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.

Mark Nottingham moving on

Mark Nottingham is moving on to Yahoo. Good luck Mark.

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.

Jim Johnson on writing a transactional resource

Jim is going to write a series of blog entries on writing transactional resources. Worth a look.

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"!

Interesting

Definitely worth a look.

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.

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.

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.

JBI and SCA

Since I'm now the Development Manager for JBossESB (amongst my roles), I'm obviously interested in things such as JBI and SCA and how they might relate. So I've been collecting articles.

Here's a nice discussion by Edwin Khodabakchian. Another by JJ (BTW, congratulations on the more to SAP JJ).

Obviously both Oracle and SAP are co-authors on SCA, so for those people who thing the above articles may not be 100% objective, there's an interesting one here, that makes a stronger statement concerning the overlap between JBI and SCA.

There are some Gartner comments here and here.

And finally one analysts take on a fairly obvious missing co-author, with which I agree.

Any more, please post to the comments.

Why JBoss?

So why have I moved across to JBoss? Well it hasn't been an easy choice, as quite a few people out there will know. Firstly I was one of the founders of the company. I was also a director of Arjuna Technologies and being a director of any company imposes certain obligations on you that don't come with normal employment contracts. I want Arjuna Technologies to succeed, because I believe in what we've been trying to do and also for the many shareholders who have supported us over the years.

We've been working on having a closer relationship between Arjuna Technologies and JBoss almost from the start. The fact that Bob Bickel is on our advisory board and also works for JBoss is a happy coincidence (we like to point out that Bob joined us first!) When the opportunity finally arose, it was simply too good for the company to pass up. Also to be honest, the way open source has burst onto the software scene, if the likes of IBM are feeling the pinch then you can bet that either every other middleware vendor is too, or is feeling OSS breathing down their necks! Nuff said.

The way JBoss operates when getting involved with any project, be it cacheing or transactions, is that they need to have a critical mass of knowledge as well as the software. So, as well as the transaction software that we have developed over the past 20 years, they needed the knowledge to compliment it. And that's where I came in.

I think this is an exciting opportunity for JBoss and Arjuna. It's also an extremely important deal for both companies. Which is why I, along with many other people in Arjuna, worked hard to ensure it happened. In some ways it hasn't been an easy decision to make, but in others it was the only thing that made sense.

End of an era?

By now you may have heard about the Arjuna and JBoss deal: basically JBoss acquires the transaction technology that Arjuna has developed independently or when working in Hewlett-Packard, which we then acquired from them when we span out. A consequence of this acquisition is that I now work for JBoss. I'll blog on the deal itself later, but for now I wanted to say a few things about leaving Arjuna Technologies.

This isn't exactly the end I had in mind when we span out of HP and started Arjuna Technologies Ltd (ATL). I've always seen ATL as a logical extension of my original start-up, Arjuna Solutions, and I think deep down I thought company acquisition was a good possibility too. Being a director, obviously the exit-strategy benefits to the shareholders were always upmost in my mind, but there's always a selfish component (and no, it's not monetary): I've been in the enviable position to have worked with the same group of friends for the best part of twenty years (if we're counting, then it's 18+ years for Stuart and I) and I would like to have had that continue. Of course we've all had our disagreements and ups-and-downs over the years (who hasn't?!), but it's always been fun and interesting.

Although we're not moving far (literally down one floor and across a corridor!) that daily interaction will be something I'll miss a lot. After I received word that the deal had completed, my first thought wasn't about the work ahead, but it was "It's not my company any more :-(". Strange.

I obviously wish everyone at ATL the best of luck in the future, but particularly Stuart, Barry, Steve and Dave. It has been fun (most of the time) and it's a period in my life I wouldn't change. I've learnt a lot from Arjuna Solutions and Arjuna Technologies and I only wish the "exit strategy" had been more inclusive!

With any luck our paths will continue to cross.

