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!

SOA 2.0 ignorance

The viral nature of gossip has taken hold of SOA 2.0 and run with it. There are more and more articles coming out every day, or so it seems.

My question is this: why do we need the term? OK, if you're an analyst firm looking to stand out from the crowd I can understand throwing a lot of new buzzwords at a wall and seeing which ones stick! But for the rest of us living in the real world, it has no meaning at all. Despite all the hype, I think we're all agreed on what SOA means: it's an architectural approach to building loosely coupled applications. Companies have been "doing SOA" for many years, even before the term was coined, using technologies as diverse as CORBA and JMS. Think of it as a pattern, or an architectural approach in the same was as distributed object-oriented systems. It has its place in any good architects toolbelt and we're finally coming to grips with it as an industry.

Then WHAM! Along comes SOA 2.0! How? Why? WTF?! I also expected more of Oracle on this one! Giving an architectural approach a version number is crazy: it makes no sense at all! Only in software would we even consider such a thing. Can you imagine going back in pre-history: is a hut also to be known as Cave 2.0? Would a house be Cave 3.0 or Hut 2.0? Where would the St Paul's Basilica come in the grand scheme of things?! If something is truly an architectural advance over its predecessors, then it should be named uniquely for a start. Caves, huts, houses, high-rise buildings all share some commonality, but they have different architectural approaches too. To call the Empire State Building an upgraded cave is to do it an injustice (at the very least)!

Steve says it's about a combination of EDA and SOA. I hate that distinction because I think that either EDA is a specific implementation of SOA or it's simply another way of reasoning about your SOA system. Gartner then say that the difference is that SOA 1.0 (yuch!) was about client-server interactions and SOA 2.0 is about events. Apart from seeing my previous comment concerning EDA, where does it say that SOA is all about clients and servers? For a start, that implies synchronous interactions, which SOA certainly doesn't require. Secondly, I know of many SOA deployments that work on an asynchronous peer-to-peer level. Hey, maybe those guys are doing SOA 3.0?!

But in all seriousness, it seems to me that people are confusing implementation with architecture. Where does it say that SOA has to be client-server driven? That's a fairly arbitrary (aka poor) way on which to base architectural differences: by any strict definition of interaction styles, something is always a client (sender) and something is always a server (receiver), but those roles can be transient and change between invocations. That's the case in most distributed systems, not just SOA based. In the early days of distributed systems it was common to have entities that were pure clients: that's less of the case these days. Take a look at some event-driven systems: they have clients and servers too!

Furthermore, is it then really necessary to confuse the issue by adding implementation semantics within the architectural approach (i.e., events)? Why not give it its own acronym, something like that captures events, the fact that they drive things and that it's an architectural methodology? Hmmm, that would then be EDA and I'm sure some analysts coined that term a long time ago, but it didn't really capture the public imagination like some other three-letter acronyms.

You know, a more cynical person might think that the only reason for SOA 2.0 is to ride on the back of all the Web 2.0 hype that's going round at the moment. But our industry doesn't work that way, now does it?

So stay clear of SOA 2.0. If you really want to talk about SOA and EDA then do so as separate entities in their own right, or coin a new term (any suggestions?) EDSOA?

NoThoughtWorks?

Savas has a few things on this paper from ThoughtWorks. I wonder if Jim wants to step in ;-) I'm on my way back from JavaOne so haven't had a chance to read it yet. However, my first question would be: What's wrong with the interoperability we've been achieving successfully with Web Services? Seems like we're doing a good enough job so far!

I need how much space?

Maybe someone can explain this to me? Why do I need 15Gig disk space for Vista? No wonder we're being told to wait for a few years!

Schweet!!

I saw a black MacBook yesterday when I called into the local Apple shop here in San Fransciso. All I can say is: drool!!!!

SOA 2.0?!

WTF?!

Infoq launches

Floyd Marinescu, who was the driving force behind TSS has launched his new site Infoq and asked me to publicise it. Take a look. There's an interesting article there that should you pay particular attention to ;-).

Another busy week ahead

I'm about to leave for JavaOne, where it's going to be an extremely busy week. On Tuesday I'm on a panel session called What's Happening With SOA in Open Source?, where I'll say a few things about JBossESB, there's another JSR Spec Lead Dinner on the evening, followed by the BOF on transactional Web Services that I'm giving with Kevin. On Wednesday I'm giving a number of interviews, plus a press round table event (on standards and Java), before attending the JCP Community Awards event on behalf of JBoss.

