Jim Gray

It's been over 5 years since I first blogged about Jim going missing at sea. At each subsequent HPTS we've had a few things to say to remember him and come together to hope that we'd see him again. Even at the remembrance event, where people spoke eloquently about Jim, his family and his work, there was always the thought that he would turn up again. However, with this recent news, it seems inevitable that although hope is never completely lost, it is less and less likely. I first met Jim in the late 1990s, though I'd known about him since the mid 1980s when I started my PhD. I'll miss him and I know that everyone who met him feels the same. My thoughts go out to his family.

Java Forum at the Titanic Centre

I wrote on my JBoss blog about a trip I made this week to present about JBoss in Belfast. Well it was a great event with around 200+ people there to hear what the speakers had to say. Well worth the trip, even if the flight out was delayed by 6 hours! But what really made the trip was the Titanic Centre: I've never presented on a stage like this before - it was a replica of the staircase from the Titanic! I've included a couple of pictures I took to give an idea of what it was like, but these pictures don't really do it justice.

Java or the JVM

In my previous post about Java as the platform of the future I may not have been too clear on what I actually meant when I said that developers in other languages would (should) be using Java under the covers. What I thought I had made clear was that if you've got a perfectly good wheel, why reinvent it if it can be relatively easily and opaquely re-tasked for another vehicle? Some concrete examples: if you've got a high performance message service implemented in Java, you don't need to reimplement it in Ruby in order for those developers to be able to take advantage of those capabilities. Likewise for transactions and other core services.

Transactions and parallelism and actors, oh my!

In just 4 years time I'll have spent 3 decades researching and developing transactional systems. I've written enough about this over the years to not want to dive in to it again, but suffice to say that I've had the pleasure of investigating a lot of uses for transactions and their variations. Over the years we've looked at how transactions are a great building block for fault tolerant distributed systems, most notably through Arjuna which with the benefit of hindsight was visionary in a number of ways. A decade ago using transactions outside of the database as a structuring mechanism was more research than anything else, as was using them in massively parallel systems (multi-processor machines were rare).

However, today things have changed. As I've said several times before, computing environments today are inherently multi-core, with true threading and concurrency, with all that that entails. Unfortunately our programming languages, frameworks and teaching methods have not necessarily kept pace with these changes, often resulting in applications and systems that are inherently unreliable or brittle in the presence of concurrent access and worse still, unable to recover from the resultant failures that may occur.

Now of course you can replicate services to increase their availability in the event of a failure. Maybe use N-version programming to reduce or remove the chances that a bug in one approach impacts all of the replicas. But whereas strongly consistent replication is relatively easy to understand, it has limitations which have resulted in weak consistency protocols that trade off things like performance and ease of use for application level consistency (e.g., your application may now need to be aware that data is stale.) This is why transactions, either by themselves on in conjunction with replication, have been and continue to be a good tool in the arsenal of architects.

We have seen transactions used in other frameworks and approaches, such as the actor model and software transactional memory, sometimes trading off one or more of the traditional ACID properties. But whichever approach is taken, the underlying fundamental reason for using transactions remains: they are a useful, straightforward and simple mechanism for creating fault tolerant services and individual objects that work well for arbitrary degrees of parallelism. They're not just useful for manipulating data in a database and neither are they to be considered purely the domain of distributed systems. Of course there are areas where transactions would be overkill or where some implementations might be too much of an overhead. But we have moved into an era where transaction implementations are lighter weight and more flexible than they needed to be in the past. So considering them from the outset of an application's development is no longer something that should be eschewed.

Back to the Dark Ages

The other day, due to severe snowstorms (for the UK), we ended up snowed in and without power or heating for days. During this time I discovered a few things. For a start, having gas central heating that is initiated with an electric started is a major flaw in the design! Next, laptop batteries really don't last long. And a 3G phone without access to 3G (even the phone masts were without power!) is a great brick.

But I think the most surprising thing for me was how ill prepared I was to deal with the lack of electricity. Now don't get me wrong - we've had power outages before, so had a good stock of candles, blankets, torches and batteries. But previous outages have been infrequent and lasted only a few hours, maybe up to a day. And fortunately they've tended to be in the summer months (not sure why). So going without wasn't too bad.