WS-TX face-to-face meeting

I'm on my way back from the inaugral OASIS WS-TX face-to-face meeting. I think the two day meeting went well - certainly better than expected. Eric is one of the chairs, along with Ian, who I've worked with before on the CORBA Activity Service and it's J2EE equivalent. It's a small world!

Eric has some interesting comments on the face-to-face. I'd just like to add that after the meeting I'm even more convinced that WS-CAF has a lot to offer this new TC, both in terms of experiences gained and as a place to do additional work, such as heuristics.

Greg also has something to say on the subject, but I think WS-Coordination isn't the right building block for sessions: it should be WS-Context. Greg also has a reference to the XML 2005 presentation he just presented, based on our paper.

Interesting statistics for WWW 2006 submissions

This year we've got 13 tracks for paper submissions. Here are the statistics:

Browsers and User Interfaces: 51 papers
Data Mining: papers 98 papers
E* Applications: papers 105
Hypermedia and Multimedia: 23 papers
Performance, Reliability and Scalability: 34 papers
Pervasive Web and Mobility: 14 papers
Search: 128 papers
Security: 37 papers
Semantic Web: 75 papers
Web Engineering: 61 papers
XML and Web Services: 67 papers
Developing Regions: 0 papers
Industrial Practice and Experience: 5 papers

Update: overall, paper submissions are up 25% on WWW2005.

And so it begins!

The submission deadline for WWW2006 finally passed this morning (10am my time). We got 67 paper for the XML & Web Services track that I'm chairing. This year we're using the OpenConf system for paper reviews and assignments. It's pretty good and certainly better than most of the ones I've used over the years. However, there are still issues with it that made my role of assigning papers more problematical than it should have been. Maybe if I ever find some spare time I'll sit down and write the ulimate paper reviewing system; with 20 years of reviewing experience behind me, how hard can it be ;-)?

Anyway, the assignments are done. We ended up with a couple more papers per reviewer than I expected, due to the high number of submissions and the fact that a couple of PC members dropped out at the very last minute. Now we've got until the 24th of December to do the reviews :-(

WS-TX presentation

The first face-to-face meeting of the new OASIS WS-TX technical committee is next week. As one of the co-authors I'd try to attend anyway, but as luck would have it, I'm also giving one of the presentations: on WS-AtomicTransaction. Hopefully there'll be discussion around WS-CAF, as I strongly believe that there is scope for collaborative work between these two committees. I'm in the process of writing a blog entry on that subject for WebServices.org, so watch this space.

Session modeling for Web Services paper published

Via Greg, I'm reminded that our ECOWS paper has been published.

WWW 2006 submission deadline extended

Extension: The submission deadline for WWW2006 refereed papers has been extended to Friday November 11 11:59PM Hawaii time (hard deadline).

As you may know, on Sunday October 30 there was a significant fire at the site hosting the www2006 server. No one will be allowed into the building until Christmas and half the research labs are completely destroyed.

We attempted to mask the failure with a temporary site and have restored the site as quickly as possible in order to maintain the original deadline. But we have become aware that DNS and routing problems are still causing locations to be unable to reach the site even as late as Friday November 4th 2005.

Given these technical difficulties, the fairest thing to do seems to be to grant a blanket 1-week extension, until November 11th 2005.

In fairness to those who submitted on time and managed to find the web site, we will allow revised versions of papers to be uploaded up to the new deadline.

We apologize unreservedly for the confusion stemming from this fire and its aftermath - its been an interesting exercise in network complexity, and at least nobody was hurt - and we thank you for very much for submitting your work to WWW2006.

TEMPORARY WWW2006 WEBSITE: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~lac/ but SHOULD be visible at www2006.org
DIRECT ACCESS to the paper submission website: http:// www.openconf.org/www2006/
TEMPORARY EMAIL FOR ENQUIRIES: lescarr@gmail.com

Information about the fire can be found at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/ hi/england/hampshire/4390048.stm.
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WWW2006 Co-chairs: Les Carr, Dave De Roure, Arun Iyengar
WWW2006 PC Chairs: Carole Goble, Mike Dahlin