Not enough time ...

Been way too busy to breathe let alone blog! Major efforts at work around JBossTS and JBossESB, more standards related issues than I care to relate, plus a week SCUBA diving in the Red Sea. Now I'm at JBoss World Berlin, where I'm giving 3 presentations as well as copious meetings. Fun fun fun!

Problem solved!

A while ago I mentioned the problem I have with my family car: a Honda Prelude 2.2i VTEC. Nice car, but not very practical for the family. I love the 'lude, but something had to give: I didn't want to lose the car, but most places are too far for the rest of my family work walk to! Well I can now announce that I solved the problem: we bought a second car! A nice Subaru Impreza. :-)

Good or bad?

There's been a lot of postings concerning Oracle's Unbreakable Linux announcement. Is this good news or bad news for Linux? Is this good news or bad new for Redhat? No comment, I'm afraid. However, read the official response from Redhat.

Trying to be objective for a moment, I tend to agree with these sentiments and particularly with the report from CIOInsight that shows Redhat is the number one vendor for value as rated by CIO’s in 2004 and 2005. Oracle ranked 39 out of 41 (lower is worse!). Makes you wonder. In the UK (and elsewhere I suspect), anyone can sell support for Ford, Honda or Toyota cars (as examples), often undercutting the official franchises. Speaking from personal experience, you do get what you pay for though. If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. It may cost a little more, but I'm happy to pay for the peace of mind a franchise gives me where my car is concerned.

I've quite a few good friends at Oracle and I definitely wouldn't consider them monkeys, but I do wonder: WTF does Oracle know about supporting RHEL?

The 2nd International Workshop "Dependability and Security in e-Government" (DeSeGov 2007)

I'm on the PC. You know what to do ...

Conference

The Second International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (“ARES 2007 – The International Security and Dependability Conference”) will bring together researchers and practitioners in the area of IT-Security and Dependability. ARES 2007 will highlight the various aspects of security – with special focus on secure internet solutions, trusted computing, digital forensics, privacy and organizational security issues.
ARES 2007 aims at a full and detailed discussion of the research issues of security as an
integrative concept that covers amongst others availability, safety, confidentiality, integrity,
maintainability and security in the different fields of applications.



Important Dates

Workshop Proposal: September, 10th 2006
Submission Deadline: November, 19th 2006
Author Notification: January, 7th 2007
Author Registration: January, 21st 2007
Proceedings Version: January, 21st 2007
Conference: April, 10th to April 13th, 2007


Workshop Proposal

In conjunction with the ARES 2007 conference, a number of workshops will be organized. Workshop proposals should include the call for papers, the number of papers to be accepted, the contact person, etc. They are to be sent to the Workshop Organizing Committee Dr. Nguyen Manh Tho ( tho@ifs.tuwien.ac.at) by September 10th 2006. Proceedings of the ARES 2007 workshops will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press.



Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Process based Security Models andMethods
Authorization and Authentication
Availability and Reliability
Common Criteria Protocol
Cost/Benefit Analysis
Cryptographic protocols
Dependability Aspects for Special Applications (e.g. ERP-Systems, Logistics)
Dependability Aspects of Electronic Government (e-Government)
Dependability administration
Dependability in Open Source Software
Designing Business Models with security requirements
Digital Forensics
E-Commerce Dependability
Failure Prevention
IPR of Security Technology
Incident Response and Prevention
Information Flow Control
Internet Dependability
Interoperability aspects
Intrusion Detection and Fraud Detection
Legal issues
Mobile Security
Network Security
Privacy-enhancing technologies
RFID Security and Privacy
Risk planning, analysis & awareness
Safety Critical Systems
Secure Enterprise Architectures
Security Issues for Ubiquitous Systems
Security and Privacy in E-Health
Security and Trust Management in P2P and Grid applications
Security and privacy issues for sensor networks, wireless/mobile devices and applications
Security as Quality of Service
Security in Distributed Systems / Distributed Databases
Security in Electronic Payments
Security in Electronic Voting
Software Engineering of Dependable Systems
Software Security
Standards, Guidelines and Certification
Survivability of Computing Systems
Temporal Aspects of Dependability
Trusted Computing
Tools for Dependable System Design and Evaluation
Trust Models and Trust Management
VOIP/Wireless Security


Submission Guidelines

Authors are invited to submit research and application papers following the IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Manuscripts style: two columns, single-spaced, including figures and
references, using 10 fonts, and number each page. You can confirm the IEEE Computer Society Proceedings Author Guidelines at the following web page:

http://computer.org/cspress/instruct.htm

Nice interview with Eric.

