Dedications and Acknowledgements

We'd like to thank those who granted us kind permission to use their materials in the text of this book: Much of the code presented in chapters 6, 7 and 8 is used with the permission of Sun Microsystems, the excerpts from OMG IDL to Java Mapping Specification that appear in Appendix A are reprinted with permission of Sun Microsystems and the OMG, and several of the figures in chapter 3 are used courtesy of the Object Management Group.

There is a whole community of people who worked together to bring this book together. At Sun, a number of people provided support for this book whether they knew it or not: John deArmon, Shahram Moradpour, Reed Hornberger and Ken Oestereich. Also at Sun, Harold Carr, Chris Callsen provided technical assistance, and Greg Nuyens and Steve Uhlir gave important management support. The people at Fusion Systems Group, past and present, built the team who wrote much of this book. Besides the contributors themselves, Mark Elenko was of great assistance one late night while I was debugging (thanks, Mark) and Srinvasa Vangala produced the Java IDL 1.1 FCS version of NPS and fixed a few bugs in the NPS client while he was at it. Thanks, folks. At Wiley, the professional, insightful and very patient team of Bob Elliot, Brian Calandra, and Brian Snapp provided guidance and wisdom, and were very flexible when this book had to transmogrify itself more than once. There are others at Sun and Wiley who contributed to this book whose names we may not even know—thank you for your help.

From Steven Barber:

To Steve Siegel, who understands the productive nature of chaos, and who neglected to kill this project when he had the chance.

To Laurie, the best wife ever, who puts up with all this.

I’d like to acknowledge the contributions of Lance Rose and Simson Garfinkel, who provided counsel to this first time book author. I’d also like to thank my co-authors: Geoff, thanks for getting me into this mess; Ellen, thanks for getting me out of it.

Finally, I’d like to acknowledge a few folks from my deep past without whom I’d never have been foolish enough to take on a task of this magnitude: my mother, Ada O. Barber, who imparted to me a love of words almost before I knew how to walk; my father, Edward A. Barber, who came home with that TRS-80 Model I one fateful weekend back in 1977 and thus introduced me to the computational world and who is, like me, an inveterate tinkerer (those familiar with Barbers' Follies Nos. 1 through 685,202 will know what I mean); Timothy Fiume, who believed in me enough to get me to believe in myself; Hal Abelson and Gerald Sussman, who taught me that there could be depth and beauty in the arrangement and rearrangement of bits; and Richard Weisberg, who taught me, again, that all it takes is the vision and will of one person to make a difference.