Java Message Service

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. ...