Nearly missed this interview with Eric.

WWW2007

Last year I was chair of the XML and Web Services track of WWW2006. This year I'm back to being a referee and my friends Paul and Jim take the helm of a pure Web Services track (about time for the track split). I'm sure they'll do a great job.

Here's the call for papers. If you've think you've got anything relevant that the community would be interested in then I encourage you to submit. The WWW conferences have always been a great place to present and meet people.


CALL FOR PAPERS
Sixteenth International World Wide Web Conference
Web Services Track
Banff, Alberta, Canada
http://www2007.org
May 8-12, 2007

The Web Services track of WWW2007 seeks original papers describing research in all areas of Web Services. Topics include, but are not limited to:

* Service contract and metadata
* Orchestration, choreography and composition of services
* Large scale XML data integration
* Dependability
* Security and privacy
* Tools and technologies for Web Services development, deployment and management
* Software methodologies for Service-Oriented Systems
* The impact of Web Services on enterprise systems
* Web Services performance
* Architectural styles for Web Services computing
* Application of Web Services technologies in areas including e-commerce, e-science and grid computing
* Impact of formal methods on Web Services

IMPORTANT DATES

Refereed Paper submissions due: November 20, 2006 (HARD deadline; no extensions)
Acceptance Notification: January 29, 2007
Conference dates: Tuesday-Saturday, May 8-12, 2007

Submissions should present original reports of substantive new work and can be up to 10 pages in length. Papers should properly place the work within the field, cite related work, and clearly indicate the innovative aspects of the work and its contribution to the field. We will not accept any paper which, at the time of submission, is under review for or has already been published or accepted for publication in a journal or another conference. In addition to regular papers, we also solicit submissions of position papers articulating high-level architectural visions, describing challenging future directions, or critiquing current design wisdom. Queries regarding WWW2007 Web Services track submissions can be sent to Paul.Watson@ncl.ac.uk or Jim@Webber.name.

All papers will be peer-reviewed by at least three reviewers from an International Program Committee. Accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and will also be accessible to the general public via the conference Web site. Authors will be required to sign a copyright transfer form. Detailed formatting and submission requirements are available at http://www2007.org/.

Authors of top-ranked papers from the overall conference will be invited to submit enhanced versions of their papers for publication in a special issue of the ACM Transactions on the Web.

TRACK CHAIRS

* Paul Watson, Newcastle University (UK)
* Jim Webber, Thoughtworks (Australia)

PROGRAM CHAIRS

* Peter Patel-Schneider, Bell Labs Research (USA)
* Prashant Shenoy, University of Massachusetts (USA)

TRACK PC

* Boualem Benatallah, University NSW, Australia
* Sanjay Chaudhary, DA-IICT, India
* Thomas Erl, SOA Systems, Canada
* Alan Fekete, University of Sydney, Australia
* Jinpeng Huai, Beihang University, China
* Hiro Kishimoto, Fujitsu, Japan
* Frank Leymann, University of Stuttgart, Germany
* Mark Little, RedHat, UK
* Jimmy Nilson, JNSK, Sweden
* Dare Obasanjo, Microsoft, USA
* Savas Parastatidis, Microsoft, USA
* Greg Pavlik, Oracle Corporation, USA
* Denis Sosnoski, Sosnoski Software Solutions, New Zealand
* Tony Storey, IBM, UK
* Japjit Tulsi, Google, USA
* William Vambenepe, Hewlett-Packard, USA
* Steve Vinoski, IONA Technologies, USA
* Stuart Wheater, Arjuna Technologies, UK
* Michal Zaremba, Digital Enterprise Research Institute, Ireland

Two-phase commit and the real world

Picture this ...

Priest: Do you David, take this woman Helen to be your lawful wedded wife?

Dave: I do (log write).

Priest: Do you Helen, take this man David to be your lawful wedded husband?

