Cosmos revisited

I'm sure everyone has their own list of TV programs, books, films etc. that influenced them when growing up. One of mine was Carl Sagan's Cosmos and I was 14 when it was first shown. That's a pretty influential age for any child, but especially one whose head was already in all things science (fiction and fact). My memories of that time often have a Cosmos link, whether it's walking along the beach contemplating that they are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all of the beaches in the world or where we would be if Library of Alexandria hadn't been destroyed.

I can trace many of the things I did in my career back to Cosmos, including taking astrophysics at University and continuing to consider myself a scientist no matter what I do. However, apart from the first ever screeing of the program and maybe a repeat early on, I haven't seen it for well over twenty years. I've got the book and pretty much every other book he wrote, but I always longed to see the program again. So when it became available on DVD I snapped it up, and recently began to watch it again. Well time certainly hasn't diminished it's power and relevance; I'm finding it just as compelling a watch as I did almost thirty years ago. If you haven't seen it before, or it's been many years since you did watch it, I can thoroughly recommend another viewing: you won't be disappointed and maybe it'll instill a sense of wonder at the universe in to you, as it did (and does) with me.

Sad

If I get time I may blog on my own experiences with Sun over the years, but for now I found this kind of sad. Farewell Sun.

Congratulations Andrew

Congratulations to Andrew for his OBE! It's been a while since I've caught up with him, but apart from being a critical part of Ansa when we were starting on Arjuna, more importantly he was also the external examiner for my PhD thesis! We did some work with him when he started Digitivity and during his stint at Citrix, and it's always been stimulating to talk with him about this or that, even if the topics aren't work related. Congratulations again Andrew. Now maybe I should nominate Santosh for next year.

A quick look back over 10 years

It's been an interesting decade as far as I'm concerned. Going from co-creating Arjuna Solutions through the Bluestone acquisition and the Bluestone-Arjuna Labs, then the HP acquisition and the HP-Arjuna Labs, spinning out and co-creating Arjuna Technologies, then the move to JBoss, followed by the Red Hat acquisition, a lot of work around SOA (which dates back to at least JBoss) and finally my new role with the departure of Sacha.

Very busy and despite a few ups and downs, very interesting and a lot of fun. It's not a period where I'd change anything professionally. However, I hope the next decade has somewhat less company movement than the previous! But I'm sure the interest and fun will continue.

Where does the time go?

There are only a few days left in 2009 and that means just a few more until I'm officially back to work. Although I have managed to find time (make time?) to work on a few things, as usual there hasn't been as much time as I'd expected (hoped?) Family life and seasonal activities impacting (as they should?) But it's better to have a longer list of things to do and not get to them than sit twiddling my thumbs watching TV.

Over the next few days I expect to finish off some more work related things but it's quite possible that drink and merriment will have to take priority: after all, once I'm officially back to work they won't get much chance for the next 12 months!

It's spooky when people know you too well

It's Christmas day and we've had family and friends come from across the country. Lots of good times and good food. But the spooky thing for me was when I started to unwrap gifts from people who hadn't coordinated their giving and yet they had a common theme: Star Trek. I've mentioned before that I'm a fan, but it's not something that comes up day-to-day. So it was all a complete surprise, particularly when the gifts came from so many different and disconnected individuals. My inner child is happy today. Merry Christmas!

JBoss in the Cloud

It's nice to see Bob, Marek, Mic and the team release StormGrind. There's a lot of interesting things going on in the Cloud and how open source in particular can influence it. Fortunately we've got some of the best people to help us keep pushing ahead with defining the Cloud. I think 2010 is definitely going to be a good year for JBoss and the Cloud.

Dan O'Bannon

I can't believe I missed the news of the death of Dan O'Bannon! It's sad to see it hidden away in the corner of the news, given how influential he was. I suppose the first time I ran into his sphere of influence was Dark Star: if you've never seen the film then I definitely recommend it. Not many films can say they managed to combine an orange beachball-alien and a surfing astronaut so well! Of course Alien was more successful and probably more influential, but I think I'll always associate him more with Dark Star. It's a sad day, but I'm sure that wherever he is now he'll be teaching them about phenomenology.

