First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge my family, Lorraine, Natalie, and Daniel, who graciously tolerated the long hours I put into this project, encouraged me through the process, and rejoiced with me as I reached each significant milestone. Without their support, this project would not be possible.

Sun’s announcement of the Red October program in November 2005, under which all Sun Software was going to be made available for download and use, was met with mixed reaction among some of the former SeeBeyond folk. Java CAPS is a complex enterprise application integration platform, not a lone-developer IDE or a data center technologist–configured infrastructure package. Some felt that making the Java CAPS suite freely downloadable would be unhelpful. This was particularly so as a major gap was perceived to exist between material in product documentation and the product and context knowledge an enterprise architect and integration developer would need to effectively use Java CAPS. I felt that a book bridging this gap, and showing examples of Java CAPS solutions implementing enterprise integration patterns, would be appropriate and timely.

Although the manuscript took three times as long to write as I originally anticipated, I made some of the material available to individuals both inside and outside Sun well before it was completed. This was to validate the original intent, to help answer specific questions, and to get early feedback on the content and coverage of various topics. I wish to acknowledge these individuals, particularly Jason Baragry, who took time to review most of the chapters and provided valuable feedback that helped shape the manuscript. I also wish to acknowledge other members of the seebeyond-I community at the ITtoolbox, who took time to provide feedback and who encouraged me to continue.

While this project is largely my own and was almost exclusively undertaken in my own time, there were occasions when I worked on it during my regular hours. Ray Gear at SeeBeyond and subsequently at Sun, and Angelo Joseph at Sun, are due credit for encouraging me to finish the project and tolerating the occasional diversion.

I wish to thank my collaborators, Sebastian Krueger, Brendan Marry, Saurabh Sahai, Peter Vaneris, and Andrew Walker, all talented Java CAPS field practitioners, for providing material for various chapters and for reviewing the manuscript. In particular, the topics Brendan and Peter addressed would likely not have been covered if they had not provided the material. I would also like to thank Dean Hansen, who provided notes on some of the material in early chapters and reviewed parts of the material.

Special thanks go to Jason Fordham and Peter C. Berkman, my colleagues at Sun, for trying to make a virtual image of the Solaris 10-based Java CAPS installation available in time for inclusion on the CD-ROM accompanying the book. Although through no fault of theirs this did not happen, I am grateful to them for the effort.

Last, but not least, I would like to thank Carol J. Lallier, who made sure the text is in English, however American it may be; Kim Arney, who laid out the book; Diane Freed and Richard Evans, who proofed and indexed the book; Elizabeth C. Ryan, who managed the publication process; Myrna Rivera, Gabriele De Celis, and Laurie Wong, my colleagues at Sun Microsystem, who handled the promotion of this book inside and outside Sun; and Greg Doench, who took a punt and walked me through the process of writing and publishing a book.