Helen: I do (log write).

Priest: I now pronounce you man and wife.

Dave: [smiles] (delete log).

Helen: [smiles] (delete log).

Priest: (delete log) You may kiss the bride.

This is my roundabout way of saying congratulations to Dave and Helen. About time too! ;-)

webMethods acquires Infravio

Looks like my friend Miko will be moving companies soon. Good luck.

The perfect day

Back from vacation, where I was forced into a 2 week spell of not being able to read email. At first I was a little concerned (it's sad, but in the past 5 years there has never been a time when I've been away from email for more than 2 days!), but I quickly forgot about it (I'd have these moments of "Oh, I wonder what's happening back at work" now and then). In the end, I had one of the best vacations I can remember in a long time: kind of an extended perfect day. Now I'm back, I'm welcomed by 1500 emails (and that's not including junk).

We're doomed!

All I can say is watch and weep!

Two releases in 1 week!

I definitely need a break! Two releases in the space of a week! First JBossTS and then JBossESB. The latter was my first real experience of working with a team composed of full time employees as well as community members. It could simply be down to the team composition, or maybe this is the general rule for open source projects, but this worked like a dream. I couldn't have asked for more from the group of people I have to manage than if they were all full-time employees of Redhat. Well done guys!

Mac OS versus Windows and their relevance to WS-* versus REST

Before I start I have to make it clear that computer illiteracy is not a bad thing. Some people just don't take to using computers very easily. Nature endows everyone with the ability to learn, but some subjects (not just computing) are just too difficult for the brain to grasp. Some people can't drive cars, some people can't learn foreign languages (I fall into this category: for some reason, I don't have a problem with computer languages, but basic French and German from 20 years ago is my limit for human languages), etc. etc.

There are a couple of computer illiterate people in my family (names withheld!). Over the years I've helped them get to grips with The Internet on various ranges of PCs. The operating system has always been Windows variants: starting with 95, then 98, then 2000 (I skipped NT because it was never intended for end-users!) and finally XP. Over the years (probably 10 years now), there have always been questions from my family about the way things work in Windows. For example: "where'd it save my attachments?", "what's a virus?", "why won't it recognise my digital camera?" and the perennial "why did they change that?" The interesting thing is that I got less questions concerning how to accomplish the easy tasks (such as email and browsing) back in the 95/98 days than I did in the 2000/XP days. I didn't look forward to Vista for these people!

So when the time came for a change (old machines, too many viruses etc.) I opted to move these people to Mac OS X. I've been using it successfully for a few years and I really like it. It's got a nice look-and-feel and runs everything I need. Plus it's Unix! But the one reason I wanted to move my computer-phobic family members across was simply manageability: I wouldn't have to worry (so much) that they'd remember to update their virus checker or run Windows-update (auto-update is fine if you're sure it's not going to screw with some other piece of software you've installed). Plus one thing I should have mentioned: I don't live close by, so fixing problems often requires a special trip elsewhere in the country. So manageability, and the confidence that things are going to remain operational for long stretches of time, is paramount for the computer "challenged".

Now you may ask why did I go with Windows in the first place for my family? I don't think anyone could honestly say that it's ever been in the "install once and never have to touch it for years" category. (What operating system is? But relatively speaking it doesn't score high.) However, it is convenient. Plus most of the software you'd want to run probably runs on Windows first.

For hardened computer scientists I think Windows is fine (well, almost). These days it offers far more powerful tools and capabilities than it used to and there's a lot of flexibility there too. As I said in another post, my move to Windows from Unix was because of convenience and despite its short-comings IMO it did the job. I know the rules: update frequently and be defensive. But computer illiterate people don't. Where else in someone's life does this kind of thing happen? When was the last time you contacted your car manufacturer to see if there was a problem with your make and model? Such things do happen in the auto-trade, but they're so infrequent as to not be the norm. Plus if there is a problem (for example with the axle) it's unlikely to affect the car stereo system!