In there somewhere I also want to go to a few sessions (as well as the JBoss Party!) It turns out that Greg's in town too, so there will definitely be a catch-up session involved there. I've also just found out that my friend and ex-Arjuna colleague Arnaud will be coming this year, so I hope to see him too.

At long last

It's only taken us 9 years (if you include the original OMG work), but finally ...

The Expert Group for JSR-000095 J2EE Activity Service for Extended
Transactions has completed its work and published the Final Release of the
specification.

The Final Release of the specification is available from the Java
Community Process Web site at:

http://jcp.org/en/jsr/stage?listBy=final

and also from the JSR 95 detail page:

http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=95

WS-Addressing 1.0

Finally!

Complexity theory

I just gave an invited presentation on Web Services at School of Computer Science at Manchester University. I covered basic and advanced Web Services, Web 2.0, REST and Semantic Web (cramming to get all of this into an hour). The audience appeared interested and I got some good follow-up questions. But as you might imagine, it was tricky to get everything in to the allocated time slot.

However, one thing that became apparent to me over the past few days as I wrote the presentation was how difficult it is to actually cover *just* Web Services in an hour! I remember giving talks on Web Services back in 2002/2003 when there was really just SOAP, WSDL and a smattering of UDDI: that's an hour, depending on how much detail you want to go into around SOA. In the intervening years we've standardised on more aspects of the WS architecture and complexity has risen. Now don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that we could avoid the complexity or that it's a bad thing. I've worked on a range of distributed systems architectures over the years and there really is no such thing as a free lunch: if you need advanced facilities such as session management, transactions, security and fault-tolerance then you've got to pay for them somewhere, and pushing things "behind the service endpoint" only works to a point.

Web Services started out as simple (often compared to the complexity of CORBA), but have inevitably gotten more complex as we try to do more and more with them. In some ways, the closest analogy I can come up with is Java: it started out as being "better" than C++ because it was so much simpler - none of those waste-of-space features such as multiple inheritance, pass-by-reference or templates and none of the huge libraries that you never needed (I'm joking here, because I always felt the need for such features). But look at it today: we've now got templates and the JDK is 60Meg! A simple Hello World application takes many Meg to execute!

However, one question I posed during my presentation was: Can it be simpler? What about the WWW? Technically it hasn't changed much and yet we're now working in a Web 2.0 world (I don't like the term, but I agree with the categorisation). The REST approach is often mentioned as more natural for services on the Web than Web Services (evolution rather than revolution), so what about that as the foundation on which to build a simpler and better Web service (small 's') architecture? As you may have gathered, I think the answer is no. That's not to say that I don't think some aspects of a pure REST-ful approach wouldn't be simpler (e.g., URI's have been pretty successful for the WWW, so we may not need something like WS-A), but other aspects may be more complicated (e.g., transactions - my first foray into transactions on the Web started out effectively REST-based I think and it was difficult to do in those days so it ended up quite different). However, the approach does intrigue me enough that, should I ever find any spare time, I'd like to flesh out how a REST service architecture might match up to its Web Services cousin. Anyone wanting to help, just drop me a line.

But back to Web Services! The death of Simple Web Services was signaled as soon as we wanted to do more complicated things with it. We shouldn't ignore that fact and continue as though we were still working in 2002. The S in SOA doesn't stand for, or imply, Simplicity. Whether you're talking services, objects or procedures, complex things such as transactions require complex solutions. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who's been working in distributed systems over the past 20+ years.

Water flows uphill

Impressive. Next thing you know, pigs will fly!

Web Services, interoperability and portability

I've been meaning to write this entry for a couple of weeks, but just haven't had the time. The original impetus for this came about because of a recent client engagement that reminded me of previous similar interactions. At the heart of the problem lies the difference between interoperability and portability, a discussion that isn't new by any means, and neither is it a Microsoft versus everyone else argument: J2EE and CORBA both suffer too.

Where the recent confusion arises is around the hype associated with Web Services: too often people will say things like (and I'm paraphrasing) "Web Services are meant to be interoperable, allowing you to talk to other vendor implementations and hence removing vendor lockin." Now everyone working in this sector of the industry knows (I hope) what this actually means: product A from vendor 1 can interact with product B from vendor 2 because the on-the-wire representation is defined within some set of standards with which both products comply. Unfortunately what the customer/end-user tends to hear is subtly different: "blah blah blah the same application can run on different vendor deployments blah blah blah." and when you come to educate them on the difference (e.g., Web Service standards don't talk about implementation language bindings, there's still scope for proprietary extensions within standards
and there's still no agreed Web Services architecture), they either look at you as though you'd just arrived from Mars or that you've taken their favourite toy away!