However, not this time and I've been trying to understand why. I think it's a combination of things. The duration for one, but also the fact that it happened during the week when I had a lot to do at work. Missing a few hours connectivity is OK because there are always things I can do (do better) when there are no interruptions from email or the phone. But extend that into days and it becomes an issue, especially when alternative solutions don't work, such as using my 3G phone for connectivity or to read backup emails.

What is interesting is that coincidentally we're doing a check of our processes for coping with catastrophic events. Now whilst I think that this power outage hardly counts as such an event, it does drive home that my own personal ability to cope is lacking. After spending a few hours thinking about this (I did have plenty of time, after all!) I'm sure there are things I can do better in the future, but probably the one place that remains beyond my control is lack of network (3G as a backup has shown itself to be limiting). I'm not sure I can justify a satellite link! So maybe I just take this as a weak link and hope it doesn't happen again. But we may be investing in a generator if this happens again.

Big Data

Data is important in everything we do in life. Whether it's a recipe for your favourite dinner or details of your bank account, we are all data driven. This is nothing new either: humanity, and in fact all life, is critically dependant on data (information) and has been for millions, or billions, of years. Therefore, maintaining that data is also extremely important; it needs to be available (in a reasonable period of time), often shareable, secure and consistent (more or less).

If we cannot get to our data then we could be in trouble (catastrophic). If it takes too long to get at then there may be no real difference between it being available or not. If someone else can get to out data without our permission and possibly modify it without our knowledge, then that could be even worse than not being able to access the information. And of course if the information is maintained in multiple places, perhaps to ensure that if one copy is lost then we have backups, then updates to a copy must be made eventually to the others.

Over the centuries individuals and companies have grown successful and controlling from maintaining data securely for others or even managing it so that everyone has to go to them to obtain it. In our industry several large companies grew primarily because of this model. Other vendors became successful through other aspects related to data management or integration. Data is an enabler for everything in the software industry, whether it's middleware or operating system related.

So data is King. That is the way it has been and always will be. Everything we do uses, manipulates or otherwise controls data in some way, shape or form. The arrival of Cloud, mobile and ubiquitous computing does not change it. In fact ubiquitous computing increases the amount of data we have by several orders of magnitude. The bulk of the world's computing power are embedded systems, i.e., systems designed to do a few dedicated functions, in real-time, using sensors for data I/O. Technically all smart-phones and tablets are embedded systems, not PCs. Major drivers for data in the coming years are smart-phones, tablets, sensors, green technology, eHealth/medical, industrial applications and system "health" monitoring.

Much of the new data coming on stream today contains a location, timestamp or both. There has been a ten fold increase in electronically generated data in 5 years. It is predicted that very soon there will be over a Zetabyte of data (1billion terabytes). That's the equivalent of a stack of DVDs half way from here to Mars! Maintaing that data is important. But being able to use it is more important.

It is now well known that issues with traditional RDBMS implementations, their architectures and assumptions, mean that they are insufficient to manage and maintain this kind of data, at least not by themselves. This has lead to the evolution of BigData, with NoSQL and NewSQL implementations. There are a range of different approaches, including tuple space and graph-based databases, because one size does not fit all. Unlike with the RDBMS which is a good generic workhorse, but not optimisable for specific use cases, these new implementations are targeted specifically at them and conversely would make poor generic solutions.

It is extremely unlikely that a single standard, such as SQL, will evolve that works across all NoSQL implementations. However, there may be a set of standards, one for each category of approach. But for many, SQL will still remain a necessity, even if it means they cannot benefit from all of the advantages NoSQL offers: more people understand SQL and more applications are based on it, than anything else. So bridging these worlds is important. Finally it is worth noting that business analytics and sensor analytics will play a crucial role here.

In our industry we are now seeing an explosion in new database vendors looking to become the standard for this next generation. The current generation of developers are more heavily influenced by mobile, social and ubiquitous computing than by mainframes, so the RDBMS is not their natural first thought when considering how to manage data. However, most of these new companies are small open source startups and recognise the problems inherent with both: customers not trusting their important data to small companies that could go under or be acquired by a competitor; other vendors taking their code and creating competing products from it.