Alright I may be over exaggerating slightly, but it can seem this bad for people who only want to use a computer for convenience and don't know how (or why) to manage it. So the move to Mac OS X seemed like a good idea for purely that reason. However, it turned out that there was an added bonus: simplicity. Both people took to the Mac interface a lot quicker than Windows. To paraphrase "it's more natural" and "more integrated". Now it's difficult for me to be objective on this aspect. I think that's because when I started using computers they were "raw" and I'm used to all of their "qwerks". But trying to see beyond this, I think I understand what they mean and agree with them. The Mac seems to have found that sweet spot between usability and power.

Now it's true that the Mac is a niche player and my 2 family members don't allow for a good statistical distribution, particularly when you consider how many Windows users there are out there. Surely Windows must have hit the 80/20 mark or 98/02 mark, right? I don't really know and I'm not sure anyone has the right demographic information. Maybe computer illiterate people using Windows just put up with it because they don't know any better or have on-call "system administrators" (aka family members) to help them.

By now you're probably wondering what this has to do with WS-* or REST. Well there's been a debate for many years about one versus the other. I first came across it back in 2002 when I was on the W3C WS-Architecture working group. It seemed to come up every year, with the help of the likes of Mark and Eric. It has continued and can sometimes be an almost religious war on the scale of Macs versus PCs. Apparently you've got to be either pro REST (and against WS-*) or vice versa. Sitting on the fence is seen as a cop-out!

However, I'm one of the fence sitters for the following reasons: I've never believed in the one-size fits all argument; REST has simplicity/manageability to offer in certain circumstances and WS-* works better in others. As far as distributed internet-based computing is concerned, REST is probably closer to Mac OS X and that makes WS-* the Windows. For what people want to do today I think REST is at the sweet spot I mentioned earlier. But as application requirements get more complex, WS-* takes over. We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that they can compliment each other: it need not be a case of eiher one or the other.

Taking my analogy of Mac OS X/REST and Windows/WS-* further, my only concern is that we don't lose sight of who will be using these systems: they're not necessarily going to be computer experts and may very well be the next generation equivalents of computer illiterates. The Web has been successful so far because its protocols are relatively simple (there are 80 year old ladies in Florida running their own web sites and writing HTML!) As I've said before, complexity can't be simple! But we need to hit the 80/20 mark! And that also includes the fact that once deployed, people shouldn't need to worry about continually updating these systems.

Busy (but then what's new?)

I've let this blog thing slip for a while. Got (and still am) thrashing over many different things, including (and in no specific order): the Redhat move, a new JBossTS release, working towards the first beta release of JBossESB, SCA, AMQP, sales trips and presentations, standards work and probably 1001 other details I've forgotten! Plus I'm going on the annual vacation to Canada next week to visit the in-laws. However, I am going to try to post a few entries before I leave for a couple of weeks rest!

SCA update

We're now a member of the SCA consortium. I'm going to blog on SCA and what it means for us as soon as I find time, but in the meanwhile it's interesting to read what the press think.

Middleware for Service-Oriented Computing Workshop CFP

Middleware for Service-Oriented Computing Workshop
of the ACM/IFIP/USENIX 7th Int. Middleware Conference

Published by ACM

November 27 - December 1, 2006
Melbourne, Australia
http://www.dedisys.org/mw4soc/

Submission Deadline: August 10, 2006
Author Notification: September 14, 2006


Call for Papers:

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is an emerging computing paradigm utilizing services to support the rapid development of distributed applications in heterogeneous environments. While the immediate need of middleware support for Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) is evident, current approaches and solutions mostly fall short by primarily providing support for the Enterprise Application Integration aspect of SOC only and do not address other important aspects. Furthermore, non-functional properties (like dependability and security) and Quality of Service (QoS) need to be addressed in terms of integrated middleware support. Thus, the topics of particular interest for our workshop include, but are not limited to:

* Architectures and infrastructural principles of middleware for SOC
- "Traditional" middleware functions (replication, transactions)
"revisited" for SOC.
- Middleware support for data integration in SOC.
- Middleware support for dynamic and flexible service re-configuration,
re-composition, and re-engineering during run-time in accordance with
an extensible set of QoS properties and policies.
* Quality-of-Service (qualitative and quantitative)
- Service-level Agreement (SLA) middleware, QoS negotiation and
agreement, contracts, composition of QoS requirements, QoS-aware
service composition.
- Middleware support for end-to-end dependability, security, fault-
tolerance, replication, high-availability, mission-critical systems.
- Middleware support for mobile computing and pervasive services.
- Middleware languages and protocols for non-functional properties,
composability of non-functional requirements, support for explicit
trading of non-functional requirements and constraints.
* Service management and monitoring
- Autonomic capabilities and self-properties
- Measures and metrics for autonomic capabilities.
- Service governance across organizational boundaries.
* Business-oriented services computing
- Run-time support for business policies and rules.
- Adaptive workflows, aspect-orientation in process design and execution
(including BPEL).
- Middleware support for cross-organizational services computing.
- Trends impacting Middleware for SOC: Open-source, software
commoditization, solution outsourcing.
- Evaluation and experience reports


Workshop Program Chairs:

Karl M. Goeschka (Vienna Univ. of Technology, Austria)
Schahram Dustdar (Vienna Univ. of Technology, Austria)
Frank Leymann (Univ. of Stuttgart, Germany)
Stefan Tai (IBM T.J. Watson, USA)


Program Committee:

Gustavo Alonso, ETH Zurich (Switzerland)
Mark Baker, independent consultant (USA)
Boualem Benatallah, UNSW (Australia)
Francisco Curbera, IBM (USA)
Wolfgang Emmerich, UC London (UK)
Pascal Felber, Universite de Neuchatel (Switzerland)
Harald C. Gall, Univ. Zurich (Switzerland)
Yanbo Han, ICT Chinese Academy of Sciences (China)
Manfred Hauswirth, EPFL (Switzerland)
ValÈrie Issarny, INRIA (France)
Mehdi Jazayeri, Univ. d. Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland)
Bernd Kr‰mer, University of Hagen (Germany)
Mark Little, JBoss (USA)
Heiko Ludwig, IBM Research (USA)
Rui Oliveira, Universidade do Minho (Portugal)
Maria Orlowska, UQ (Australia)
Mike Papazoglou, Tilburg University (Netherlands)
Fernando Pedone, Univ. d. Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland)
Jose Pereira, Universidade do Minho (Portugal)
Bruno Schulze, Nat. Lab for Scientific Computing (Brazil)
Steve Vinoski, IONA (USA)
Sanjiva Weerawarana, WS02 (Sri Lanka)
Eric Wohlstadter, University of British Columbia (Canada)



Detailed information can be found at http://www.dedisys.org/mw4soc/

AMQP

An interesting move from Redhat and others.

Middleware 2006 workshops announced

As part of my PC duty, here's the announcement.

Another update to my bio then ...

Somehow it looks better in dollars than pounds.

Web-NG

As I mentioned before, I'm still not so sure about all of the things that get the Web 2.0 tag applied to them. Is it a technology (seems not)? Is it an architecture (seems not)? But maybe it is a name for a transition that occurred a few years back in the way we use and interact with the WWW. From what I've seen and heard so far, it just seems to be a name for another era in our ongoing evolution of the Web. And as far as that goes, I'm happy to use a tag.

However, as reported, Orielly has decided to trademark Web 2.0. Since it would appear he invented the term, there's nothing wrong with him wanting to protect it. Unfortunately I think they're a little late off the mark on this one. If you believe everything that's been written (and I have no reason to not do so), then the name came up in 2004. Since then it has taken off like wildfire in many circles (I've been reviewing papers for a number of conferences and workshops over the past 2 months and the term has come up on several occasions). It would seem to me that the cat's out of the bag on this one and it's far too late to come along and put a trademark on it. Alright, maybe this was always the intention but it's just taken a little longer than expected. But I'd still say it's too late. But then I'm no lawyer and I'm sure this will go in their favour. (Side note: it's a good job that another Tim didn't trademark the Web.)

So going back to what I said at the start of this entry: I think having some classification for this point in time of the Web's evolution is a good thing. If we can't use Web 2.0 for fear of getting Cease-and-Desist orders, then I propose we coin another term. The best one I've come up with so far is Web-NG, which I freely give to the world ;-) No fear that I'm going to retract that and try and trademark it. If anyone can think of a better name, then let me know. The name is secondary: the fact that it's free for use for all time is the most important thing.

The death of Web 2.0

How crazy can you get? Well look at this if you want an answer!