In no cases I've been involved with has the customer decided to ditch the move to Web Services (though some have seen Microsoft as a better route to achieving portability and interoperability, simply because the landscape isn't so fragmented - but there are other downsides to consider!), but they've asked the question "why?". Unfortunately that's not the right question either: it should be "how?". There are a number of steps that would need to be taken, one of which could be to go down the OMG route of a single organisation defining all language bindings and everyone agreeing to use them (Java almost has it). But I don't think that's going to happen (and in some respects I think it shouldn't): there's simply never going to be enough technical or political reasons to do so.

Ultimately I think this is an education problem. We need to make sure we clearly define what we mean by interoperability and portability (straighforward to do, you would think) and try not to gloss over the differences. Interoperability is extremely important as far as Web Services are concerned (at the moment I'd say it is the single most important aspect) and correctly discussed, customers will agree.

WS-FM CFP

I'm on the Program Committee for WS-FM again this year. Here's the CFP.


======================================================================
3rd International Workshop on
Web Services and Formal Methods
(WS-FM 2006)
8-9 September 2006, Vienna, Austria
http://cs.unibo.it/ws-fm06

Official event of "The Process Modelling Group"
http://www.process-modelling-group.org

Co-located with BPM 2006
4th International Conference on Business Process Management
http://bpm2006.tuwien.ac.at
======================================================================

SCOPE

Web Services technology aims at providing standard mechanisms for
describing the interface and the services available on the web, as well
as protocols for locating such services and invoking them (e.g. WSDL,
UDDI, SOAP). Innovations are mainly devoted to the definition of
standards that support the specification of complex services out of
simpler ones (the so called Web Service orchestration and choreography).
Several proposals have been already set up: BPML, XLANG and
BizTalk, WSFL, WS-BPEL, WS-CDL, etc...

Formal methods, which provide formal machinery for representing and
analysing the behavior of communicating concurrent/distributed systems,
are playing a fundamental role in the development of such
innovations. First of all they are exploited to understand the basic
mechanisms (in terms of semantics) which characterize different
orchestration and choreography languages and to focus on the essence
of new features that are needed. Secondly they provide a formal
basis for reasoning about Web Service semantics (behaviour and
equivalence): e.g. for realizing registry services where retrieval
is based on the meaning and behaviour of a service and not just a
Web Service name. Thirdly, the studies on formal coordination paradigms
can be exploited for developing mechanisms for complex run-time Web
Service coordination. Finally, given the importance of critical application
areas for Web Services like E-commerce, the development of the Web Service
technology can certainly take advantage from formal analisys of
security properties and performance in concurrency theory.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on Web
Services and Formal Methods in order to facilitate fruitful collaboration
in this direction of research. This, potentially, could also have a great
impact on the current standardization phase of Web Service technologies.

LIST OF TOPICS

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Protocols and standards for WS (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, etc... )
- Languages and description methodologies for
Coreography/Orchestration/Workflow
(BPML, XLANG and BizTalk, WSFL, WS-BPEL, WS-CDL, YAWL, etc... )
- Coordination techniques for WS
(transactions, agreement, coordination services, etc...)
- Semantics-based dynamic WS discovery services
(based on Semantic Web/Ontology techniques or other semantic theories)
- Security, Performance Evaluation and Quality of Service of WS
- Semi-structured data and XML related technologies

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions must be original and should not have been published
previously or be under consideration for publication while being
evaluated for this workshop.

We encourage also the submission of tool papers, describing tools
based on formal methods, to be exploited in the context of Web Services
applications.

Papers are to be prepared in LNCS format and must not exceed
15 pages. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings
as a volume of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

As done for previous editions of the workshop, we intend to publish a
journal special issue inviting full versions of papers selected among
those presented at the workshop.