Furthermore, some large vendors who have failed to make an impact in the data space or inroads in enterprise middleware, see this new area and these new companies as opportunities. As a result, relationships are being created between these two category of companies in a symbiotic manner. Many of these NoSQL/NewSQL companies are going to merge, be acquired or fail. In the meantime new approaches and companies will be created. Over the next 5 years this new data space, which will integrate with the current RDBMS area, will coalesce and solidify. There are no obvious winners at this stage, but what is clear is that open source will play a critical role.

Clouds for Enterprises (C4E) 2012

Call for Papers: The 2nd International Workshop on

Clouds for Enterprises (C4E) 2012

http://nicta.com.au/people/tosicv/c4e2012/

held at the 16h IEEE International EDOC Conference (EDOC 2012) "The Enterprise Computing Conference"

(http://www.edocconference.org), Beijing, China, 10-14 September 2012

Important dates:

Paper submission: Sunday, 1 April 2012

Notification of acceptance: Monday, 28 May 2012

Camera-ready version: Friday, 15 June 2012

Description:

Cloud computing is an increasingly popular computing paradigm that aims to streamline the on-demand provisioning of software (SaaS), platform (PaaS), infrastructure (IaaS), and data (DaaS) as services. Deploying applications on a cloud can help to achieve scalability, improve flexibility of computing infrastructure, and reduce total cost of ownership. However, a variety of challenges arise when deploying and operating applications and services in complex and dynamic cloud-based environments, which are frequent in enterprises and governments.

Due to the security and privacy concerns with public cloud offerings (which first attracted widespread attention), it seems likely that many enterprises and governments will choose hybrid cloud, community cloud, and (particularly in the near future) private cloud solutions. Multi-tier infrastructures like these not only promise vast opportunities for future business models and new types of integrated business services, but also pose severe technical and organizational problems.

The goal of this one-day workshop is to bring together academic, industrial, and government researchers (from different disciplines), developers, and IT managers interested in cloud computing technologies and/or their consumer-side/provider-side use in enterprises and governments. Through paper presentations and discussions, this workshop will contribute to the inter-disciplinary and multi-perspective exchange of knowledge and ideas, dissemination of results about completed and on-going research projects, as well as identification and analysis of open cloud research and adoption/exploitation issues.

This is the second Clouds for Enterprises (C4E) workshop - the first was held in 2011 at the 13th IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing (CEC'11) on Monday, 5 September 2011 in Luxembourg, Luxembourg. The C4E 2011 workshop program, posted on the workshop Web page http://nicta.com.au/people/tosicv/clouds4enterprises2011/, included the keynote "Blueprinting the Cloud" by Prof. Willem-Jan van den Heuvel, presentations of 3 full and 5 short peer-reviewed workshop papers, and the discussion session "Migrating Enterprise/Government Applications to Clouds: Experiences and Challenges". The workshop proceedings were published by the IEEE and included in the IEEEXplore digital library, together with the proceedings of the main CEC'11 conference and the other co-located workshops. The Clouds for Enterprises (C4E) 2012 workshop will be held at another prestigious IEEE conference - the 16h IEEE International EDOC Conference (EDOC 2012) "The Enterprise Computing Conference" in Beijing, China, 10-14 September 2012. The main theme of the IEEE EDOC 2012 conference is "When Services in Cloud Meet Enterprises", so the C4E 2012 workshop is an excellent fit into and addition to the IEEE EDOC 2012 conference.

This Clouds for Enterprises 2012 workshop invites contributions from both technical (e.g., architecture-related) and business perspectives (with governance issues spanning both perspectives). The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Technical Perspective:

- Patterns and best practices in development for cloud-based applications

- Deployment and configuration of cloud services

- Migration of legacy applications to clouds

- Hybrid and multi-tier cloud architectures

- Architectural support for enhancing cloud computing interoperability and portability

- Architectural principles and approaches to cloud computing

- Cloud architectures for adaptivity or robustness

- Evaluation methods for cloud architectures

- Architectural support for dynamic resource management to support computing needs of cloud services

- Cloud architectures of emerging applications, such as mashup of enterprise/government services

- Impact of cloud computing on architecture of software and, more generally, IT systems