Christmas is coming and ...

... I'm on vacation until January, but the next few days will be tying up some loose ends from work, catching up on a few things (work related) that I haven't had a chance to get to recently and then the rest of the holidays are mine ... all mine!! So I plan to get back to some pet projects that have been languishing for the past few months, finish some reading and maybe, just maybe, finish a paper I've been working on for a while.

JBossWorld 2010

The Call For Papers has been announced. So if you're interested in presenting or just meeting up with JBoss engineers or users, get submitting! It's a great event to attend. Now I've just got to make sure I can present something technical again next year as I did this year: Keynotes are good, but I love the feedback you get from presenting papers, work in progress etc.

One of the first Web sites

While talking with some of my friends from Arjuna today, Stuart reminded me that we started playing with the Web in 1991/1992, when we created a Web site with one of the first releases of the CERN HTTP code for the original Arjuna Project. As Stuart recalled, it was so early in the evolution of the Web that one of the original CERN pages which maintained a list of available Web servers around the world (I suppose you could say a precursor to Google in that regard) had our site on the very first page for a long time. It's a shame the Internet Archive does not go back that far.

I know we often hear people ask "Where were you when Kennedy was shot?" or "Where were you when the Wall came down?", but I suppose in our industry a similar question would be "Where were you when the Web was started?" Well for me I was in the office I shared with Stuart, working on my PhD and playing with HTTP and HTML. Sometimes I'm surprised we got any real work done :-) !

VSS Enterprise

Something to dream about!

RESTful transactions round two

I've been working on a second draft of the RESTful transactions work that I've mentioned before. This time I'm doing it for Bill and his REST-* effort. I revised the original for JavaOne but didn't get a chance to use it in our presentation. So I'm taking this opportunity to apply some standards boiler-plate and bring it up to date. Plus it's always good to revisit something you did almost a decade ago and use the benefit of those intervening years and the experience gained.

Enterprise OSGi: two is obviously better than one

I think OSGi is important for several reasons. I think Enterprise OSGi is an interesting approach, particularly as it leverages JEE. I've even contributed to some of the work, for example around the transactions component. JBoss is doing a lot of implementation work around OSGi too.

I have to admit that I haven't been paying close attention to OSGi for a few months. However, I had heard about the new Apache Aries project. Unfortunately I just heard from a friend about the Eclipse Gemini project. Now I've been involved with standards long enough to have experienced first hand the political games that rivals play with each other. It's unfortunate because it rarely benefits users, tending to obscure the reasons for choosing one approach over another, confuse people, and ultimately delaying the uptake of the standard or technology involved.

Maybe I'm missing the underlying reasons why Oracle and SpringSource decided that Aries wasn't the right project for them. However, I really wish that as an industry driven primarily by technologists we could leave the politics behind and try to work far more collaboratively, and particularly where open source is concerned! As a slight aside, that's one of the things I really like about HPTS: it doesn't matter which company you're from, people talk and interact freely to try to better our collective understanding of problems and lessons learnt.

Update: I should point out that in the paragraph above I wasn't siding with Aries over Gemini, simply that Aries started first.

The future of Java

For one reason or another I've been thinking about the future of Java for a while; more the language than the platform (JEE). I think that the JEE platform will continue to evolve over the coming years, more likely into a series of specific vertical solutions. But this entry isn't about the platform, it's about the language.

Although I've been using Java since it was known as Oak and have written a fair amount with it (for example, I wrote the first ever Java transaction implementation over Christimas 1996), it's never been my favourite programming language. There are some things that I liked about the language from the start, such as threading, but others, such as garbage collection (yes, I like the control of a good delete) and lack of multiple inheritance, that I didn't. The Java language has certainly evolved over the past decade, mostly for the better (garbage collection is a lot better now and we have templates), but in general the language still takes a lowest common denominator approach. And it has got rather bloated.