IMPORTANT DATES

May 2, 2006: Abstract submission deadline
May 9, 2006: Paper submission deadline (EXTENDED DEADLINE)
June 6, 2006: Notification of acceptance
June 20, 2006: Camera ready
September 8-9, 2006: Workshop dates

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Co-Chairs

Mario Bravetti University of Bologna, Italy
Gianluigi Zavattaro University of Bologna, Italy

Board of "The Process Modelling Group"

Wil van der Aalst Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Rob van Glabbeek NICTA, Sydney, Australia
Keith Harrison-Broninski Role Modellers Ltd.
Robin Milner Cambridge University, UK
Roger Whitehead Office Futures

Other PC members

Marco Aiello University of Trento, Italy
Farhad Arbab CWI, The Netherlands
Matteo Baldoni University of Torino, Italy
Jean-Pierre Banatre University of Rennes1 and INRIA, France
Boualem Benatallah University of New South Wales, Australia
Karthik Bhargavan Microsoft research Cambridge, UK
Roberto Bruni University of Pisa, Italy
Michael Butler University of Southampton, UK
Fabio Casati HP Labs, USA
Rocco De Nicola University of Florence, Italy
Marlon Dumas Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Schahram Dustdar Wien University of Technology, Austria
Gianluigi Ferrari University of Pisa, Italy
Jose Luiz Fiadeiro University of Leicester, UK
Stefania Gnesi CNR Pisa, Italy
Reiko Heckel University of Leicester, UK
Kohei Honda Queen Mary, University of London, UK
Nickolas Kavantzas Oracle Co., USA
Leila Kloul Université de Versailles, France
Cosimo Laneve University of Bologna, Italy
Mark Little JBoss Inc
Natalia López University Complutense of Madrid, Spain
Roberto Lucchi University of Bologna, Italy
Jeff Magee Imperial College London, UK
Fabio Martinelli CNR Pisa, Italy
Manuel Mazzara University of Bolzano, Italy
Ugo Montanari University of Pisa, Italy
Shin Nakajima National Institute of Informatics and JST, Japan
Manuel Nunez University Complutense of Madrid, Spain
Fernando Pelayo University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain
Marco Pistore University of Trento, Italy
Wolfgang Reisig Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany
Vladimiro Sassone University of Southampton, UK
Marjan Sirjani Tehran University, Iran
Friedrich Vogt Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Germany
Martin Wirsing Ludwig-Maximilians University Munchen, Germany

WS-Policy at W3C

It's about time! WS-Policy and WS-PolicyAttachment are submitted to W3C.

JBossWorld 2006

Come to JBoss World and hear me speak. Or, more likely, just have a good time. (Not that listening to me doesn't constitute a good time, but you know what I mean!) I'm trying to arrange some SCUBA diving while I'm there (would never have thought it possible in a desert!) Same for JavaOne, though it looks like I'll have to go to Monterey to get something in. If anyone wants to buddy up at either of these SCUBA attempts, let me know!

Flying a kite?

People who have known me a long time will know I came to be a Windows user with some reluctance. Ignoring my early computing days which included forays into the bygone worlds of punch card and tape, the Commodore PET, the BBC Model B and the Atari 520 STFM, my academic career spanned such varied systems as MTS (I think everyone should be made to use batch systems, with printouts of runs collected 6 floors below where you submit them - makes you try very hard to ensure your programs are bug free before you run them!), Whitechapel computers, PDP-11's, the Blit (fantastic machine and it looked hand-made inside!) and ultimately various Sun 3 series and Sparc machines running SunOS or Solaris variants. In there somewhere was a brief association with the Macintosh, but the lack of multithreading was a pain. As Stuart is often at pointing out (or not letting me forget!), I spent some time using OS/2; I still think it was far superior to Windows at the time.

So it's true to say that I managed to stay clear of Microsoft for a few years. That is until the arrival of Linux (Redhat ironically was most popular amongst us) and reliable PCs where is quickly became apparent that it was cheaper to "build your own" than keep paying lots of money to Sun. Obviously when you got the computers (we bought Viglen), they came with a version of Windows pre-installed and as Word became the standard for writing papers within the Department, (we used to use Interleaf or Tex/Latex), we all started to use dual operating systems, and my slide to the Dark Side had begun!

For a few years I managed to spend the majority of my time on Unix systems, but as the time went on it got less and less. Eventually, about 4 years or so ago, I was completely on Windows 2000 and Windows XP. I managed to rebel a bit by using cygwin and emacs, but it wasn't the same as the "good old days". Looking back I suppose the transition had a lot to do with changes in my career, but some of it was also probably down to "look-and-feel": although I liked X windows, I found the convenience of Windows so much better. It's true to say that Linux systems these days are much better (and who knows, with the recent announcement I may try again), but I've felt reluctant to go back. This time I think it's entirely down to the things I'd lose, such as Office and Visio. I've tried alternatives such as OpenOffice, but they're just not quite there yet. But I missed Unix. So a couple of years ago I started to use Mac OS X at home and I've never looked back! It's great. I love the interface. I love the fact that it is Unix under the covers, and it runs all of the utilities I need.