Enterprise/Government Application Perspective:

- Case studies and experience reports in development of cloud-based systems in enterprises and governments

- Analyses of cloud initiatives of different governments

- Business aspects of cloud service markets

- Technical and business support for various cloud service market roles, such as brokers, integrators, and certification authorities

- New applications and business models for enterprises/governments leveraging cloud computing

- Economic evaluation of cloud-based enterprises

Governance Perspective:

- Service lifecycle models

- Architectural support for security and privacy

- Architectural support for trust in/by cloud services

- Capacity planning of services running in a cloud

- Architectural support for quality of service (QoS) and service level agreement (SLA) management

- Accountability of cloud services, including mechanisms, algorithms and methods for monitoring, analyzing and reporting service status and usage profiles

- IT Governance and compliance, particularly in hybrid and multi-tier clouds

Review and publication process:

Authors are invited to submit previously unpublished, high-quality papers before

***1 April 2012***.

Papers published or submitted elsewhere will be automatically rejected. All submissions should be made using the EasyChair Web site http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=c4e2012.

Two types of submissions are solicited:ˇ

* Full papers - describing mature research or industrial case studies, up to 8 pages long

* Short papers - describing work in progress or position statements, up to 4 pages long

Papers presenting and analyzing completed projects are particularly welcome. Papers about on-going research projects are also welcome, especially if they contain critical, qualitative and quantitative analysis of already achieved results and remaining open research issues. In addition, papers about experiences and comparative analysis of using cloud computing in enterprises and governments are also welcome. Submissions from industry and government are particularly encouraged. In addition to presentation of peer-reviewed papers this one-day workshop will contain a keynote from an industry expert and an open discussion session on practical issues of using clouds in enterprise/government environments.

Paper submissions should be in the IEEE Computer Society Conference Proceedings paper format. Templates (with guidelines) for this format are availableˇat: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/cscps/formatting (see the blue box on the left-hand side). All submissions should include the author's name, affiliation and contact details. The preferred format is Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), but Postscript (PS) and Microsoft Word (DOC) will be accepted in exceptional cases.

Inquiries about paper submission should be e-mailed to Dr. Vladimir Tosic (vladat at server: computer.org) and include "Clouds for Enterprises 2012 Inquiry" in the Subject line.

All submissions will be formally peer-reviewed by at least 3 Program Committee members. The authors will be notified of acceptance around

***28 May 2012***.

ˇˇ At least one author of every accepted paper MUST register for the IEEE EDOC 2012 conference and present the paper.

All accepted papers (both full and short) will be published by the IEEE and included in the IEEE Digital Library, together with the proceedings of the other IEEE EDOC 2012 workshops. A follow-up journal issue with improved and extended versions of the best workshop papers is also planned.

Workshop Chairs:

Dr. Vladimir Tosic, NICTA and University of New South Wales and University of Sydney, Australia; E-mail: vladat (at: computer.org) ? primary workshop contact

Dr. Andrew Farrell, University of Auckland, New Zealand; E-mail: ahfarrell (at: gmail.com)

Dr. Karl Michael Gîschka, Vienna University of Technology, Austria; E-mail: Karl.Goeschka (at: tuwien.ac.at)

Dr. Sebastian Hudert, TWT, Germany; E-mail: sebastian.hudert (at: twt-gmbh.de)

Prof. Dr. Hanan Lutfiyya, University of Western Ontario, Canada; E-mail: hanan (at: csd.uwo.ca)

Dr. Michael Parkin, Tilburg University, The Netherlands; E-mail: m.s.parkin (at: uvt.nl)

Workshop Program Committee:

The final list of he workshop Program Committee will be listed soon at the workshop Web site: http://nicta.com.au/people/tosicv/c4e2012.

HyperCard

A long time ago, and in what may seem to some as a galaxy far,far away, there was no web and no way of traversing resources via hyperlinks. In that time the PC was just taking off and most of us were lucky if we shared a computer with less than 5 people at a time! Back then I shared one of the original classic Macs and came across this wonderful piece of software that was to change the way I thought about the world. HyperCard was something I started to play with just because it was there and really for no other reason, but it quickly became apparent that its core approach of hypermedia was different and compelling. These days I can't recall all of the ways in which I used HyperCard, but I do remember that a few of them helped me in my roleplaying endeavours at the time (ok not exactly work related but sometimes you learn by doing, no matter what it is that you are doing!)