Ignoring several assembly languages, over the years I've learnt many high level languages including Pascal, Mesa, Smalltalk-80, Lisp, Prolog, C/C++, Simula, D, Forth and of course Java. My favourite is still C++ though. Yes I know it has its flaws and yes I know it's not the most forgiving of languages. I can't quite put my finger on precisely why I still prefer C++. I remember when we were testing the first pre-releases of Cfront for AT&T back in the mid 1980's and wondering along with Graeme and Stuart as to whether we could port it to our Atari's using Metacomco C. I seem to recall us making some progress, but Linux came on the scene bringing with it gcc. But none of this explains why I prefer C++. Maybe it's the level of direct control it gives you (as with C). Or maybe it's something else. Whatever, I'm sure it's all subjective.

Anyway, I digress. Where does this leave Java? Well I think if you look back over the past 40+ years of high level programming languages one thing is very obvious: change happens. Our ability to reason about complex algorithms and the best way of putting them into code evolves, whether it's declarative, procedural, object-oriented or something else. I think it's fairly clear that Java's dominance in the industry will wane. Yes it'll be legacy for many years to come; the 21st Century COBOL, so it will continue to be important. But something new is coming. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow. But it's coming nonetheless.

ArchiteCloud 2010

I have the pleasure of bring on the ArchiteCloud 2010 program committee. If you've any papers hiding in your "to do" lists then get them in, as this promises to be a great event! Maybe I can use this as an excuse to visit Australia next year too!

Santa is an architect

It's drawing near to that time of the year again when thoughts turn to snow, presents, turkeys and all things festive. So it was that I was watching a program on TV yesterday where Santa was the main character and my 7 year old and I began to discuss the ways in which Santa manages to get presents to all of the good little girls and boys around the globe in a single night. Of course we covered all of the usual ideas, such as time dilation, wormholes and even time travel. My son thought that magic was the solution, but I pointed out that these days what with global warming and the fact that it's been shown that continual use of magic harms the environment, it's doubtful. Let's also not forget that magic reindeers produce a lot of CO2 as well as other effluent.

So where does that leave us (apart from with a rapidly disillusioned child)? The answer was obvious: although in the past he's probably used a combination of all of the above techniques (have to placate child), today he's taken a software architecture course and figured out that federation works well and scales. He has millions (billions?) of proxies in each country who do his work for them. He sends them information about what needs getting (in advance of course) and relies on them to buy the presents and distribute them locally. Those proxies may themselves have proxies in a recursive manner. Yes we all know it's the elves who build and distributed the toys to the shops, but it's the masses of proxies that get the delivery work done. And of course these helpers are parents, grand-parents etc.

So next time the question arises you'll know the answer: Santa is a coordinator and we're all interposed coordinators in the grand scheme of things ;-)

In-memory durability and HPTS

Back in the 1980's when I was writing the proposal for my PhD work I was looking at various uses for replication (at that point strong consistency protocols). There are a number of reasons for replicating data or an object, including high-availability, fault tolerance through design diversity and improving application performance. For the latter this could include reading data from a physically closer replica, or one that resides on a faster machine available through a faster network path.

But in terms of how replication and transactions could play well together it was using replicas as "fast backing store" aka a highly available in-memory log that seemed the logical thing to concentrate on. We certainly had success in this approach, but the general idea of replication for in-memory durability didn't really seem to take off within the industry until relatively recently. I think one of the important reasons for this is that improvements in network speeds and faster processors have continued to outstrip disk performance, making these kinds of optimization less academic and more mainstream. So it was with a lot of interest that I listened to presentation after presentation at this year's HPTS about this approach. Of course there were presentations on improving disk speeds and using flash drives as a second-level cache too, so it was a good workshop all round.

A great tribute to Jim

Congratulations to Tony, Savas and everyone else involved. This is a great tribute to both the person and scientist that is Jim Gray.

Interesting discussion on SOA Manifesto

I mentioned earlier that I'm on a group collaborating to create a SOA Manifesto along with Steve. Well as part of the effort to inform the public and solicit feedback I produced something for InfoQ. The result of that is a very useful discussion on the comments to that article, which I encourage anyone interested in the SOA Manifesto to check out. Unfortunately I was in Boston last week in meetings so didn't have much chance to participate in the discussion, but as Steve points out, we'll certainly take it to the working group. Thanks to everyone who participated!