Preface
Author’s Note
Reluctantly succumbing to my father’s urging in the spring of 2000, I enrolled in my first software development course at the University of Massachusetts. Following years of frustration getting my computer to “just do what I want,” I quickly found our roles inverted; I was in charge of the machine.
Academia proved a bit abstract to my sophomoric eyes, and after those first few months of study, I yearned to make programs that delivered real user value. Endless trial-and-error led me to the conclusion that it’s best not to write every little thing on your own—it was more efficient to build upon the work of others.
By then the JBoss open source community was picking up steam with this thing called an “Application Server,” a neat program that ran other programs. To a junior developer it meant no more networking code. No more manual database connections. No more object pools or caches. It meant no more speaking like a computer. It meant writing the programs I wanted to build, not the mechanics underneath.
My experience with this enterprise software miraculously made me marketable enough to snag a post-college job in the middle of the dot-com fallout, and during my tenure there we enrolled in a weeklong training session from the source—JBoss, Inc.
The reputation of our instructor preceded his arrival, his name sprinkled about the JBoss codebase, popular forums, and the upcoming EJB 3.0 specification. Bill Burke came to deliver course material, but in my eyes he planted ...