Mastering JavaBeans and the Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition

As I write these words, I can’t help but think back to an inflection point that oc- curred in my life almost a year and half ago. I remember sitting in my cubicle at Trilogy Software Inc., an e-commerce company down in Austin, TX, lost in deep middleware thoughts. My challenge was to devise an interesting load-balancing strategy for our in-house application server, which we called the backbone.