However, my work machine still runs Windows XP and I'm getting tired of the interface. Compared to OS X it feels dated and clunky. And the number of times I keep going to the bottom of the screen to locate the dock is beginning to annoy me. So it was some surprise that I came across Flyakite OSX: it's an OS X look-and-feel for your PC! I just finished installing it and it's wonderful. I have to admit to not trying it on my work machine just yet, but it runs fine (maybe a little slower than Windows XP) on an old P3). So, if you're tired of the same old look-and-feel and can't wait for Vista (or perhaps don't want to take that risk), give it a go!

WS-FM 2006 CFP

In my role as a member of the PC:

3rd International Workshop on
Web Services and Formal Methods
(WS-FM 2006)
8-9 September 2006, Vienna, Austria
http://cs.unibo.it/ws-fm06

Official event of "The Process Modelling Group"
http://www.process-modelling-group.org

Co-located with BPM 2006
4th International Conference on Business Process Management
http://bpm2006.tuwien.ac.at
======================================================================

SCOPE

Web Services technology aims at providing standard mechanisms for
describing the interface and the services available on the web, as well
as protocols for locating such services and invoking them (e.g. WSDL,
UDDI, SOAP). Innovations are mainly devoted to the definition of
standards that support the specification of complex services out of
simpler ones (the so called Web Service orchestration and choreography).
Several proposals have been already set up: BPML, XLANG and
BizTalk, WSFL, WS-BPEL, WS-CDL, etc...

Formal methods, which provide formal machinery for representing and
analysing the behavior of communicating concurrent/distributed systems,
are playing a fundamental role in the development of such
innovations. First of all they are exploited to understand the basic
mechanisms (in terms of semantics) which characterize different
orchestration and choreography languages and to focus on the essence
of new features that are needed. Secondly they provide a formal
basis for reasoning about Web Service semantics (behaviour and
equivalence): e.g. for realizing registry services where retrieval
is based on the meaning and behaviour of a service and not just a
Web Service name. Thirdly, the studies on formal coordination paradigms
can be exploited for developing mechanisms for complex run-time Web
Service coordination. Finally, given the importance of critical application
areas for Web Services like E-commerce, the development of the Web Service
technology can certainly take advantage from formal analisys of
security properties and performance in concurrency theory.

The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers working on Web
Services and Formal Methods in order to facilitate fruitful collaboration
in this direction of research. This, potentially, could also have a great
impact on the current standardization phase of Web Service technologies.

LIST OF TOPICS

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Protocols and standards for WS (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, etc... )
- Languages and description methodologies for
Coreography/Orchestration/Workflow
(BPML, XLANG and BizTalk, WSFL, WS-BPEL, WS-CDL, YAWL, etc... )
- Coordination techniques for WS
(transactions, agreement, coordination services, etc...)
- Semantics-based dynamic WS discovery services
(based on Semantic Web/Ontology techniques or other semantic theories)
- Security, Performance Evaluation and Quality of Service of WS
- Semi-structured data and XML related technologies

SUBMISSIONS

Submissions must be original and should not have been published
previously or be under consideration for publication while being
evaluated for this workshop.

We encourage also the submission of tool papers, describing tools
based on formal methods, to be exploited in the context of Web Services
applications.

Papers are to be prepared in LNCS format and must not exceed
15 pages. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings
as a volume of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).

As done for previous editions of the workshop, we intend to publish a
journal special issue inviting full versions of papers selected among
those presented at the workshop.

IMPORTANT DATES

May 2, 2006: Submission deadline (EXTENDED DEADLINE)
June 6, 2006: Notification of acceptance
June 20, 2006: Camera ready
September 8-9, 2006: Workshop dates

JBoss and Redhat

Now this is interesting!

Threads and transactions

There's an interesting discussion on TSS about threads and transactions. Maybe what I should have also added was that there's also a really good book that covers the subject too! Hmmm, now that JBoss Transactions is out, we should think about a second edition ;-)!

We've done it again!

I always get a kick out of a product release, and we've done it again with the release of JBoss Transactions. It's a little strange that it's not the Arjuna Transaction Service anymore, and I've got to stop saying Arjuna so much when I talk about it!

