Written In The Clouds, Published With The Cloud and Pushed Into The Cloud 📎
In the contrary to the previous books, which were entirely written in trains, "Real World Java EE Patterns - Rethinking Best Practices" was mainly written in the airplanes - and so clouds. More precisely not in the clouds, but actually above them :-)
I decided to self-publish the book on lulu.com. You have to choose the templates and upload the content - "into the cloud". It was interesting to watch, how the cover was postprocessed and splitted, the preview created, formatting validated etc. This whole process is parallelizeable and could (is?) be processed by multiple workers concurrently - actually well suited for the cloud and "pay as you go".
Instead of burning the sample code on the CD, I wanted to publish them as an opensource project (http://kenai.com/projects/javaee-patterns), and get the community involved (very like the p4j5 - with over 100 observers and few committers). kenai.com is a perfect platform for that. You can create the project (after an invitation) in seconds and will get the whole infrastructure like chat, bugzilla, mercurial, continuus integration, wiki and forums. Netbeans 6.7 integration is really remarkable and seamless. The infrastructure works well. ...after 24h I got the first issue filed :-). kenai.com comes with RESTFul API and is only an instance of itself. The continuus integration is probably leveraging some grid technology - and so "clouds" already.
I'm using mercurial as SCM. It feels also cloudy. You are committing the changes locally and can push the change-set into the default repository. In the case of kenai.com - it is the cloud again.
In two days I got 26 members on javaee-patterns, and had some nice discussions about Java EE on twitter (is running on S3 and probably EC2 - and so clouds).
2 years ago I wouldn't consider this book something special, but nowadays it is completely cloud-ready :-). Btw. the book is about Java EE 5/6 a perfect cloud technology...