When the Web came along it seemed so obvious the way that it worked. Hyperlinks between resources, whether they're database records (cards) or servers, makes a lot of sense for certain types of application. But extending it to a world wide mesh of disparate resources was a brilliant leap. I'm sure that HyperCard influenced the Web as it influenced several generations of developers. But I'm surprised with myself that I'd forgotten about it over the years. In fact it wasn't until the other day, when I was passing a shop window that happened to have an old Mac in it running HyperCard, that I remembered. It's over 20 years since those days, but we're all living under its influence.

Is Java the platform of the future?

I've mentioned before, but I think we are living in a period of time where a bigger explosion of programming languages is occurring than at any time in the past four decades. Having lived through a number of the classic languages such as BASIC, Simula, Pascal, Lisp, Prolog, C, C++ and Java, I can understand why people are fascinated with developing new ones: whether it's compiled versus interpreted, procedural versus functional, languages optimised for web development or embedded devices, I don't believe we'll ever have a single language that's right for all developer requirements.

This Polyglot movement is a reality and it's unlikely to go away any time soon. Fast forward a few years we may see a lot less languages around than today, but they will have been influenced strongly by their predecessors. I do believe that we need to make a distinction between the languages and the platforms that they inevitably spawn. And in this regard I think we need to learn from history now and quickly: unlike in the past we really don't need to reimplement the entire stack in the next cool language. I keep saying that there are core services and capabilities that transcend middleware standards and implementations such as CORBA or Java Enterprise Edition. Well guess what? That also means they transcend the languages in which they were written originally.

This is something that we realised well in the CORBA days, even if there were problems with the architecture itself. The fact that IDL was language neutral obviously meant your application could be constructed from components written in Java, COBOL and C++ without you either having to know or really having to care. Java broke that mould to a degree, and although Web Services are language independent, there's been too much backlash over SOAP, WSDL and friends that we forget this aspect at times. Of course it's an inherent part of REST.

However, if you look at what some are doing with these relatively new languages, there is a push to implement the stack in them from scratch. Now whilst it may make perfect sense to reimplement some components or approaches to take best advantage of some language capabilities, e.g., nginx; I don't think it's the norm. I think the kind of approaches we're seeing with, say, TorqueBox or Immutant where services implemented in one language are exposed to another in a way that makes them appear as if they were implemented natively, makes far more sense. Let's not waste time rehashing things like transactions, messaging and security, but instead concentrate on how best to offer these capabilities to the new polyglot movement that makes them fit in as first class citizens.

And to do this successfully is much more than just a technical issue; it requires an understanding of what the language offers, what the communities expect and working with both to fit in seamlessly. Being a Java programmer trying to push Java services into, say, Ruby, with a Java programmers approaches and understanding, will not guarantee success. You have to understand your users and let them guide you as much as you guide them.

So I still believe that in the future Java will, should and must play an important part in Cloud, mobile, ubiquitous computing etc. It may not be obvious to developers in these languages that they're using Java, but then it doesn't need to be. As long as they have access to all of the services and capabilities they need, in a way that feels entirely natural to them, why should it matter if some of those bits are hosted on or by a Java application server, for instance? The answer is that it shouldn't. And done right it means that these developers benefit from the maturity and reliability of these systems, built up over many years of real world deployments. Far better than the alternative.

The future of Java

Just a couple of cross posts that are worth giving a wider distribution. First on whether this new polyglot movement is the death of Java, and second how the JCP process has been changing for the better over the years.

Blogging versus tweeting?

A few years ago when I was thinking about creating a twitter account I pondered about whether it was worth doing when I was blogging. I didn't think I'd use it much! Since creating the account I've been drawn into twitter more and more, so that today I'm finding the roles reversed: blogging is becoming less frequent whilst tweeting is increasing for me.

