazed. I have used many frameworks, but Spring remains a top-notch framework with its superior code base, agility, liveness, good design and completeness. It is my believe that Spring has many years to go and will be able to serve us on a daily basis to make our work easier, faster and help us create quality projects.

I thank my girlfriend, Sonja Korte, for bearing with me and forgiving me sacrificing our holidays and nearly all evenings and weekends over the last 4 months, and my family and friends for missing out on me.

Last but not least, I want to thank you for reading this book. I'm also a reader of many IT books, so I know what is good and what isn't. I really hope we have succeeded at bringing the good stuff into practice and offer you a top-quality book with exiting technology that will make your daily job easier.

Koen Serneels