Busy busy busy

I can hardly believe it's only mid-January! Since the start of the year it just seems to have been one thing or another that's taken up so much time. Over the Christmas and New Year period I've been working on severalJavaOne proposals with colleagues here and Oracle. Still not finalised any of them, so we'll have to do that before the deadline.

Then there's been all the work on WWW 2005. As I've already mentioned, I'm co-chair on the Web Services and XML Track and we had a lot of papers to go through. Thanks to the many reviewers who helped. The quality of the papers was OK (maybe the bell-curve was shifted towards to origin a bit) and it was difficult to make the final selection (still not finalised at the time of writing this). I have been a little disappointed with the quality of the Web Services papers: in my book taking a paper on traditional Web *Servers* and changing Servers to Services doesn't cut it, and Semantic Web isn't Web Services either. In the end the papers submitted concentrated more on the XML side of things that the Web Services.

Now does that mean that there's no interesting R&D going on in Web Services, or that people don't see the WWW conferences as the most appropriate place to publish them? I've published several times in the earlier WWW conferences and they've always been good places to attend. OK, in the early days they were about Web Servers, caching, optimizations of HTTP interactions etc, but that's because there were no such things as Web Services. But as the Web has evolved, so has the conference (not a bad example of Darwinian theory in practice). Let's hope that in the future people see the conference as a much more inclusive venue.

Another area that's taken up time is the Web Services transactions interoperability workshop, which is where I am at the moment. More on that in a separate entry though.

Oh, and let's not forget the work we've been doing with customers of our products. Sometimes that can be frustrating, but more often than not it's interesting and informative to get feedback (positive as well as negative). Someday it would be interesting to produce a timeline of all of the products and show how they've evolved over the years and (where possible/allowed) indicate why they evolved in the way they did. We started to do this with the original Arjuna System, which went on to become the Arjuna Transaction Service, but even that paper is now out-of-date. (Santosh and I have been working on an update for a while, so this just reminds me that he has the token.)