Building Oracle XML Applications

Acknowledgments

I owe an unrepayable debt of gratitude to my wife Sita. For over a year, she juggled our two active youngsters on nights and weekends while Daddy “disappeared” to work on his book—a true labor of love. She did not understand what demon drove me to write this book, but she felt I might regret not writing it for the rest of my life. I’m happy to say to her, Emma, and Amina, “Daddy’s home.”

Thanks to my mother-in-law, Dr. Nila Negrin, who assisted me in finding the perfect XML insect to grace the cover of this book, Xenochaetina Muscaria Loew. Regrettably, O’Reilly couldn’t find a print of this Tennessee-native fly, so we had to go for plan B.

Many thanks to the technical reviewers for this book: Adam Bosworth, Terris Linenbach, Don Herkimer, Keith M. Swartz, Leigh Dodds, Murali Murugan, Bill Pribyl, and Andrew Odewahn. I owe Keith a special thank you for his amazingly detailed review.

Garrett Kaminaga, a key developer on Oracle’s interMedia Text product development team, wrote the lion’s share of Chapter 13, for which I am very grateful. In addition, thanks go to MK, Visar, and Karun in Oracle’s Server Technology XML development team for answering questions when I bumped into problems, and for always having an open mind to new ideas.

Norm Walsh, coauthor of DocBook: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly & Associates), offered early encouragement for my then-crazy idea of authoring this entire book in XML, and he answered many questions at the outset about using the DocBook DTD for technical manuals.

Many thanks to Tony Graham at Mulberry Technologies for giving us permission to include the helpful XML, XSLT, and XPath quick references in Appendix D and to Oracle Corporation for allowing us to include JDeveloper 3.1 on the accompanying CD-ROM.

Thanks to the entire O’Reilly production team, especially to Madeleine Newell, the project manager and copyeditor, whose keen questions about wording and XML enhanced the book.

Finally, thanks to Debby Russell, my editor at O’Reilly, for believing in my initial idea and more importantly for not rushing me to finish. The book you’re now reading is everything I envisioned at the outset for a one-stop-shop book for developers using Oracle and XML. No compromises were made and thankfully, none was ever asked of me.