WS-Addressing makes further progress

Cut-and-paste from the formal W3C announcement:

"W3C is pleased to announce the advancement of "Web Services Addressing 1.0 - Core" and "Web Services Addressing 1.0 - SOAP Binding"
to Proposed Recommendations:

http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/PR-ws-addr-core-20060321/
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/PR-ws-addr-soap-20060321/

Please review these specifications and indicate whether you endorse them as W3C Recommendations or object to their advancement by completing the following questionnaire:

http://www.w3.org/2002/09/wbs/33280/wsaddr-cs-pr/

There were no new Formal Objections since the transition to Candidate
Recommendation. Additional details about the transition are available in the questionnaire.

The deadline for responses is 23:59, Boston time on 2006-04-18.

For more information about the Web Services Addressing Working Group:
http://www.w3.org/2002/ws/addr/"

Good news!

Laugh? I nearly cried!

Ever wondered what if some of our luminaries had tried to publish today? Well I encourage you to go and see!

WS-Eventing, WS-Transfer and WS-Enumeration to W3C

Whilst it is good to see WS-Eventing, WS-Transfer and WS-Enumeration finally go to a standards body, it not necessarily a good thing. As Paul points out on Savas' blog, these specifications have been used in yet another political game of chess, in the same way as WS-ReliableMessaging/WS-ReliableExchange or WS-CAF/WS-TX. One good thing is that this time IBM are on the receiving end, despite what they may say.

Ignoring the technical merits (or lack thereof) of these specifications, one thing that simply cannot be ignored is the fact that this will now cause more fractures within the WS-* architecture, and not less. Two competing specifications, within two different (and often competing) standards bodies, will mean yet more FUD and delay as far as vendors and customers are concerned. At least when these current specifications were purely vendor specific, customers who wanted a standard approach to events (for example), had only one choice. Now they don't have any: they've got to wait until something is sorted out.

Now don't get me wrong: I'm not disagreeing that these things shouldn't be in a standards body. Quite the contrary: I believe strongly that they should be. I just wish that the likes of IBM and Microsoft could have gotten together 2 years ago and sorted this out, so we had a single standard now! I think that the world of Web Services can learn a lot from the OMG in terms of how to work collaboratively. It's not perfect by any means, but it's inclusive, which the world of Web Services standards simply is not. There's a lot of rubberstamping going on.

RFID and security

We used to collaborate with Andy Tanenbaum and his group a lot back in the late 1980's and early 1990's, so it's nice to get an update on what they're doing these days. Very interesting.

Somethings just don't make sense

There are many things in life that just don't make sense. For example, how can you have South Park without Chef? Whatever happened to Cold Fusion? Or the entire "plot" of Highlander II! But probably the one that gets to me at the moment (because it's related to my job) is how on earth can there be such a thing as a legacy ESB?!

Since it sprang to life, the ESB term has been used to mean different things to different people. For example, to some it's JMS with a few extra bells and whistles, to others it's Web Services, and to yet others it's the saviour of EAI. However, over the past couple of years, one thing that almost everyone can agree on is that it should be an infrastructure for SOA applications. Now we all know that one of the things SOA is good for is leveraging existing infrastructural investments: letting you use your old stuff in new and interesting ways.

So it always seemed to me that a product that helps you implement SOA applications (quick note, SOA is not something you can get out of a shrink-wrapped box), shouldn't be part of the legacy problem! And yet when I was with Arjuna, I came across a number of large and small companies that were already being forced to work with legacy ESBs! These were products (names removed to protect the guilty parties) that, once integrated into the user's infrastructure, couldn't cope with changes in user requirements a matter of mere months or years later; plus they were so intertwined with that infrastructure that they simply couldn't be removed (or it wasn't worth the effort). So these companies then had to rely on yet more ESB implementations to talk to their legacy ESBs! And the vicious circle went on. Not exactly a good return on your investment!!

Now I'm not saying that we're going to reverse that trend, but I'd like to think we'll try not to fall into the same holes that others have. However, it's still an interesting contradiction, sort of like military intelligence.

WS-Policy re-release

The next (and simplified) version of WS-Policy is out. My spider-sense tells me a push for standardisation may come next.

Spotlight and Google Desktop

I've been using a Mac OS X machine at home for over a year and one of the features I really love about Tiger is spotlight. It's really easy to use and before I knew it, I'd become dependant upon it: any search for text, images etc, would drag me first and foremost to spotlight. No more using the clunky Thunderbird email search, or grep (yes, I also use emacs). It's great.

That's great for my Mac, but my main work machine is a Windows box. So I've been putting off installing Google Desktop for ages because I'd heard some bad things about it. But after checking with a few people who have actually been using it, I decided to give it a whirl. It's not as good as spotlight (indexing seems to take an age!), but it's good nonetheless. I think I'll stick with it for a while.