I think the reason why is pretty obvious: it is so much easier and quicker to tweet than to write a blog. But there are obvious limits in what you can say with 140 characters, so it's not an either/or situation for me. And yet as a result of using twitter I'm finding myself thinking less and less about blogging. That bit I don't quite understand. Now maybe it has nothing to do with my use of twitter; maybe I'd be blogging less regardless of it because of work, family life etc. Who knows? But I do know I find it interesting how twitter has insinuated itself with my life so quickly and seamlessly.

Transactions on Android

Every year I try to make time for pet projects, be they learning new languages such as Erlang (one of my 2007 efforts), writing a discrete event simulation package in C++, or one of my best which was writing the world's first pure Java transaction service over Christmas 1996. Most of the time I don't manage to make much progress throughout the year, leaving the bulk of the effort for over the Christmas break.

This year was no different, with "port Arjuna (aka JBossTS) to Android" on my to-do list for months. I've been playing around with Android for quite a while, even collaborating with some friends on writing a game (iPhone too). I know that although it's Java-based, there are enough differences to make porting certain Java applications tricky. But over the years I have found porting transactions to different languages and environments a pretty good way to learn about the language or environment in question.

So as well as doing my usual catch-up on reading material, breaking the back of the Android port was top of my list. Now in the past I'd have higher expectations of what I could accomplish in this time period, but these days I have a family and some things take priority (well, most of the time). But once everyone had opened their presents, let the turkey settle in the stomach and sat down to watch The Great Escape (hey, it's Christmas!) I found time to kick it off.

I started simple in order to remove as many variables from the problem as possible. So I went back to JavaArjuna, the ancestor of JBossTS and all that predated it. It has none of the enhancements that we've added over the years, but places less requirements on the infrastructure. For instance, it was JavaArjuna that I ported to the HP Jornada back in 2001 because it also worked with earlier versions of Java.

As in 2001 it went well and it wasn't long before I had transactions running on my Android device. It was nice to see one of the basic tests running and displaying the typical transaction UIDs, statuses, rolling back, committing, suspending etc. Then I moved on to JBossTS. It wasn't quite as straightforward and there are a few hacks or workarounds in there while I figure out the best way to fix things, but it's done too! I'm pretty pleased by the results and will spend whatever time I have in the coming weeks to address the open issues. And I've definitely learned a lot more about Android.

So overall I think it's been a good pet project for 2011. It also showed me yet again that the architecture and code behind JBossTS that the team's been working on for years is still a highly portable solution. It doesn't matter whether you want transactions on a mainframe, in the cloud, or on a constrained device, JBossTS can do them all!

PaaS 2.0?

A while ago I has some things to say about people trying to add a version number to SOA. At the time it was 2.0 and I like to think I had a little to do with the fact that it died almost as quickly as it was created. I won't go into details, but the interested reader can catch up on it all later.

Now a friend who got caught in the SOA 2.0 crossfire came to me recently and pointed out that some people are now trying to coin the term 'PaaS 2.0' and asked my opinion. At first I didn't know what to think because the original reasons I was against SOA 2.0 didn't seem to apply here because PaaS is so poorly understood. There are no fundamental architectural principles around which it has grown. There are very few examples that everyone agrees upon. There's not even an accepted definition!

But that's when it hit me! How can you assign a version to something that is so I'll defined? It's not like the Web, for instance, where it made sense to have a 2.0. Ok there's some good stuff from the likes of NIST, but there's no agreed reference architecture for PaaS, so how precisely can you say something is PaaS 2.0? The answer is that you can't. Now that doesn't mean you won't be able to do so eventually, but there are quite a few prerequisites that have to be satisfied before that can occur.

So what does this mean? Am I against PaaS 2.0 as I was with its SOA cousin? Yes I am, but for different reasons. As I outlined above, I think it's wrong to try to version something that it so ill defined. Let's figured out what PaaS 1.0 is first!

Future of Middleware

I think it's fair to say that despite my years in industry I'm still an academic at heart. I like the ability to spend time working on a problem without the usual product deadlines. Of course there's the potential that you come up with something that has little relevance to the real world, but that can be mitigated by staying close to industry through funding, sponsorship or other relationships. Often in industry we don't have the luxury of spending years coming up with the perfect solution and whilst it's for very good reasons, it can be frustrating at times for those involved.

