Rod,

I just wanted to thank you for writing this incredibly useful book, 
without any doubt it's the best J2EE book I've read so far (and I've read 
quite a few). I imagine it's only a question of time before it becomes a 
J2EE classic. Having spent some time on benchmarking performance through 
different J2EE design patterns on different application servers (WebLogic 
and OC4J), I'm also very glad to see that our conclusions meet. I'm 
astounded that you could come up with such a complete book on your own! :))

I find your dispassionate tone regarding sensible religious issues 
extremely valuable and comforting as the core requirement in any 
application is client's satisfaction far before any technical orthodoxy. I 
bought your book after reading some of your posts on theserverside.com 
just because of that sense of objectivity.

Very good job indeed.

                Yann

PS: just a comment: in chapter 9 p.359, you made a comment about always 
being able to retrieve an underlying Oracle-specific Connection from a 
generic connection wrapper issued from an application server's connection 
pool. As far as I know, this is unfortunately not the case for WebLogic up 
to the current version (7.0 SP1).