WS-Addressing interoperability fest

We've been taking part in the WS-Addressing interoperability work during the W3C Plenary in Cannes. (We did it remotely, so no nice trips to the South of France for us.)

I produced our first WS-Addressing implementation as part of the Web Services transactions implementation, which we then tested as part of the WS-TX interoperability workshop. But that was the August 2004 version of the specification and things have moved on since then, both with WS-Addressing and our product. So this interoperability event was around the latest Candidate Recommendation from the working group, which required us to change our addressing implementation. Unlike with the Raleigh event, where we shared the effort, this time Kevin had the lion's share of the work to do. It was touch-and-go at times, but it eventually paid off and we demonstrated interoperability with IBM, Microsoft, Sun and WSO2/Apache. There's still a bit more work to do over the next week or so, but it looks like we'll have a pretty good story on the interoperability of the specification, as well as our implementation.

Thanks to everyone who participated from the various companies (within the working group and in testing), and particularly to Kevin!

Busy week

I'm sitting in an airport on the way to the States for a number of meetings. First up is a stop-over in Seattle, where I'll take timeout to catch up with Savas; I haven't seen him since our trip to HPTS last year, so it'll be good to grab a coffee (something we used to do fairly regularly). Then it's dinner with Jim, before the real work begins. When I'm finished in Seattle, it's a flight to San Jose, and the JCP Executive Committee meeting. It's my first such meeting for JBoss, so I'm looking forward to that. After another business meeting in San Francisco, it's a redeye to Atlanta. I arrive there at 7am Friday morning, with the intention of giving a series of talks about transactions (caffeine permitting!) Then it's home on Saturday. Like I said: busy!

Mark on WSDL and REST

Mark Nottingham has some interesting things to say on WSDL 2.0.

An automotive interlude

A couple of years ago I traded in the then family car for a 1993 Honda Prelude VTEC SI. I'm sure psychologists could make something of the fact this move happened about a year after the birth of my youngest son! It's a lovely car: 0-60mph in just over 6 seconds, with excellent handling, a great dashboard and the perfect colour: black. Since I bought it, I've had the best driving experiences of my life and I've been driving since 1984; I definitely don't regret getting the car at all.

Now the downsides: although the boot space isn't great you can still get a family-sized shop in there (just) and there's plenty of legroom for the driver and front passenger; however, the "occasional" seats in the back aren't too bad if you're only going 10 minutes down the road or you don't want to use your legs for a few hours afterward!

Now the size of the rear passenger seats hasn't really been a problem until recently, when the kids started to grow (and unfortunately kids do complain if they can't use their legs after a ride in the car!) It's starting to get to the point where it is adversely affecting my driving experience. I've tried a lot of things, including ear plugs, loud music ("sorry, can't hear what you're saying!"), not having kids in the back seats, but none of these solutions are long term enough for them! So it's getting to the point where I'm either going to have to trade in the Honda or buy a second car. I object to the latter option because I really don't think we'd use two cars sufficiently, plus I want to do my bit for the environment. OK, I admit that the Prelude probably isn't that good for the environment as it stands, but let's not get too carried away.

Anybody have any good suggestions? One that springs to mind is that I buy bikes for the kids: it lets me keep my car, helps the environment and it's good for their health! I've toyed with the idea of a Land Rover of one sort or another, and I have several friends who rave about them (like Greg), but none of them give me the buzz I get from my 'Lude.

WWW2006 Call for Posters

WWW2006 FINAL CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
POSTER DEADLINE EXTENDED UNTIL FEB 21st 2006

The International World Wide Web Conference Committee (IW3C2) invite
you to participate in the Fifteenth International World Wide Web
Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland on May 22nd-26th 2006.

You are invited to participate in the conference by submitting
* Posters (deadline extended to Feb 21st)
* Developer Track Proposals (deadline March 5th)
* Workshop Papers

POSTERS - DEADLINE EXTENDED - February 21st 2006
Posters provide a forum for late-breaking research, and facilitate
feedback in an informal setting. Posters are peer-reviewed. The poster
sessions provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to
present and demonstrate their recent web-related research, and to
obtain feedback from their peers in an informal setting. It gives
conference attendees a way to learn about innovative works in progress
in a timely and informal manner. Formatting and submission
requirements are available at http://www2006.org/posters/.

