I work for Red Hat, where I lead JBoss technical direction and research/development. Prior to this I was SOA Technical Development Manager and Director of Standards. I was Chief Architect and co-founder at Arjuna Technologies, an HP spin-off (where I was a Distinguished Engineer). I've been working in the area of reliable distributed systems since the mid-80's. My PhD was on fault-tolerant distributed systems, replication and transactions. I'm also a Professor at Newcastle University and Lyon.
Monday, January 30, 2006
A new place to submit articles
If you're looking for somewhere to publish articles or papers on general middleware problems, JEE, Web Service, or something you think the community at large may find interesting, then you might want to check out the JBoss Architect's Library.
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Twilight Zone article
WebServices.org has published another of my blog entries, so take a look. Unfortunately in the translation they stripped out several of the references to the Twilight Zone, but hopefully it doesn't detract from the central message: that WS-Context should be more widely adopted for session management in preference to the WS-Addressing approach. Be warned, the article is deliberately more anti-WS-Addressing than I am in reality, but that's simply to try to hammer home the argument.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Jim Johnson on writing a transactional resource
Jim is going to write a series of blog entries on writing transactional resources. Worth a look.
Monday, January 23, 2006
Time for a change
Just a note to say that I've altered the look-and-feel of the blog. Not reason other than I felt like a change.
Arjuna mortgages
One of the things Arjuna has been involved with for sometime finally went live yesterday. Bundles is a mortgage auction facility for which Arjuna is providing the software and support. It's a shame that none of the articles, including The Times mention them, but I do know from the involvement I had when working there, that the Arjuna staff have put in a lot of time and effort. Finger's crossed that it all works out for them. If it does, it'll be amusing to consider how it all started: 18+ months ago Bundles came to talk to Steve and I about a "little bit of contract work"!
Monday, January 16, 2006
WWW 2006 PC meeting
Just back from the WWW2006 Program Committee meeting in Edinburgh. Santosh and I joined the other track chairs to decide which of the record breaking number of submissions, should be accepted to the conference. In some cases it was an easy decision to make, but in others it was very difficult. Although judging the quality of papers within a given track is usually straightforward, in some cases we had to judge between tracks and that's not easy. However, at the forefront of everyone's minds at this stage was not protecting individual tracks, but ensuring that overall the quality of the conference was high. Sometimes this meant that uniformly excellent papers were rejected in favour of papers that had generated a lot of discussion within the review process, on the assumption that they would continue to generate good discussion within the conference.
It was tough. We had two sites for the track chairs going concurrently: Edinburgh and Boston. Because of the time difference we started at 9am and were going until 8pm. But as you can see, our host the National E-Science Institute, had some good surroundings.
In the end, of the record breaking 700+ submissions, we accepted about 11%. That's not 11% from each track, though. Some tracks had more accepted than others simply because of the quality differences between tracks.
One final comment: for my own track, it was nice to see more Web Services papers this year.
It was tough. We had two sites for the track chairs going concurrently: Edinburgh and Boston. Because of the time difference we started at 9am and were going until 8pm. But as you can see, our host the National E-Science Institute, had some good surroundings.
In the end, of the record breaking 700+ submissions, we accepted about 11%. That's not 11% from each track, though. Some tracks had more accepted than others simply because of the quality differences between tracks.
One final comment: for my own track, it was nice to see more Web Services papers this year.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
I want one!
I don't think I'd ever break my rule of not buying first generation, but this looks so sweet!!
WSDL 2.0
Several years (5?) after WSDL 1.1 came out, WSDL 2.0 is finally a candidate recommendation. Check out the Primer for a start. There's also the SOAP 1.1 Binding, the Adjuncts, SOAP 1.1 binding schema and HTTP binding schema.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Arjuna Technologies lives!
There have been quite a few articles in the media since the Arjuna and JBoss announcement. Most of them have been pretty accurate, but one or two have inadvertently and incorrectly stated that JBoss acquired Arjuna Technologies. That isn't the case. JBoss acquired the transaction product and related material, plus a couple of employees (myself included). However, Arjuna Technologies is still an independent company which continues to own the rights to, and market, its JMS implementation, amongst other things. In fact, Arjuna Technologies is to forge a stronger relationship with JBoss in the future as it provides consultancy and training in the area of high-end transaction deployments.