But we all make the best of what we have to work with and I love my current position, despite the fact I get to spend less time researching than I would like. In fact in some ways I now understand what Santosh has been doing for years in directing and pushing others in the right directions, whilst at the same time wanting to get more involved himself but not quite having enough time to do it all.

Therefore, I take any opportunity I can find to dive back into research, write papers, code etc. And attend, and possibly/hopefully present at conferences and workshops that are often dominated by the research community, though obviously with practical overtones. The Middleware conference is one such event that I love to participate with in one way or another. Over the years I've had papers there and been on the program committee, and not once have I been disappointed by the quality of submissions.

So it was great to be asked to write a paper with Santosh and Stuart on the future of middleware for FOME. Truth be told, Santosh did the bulk of the writing and his co-authors provided the disparate data and input that he's excellent at being able to form into a coherent whole. The result is a great paper that I presented in Portugal earlier this month. It went down well and I got a lot of good feedback, both from the academics present as well as industrial participants.

But the real high for me was just being at the workshop and listening to all of the other presentations. I had a wonderful time meeting with others there and getting as immersed in the research atmosphere as it's possible to do in 48 hours. I could cast my mind back many years to when I was in full-time research and compare and contrast with today. I got a lot out of the many conversations I had with researchers, both old and new to the field. I hope I had a positive impact on them too, because I came away invigorated and my mind full of new possibilities.

Wave sick?

What with HPTS, JUDCon, JAX, QCon, JavaOne and various business meetings, I've been doing a lot of traveling recently. Time spent on a plane usually means my mind wanders a bit, covering various topics some of them unrelated. One of the things I got thinking about though, was definitely influenced by a series of talks I've been giving for a while, including at my JBossWorld keynote: the history of distributed systems.

I covered it at Santosh's retirement event too, but from a very personal perspective, i.e., how Arjuna related to it, and relate it did, often in a big way. So this got me to thinking about the various technology waves I've lived through and helped influence in one way or another. And it was quite "chilling" for me to realise how much I'd forgotten about what's happened over the past third of a century or more! (And that made me feel old too!)

I often take for granted that I lived through the start of the PC era: there were no PCs when I first started to code. In fact I'd been developing applications on a range of devices before IBM came out with the first PC or before Microsoft came with the first version of Word. I moved through the era of the BBC, ZX80, Commodores, Ataris, etc. into the first Sun machines, Apples, PCs, laptops, desktops, PDAs, smartphones, pads and much much more. A huge change in the way we interact with computers and importantly the data they maintain. Many different paradigm shifts!

Looking at the middleware shifts that accompanied some of these hardware changes and in fact were often driven by them, I've ridden a number of equally important waves. RPC, distributed objects, bespoke enterprise middleware architectures and implementations, standards based, a number of times there have been explosions of languages including functional and object-oriented, Java, open source, Web Services, REST, mobile, ubiquitous computing, and of course fault tolerance running throughout with transactions and replication. And I'm probably forgetting other things in between these waves.

It's been a bumpy ride at times. The move from CORBA to J2EE wasn't necessarily as good as is could have been. Web Services were often vilified far more than made sense if you were objective. But overall I've enjoyed the ride so far, more or less. And now with Cloud, mobile and beyond it's looking like the next decade will be at least as interesting as the last three. I'm looking forward to playing my part in it!

The future PC

I've been thinking a lot about what personal compute devices might look like in the future given the amount of time I've been looking at how things have evolved over the past 30 years. Not so much about what a mainframe or workstation computer might look like (assuming they even exist!) but what replaces your laptop, pad, phone etc. Now of course much of what I will suggest is influenced by how I would do it if I could. However, there's also a smattering of technical advancements in there for good measure.

So my biggest bugbear with my current situation is that I have a laptop (two if I include my personal machine), an iPad and a smartphone (two if I include the one I use for international travel). Each of them holds some subset of my data, with only one (laptop) holding it all. Plus some of that data is held in the cloud so I can share it with people or between devices. This is manageable at the moment, but it's frustrating when I need something on my iPad that's on my laptop or something on my phone that's on the iPad (you get the picture).

What I want is the same information available on all of these devices. In fact, what I want is one device that does it all. I rarely use my phone and pad concurrently, or my pad and laptop. There are exceptions of course, but bear with me. (I may be unique in this and some people might want multiple concurrent devices. But that's still possible in this environment.) What would typically satisfy me would be a way to modify the form factor of my device dynamically over time. Taking a touchscreen smartphone through a pad and then to a laptop with large screen, keyboard and trackpad. At each stage I'd like the best performance, graphically and compute, and the most amount of storage.

Is this possible? Well if you look at how hardware had evolved over the past decades it's not that far off. ARM dominates the smartphone arena and although Intel/AMD will eventually find a way into the market my money is on AMD to get to the laptop and workstation performance before they get to the low power consumption sector in any significant manner. So AMD powered laptops that perform equally with their Intel/AMD cousins aren't far off.

What about main memory? Well you only have to look at how things have evolved recently from 512meg through to 8gig and beyond. It's going to be possible to have 8gig smartphones and tablets soon. And SSDs are getting cheaper and cheaper by the month. Capacity-wise it may take them longer to get to the sizes of spinning disks, but once most laptop manufacturers include SSDs by default, the cost per Gig will plummet as their physical sizes continues to do so too. Putting multiple instances in the same device will be possible to fill the size gap too.

Now you could assume that what I'm outlining is a portable disk drive, but it really isn't. I'm assuming it has storage, of course, but I'm also assuming it has a CPU and probably a GPU. Think plug computer, but much smaller and with much more power: certainly the processing power to rival a laptop and probably the graphical power too. I say 'probably' only because I can see situations where the GPU could be part of the form factor you plug the device in to so that you can do work, e.g., the phone housing or the keyboard/screen.

Ok so there we are: my ideal device is the size of a gum packet (much smaller and you'll lose it) and can be plugged into a range of different deployment chassis. Now all I have to do is wait!

HPTS 2011

I'm back from HPTS and as usual it was a great snapshot of the major things happening or about to happen in our industry. In past years we've had Java transactions, ubiquitous computing, transactions for the Internet and the impacts of large scale on data consistency. We've also had discussions on the possible impact of future (back then) technologies such as SSD and flash on databases and transactions.

This year was a mix too, with the main theme of cloud. (Though it turned out that cloud wasn't that prevalent). I think the best way to summarise the workshop would be concentrating on high performance and large scale (up as well as out). With talks from the likes of Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft we covered the gamut of incredibly large numbers of users (700 million) through eventual consistency (which we learnt may eventually not be enough!)

Even 25 years after it started it's good to see many of the original people behind transaction processing and databases still turning up. (I've only been going since the 90s.) This includes Stonebraker (aka Mr Alphabet Soup), who gave his usual divisive and entertaining talks on the subject of SQL and how to do it right this time, and of course Pat, who instructed us never to believe a #%^#%-ing word he says as he's now back on the side of ACID and 2PC! (All in good fun, of course.)

Now it's important to realise that you never go to HPTS just for the talks. The people are more than 50% of the equation for this event and it was good to see a lot of mixing and mingling. We had a lot of students here this time, so if past events are anything to go by I am sure we will see the influence of HPTS on their future work. And I suppose that just leaves me to upload the various presentations to the web site!

Where have all the postings gone?

I know I've been blogging a lot this year, yet when I look at the entry count for this blog it's not as high as I had expected. Then I realised that most of my attention has been directed at JBoss. So if you're wondering where I am from time to time, it's over here.

RIP Dennis Ritchie

It's safe to say that no programming language has had as big an impact on my career as C. It's also safe to say that no operating system has had as big an impact on my career as Unix. So for these reasons and many others it is sad to hear about the passing of Dennis Ritchie. I met him once, many years ago, when he visited the University and spoke about a range of things, including C and Plan 9. He was a great speaker, someone who helped shape the world we live in, and a nice man. Yet another sad day.

Bluestone and Steve Jobs

Amongst all of the various articles and tributes to Steve Jobs I came across this from Bob, who is one of the people that has influenced my career significantly (and positively!) over the years. So it's interesting to read the influence Steve had on Bob, Bluestone, HP and hence Arjuna, JBoss and now Red Hat (not forgetting the other companies with which Bob's been involved over the years)! Thanks Bob and thanks, indirectly, Steve.