Conference topics include but are not limited to:
# Browsers and User Interfaces
# Data Mining
# Hypermedia and Multimedia
# Performance, Reliability and Scalability
# Pervasive Web and Mobility
# Search
# Security, Privacy, and Ethics
# Semantic Web
# Web Engineering
# XML and Web Services
# Industrial Practice and Experience
# Developing Regions
# Applications: E-Communities, E-Learning, E-Commerce, E- Science, E-Government and E-Humanities

DEVELOPERS TRACK PROPOSALS - Deadline - March 5th 2006
The developers' community is an integral part of the WWW conference
series. It includes all those who write the code that makes the Web
work. WWW developers work at startups, IT departments, software vendors
and government, but also include researchers who have a commitment to
developing usable tools and products. The aim of the track is to showcase
the practical experimentation that accompanies both cutting-edge research
and a dedication to standards setting and adoption.

Proposals are invited for technical demonstrations, presentations and
discussions to take place within the Developers' Track throughout
the conference, in keeping with the various conference topics (above).
The proposals should concern work with significant new functionality,
capability or 'wow' factor. Submission instructions are available
at http://www2006.org/developers/.

WORKSHOPS - Deadline - Various
A wide variety of workshops address the current research issues and
future development of the World Wide Web. Papers are invited for the
following workshops. For individual deadline and submission details see
http://www2006.org/workshops/.

BTP closes down

The official announcement from OASIS says it all:

To OASIS Members:

This is to notify you that the OASIS Business Transactions Technical Committee has completed its work and is now closed. We thank
the members and leadership of the TC for their contributions and dedication to this effort. The work that the TC produced during its
tenure can be found at its public pages, which will remain accessible at http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/business-transaction.
Its email archives also will remain permanently accessible at http://lists.oasis-open.org/business-transaction.

OASIS work on transactional and service coordination methods continues in a number of current projects, including the ASAP,
ebXML-BP, WSBPEL, WS-CAF and WS-TX technical committees.

I've been involved with this work from the start and although it never really caught on, I think it contributed to the overall discussions in this area and acted as a catalyst. My thanks to everyone who was ever involved with this effort.

Middleware 2006

I'm on the Program Committee for Middleware 2006. Here's the CFP:

ACM/IFIP/USENIX 7th International Middleware Conference

Melbourne, Australia
November 27 - December 1, 2006

http://2006.middleware-conference.org/


The Middleware conference is a forum for the discussion of important
innovations and recent advances in the design and construction of
middleware. Middleware is distributed-systems software that resides
between the applications and the underlying operating systems, network
protocol stacks, and hardware. Its primary role is to functionally
bridge the gap between application programs and the lower-level
hardware and software infrastructure in order to coordinate how
application components are connected and how they interoperate.

Following the success of past conferences in this series, the 7th
International Middleware Conference will be the premier event for
middleware research and technology in 2006. The scope of the
conference is the design, implementation, deployment, and evaluation
of distributed system platforms and architectures for future computing
and communication environments. Highlights of the conference will
include a high quality technical program, tutorials, invited speakers,
poster presentations, and workshops.

Submissions on a diversity of topics are sought, particularly ones
that identify new research directions. Middleware 2006 is not limited
to topics discussed in previous Middleware conferences. Authors
concerned about the appropriateness of a topic may communicate by
electronic mail with the program chairs prior to submission.

The proceedings of Middleware 2006 will be published as a Springer-Verlag
volume in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series.


Topics:

The topics of the conference include, but are not limited to:

Platforms and Architectures:
* Middleware for Web services and Web-service composition
* Middleware for cluster and grid computing
* Peer-to-peer middleware solutions
* Event-based, publish/subscribe, and message-oriented middleware
* Communication protocols and architectures
* Middleware for ubiquitous and mobile computing
* Middleware for embedded systems and sensor networks
* Service-oriented architectures
* Reconfigurable, adaptable, and reflective middleware approaches

Systems issues:
* Reliability, fault tolerance, and quality-of-service in general
* Scalability of middleware: replication and caching
* Systems management, including solutions for autonomic and self-managing middleware
* Middleware feedback control solutions for self-regulation
* Real-time solutions for middleware platforms
* Information assurance and security
* Evaluation techniques for middleware solutions
* Middleware support for multimedia streaming
* Middleware solutions for (large scale) distributed databases

Design principles and tools:
* Formal methods and tools for designing, verifying, and evaluating middleware
* Model-driven architectures
* Software engineering for middleware
* Engineering principles and approaches for middleware
* Novel development paradigms, APIs, and languages
* Existing paradigms revisited: object models, aspect orientation, etc.
* On-the-fly management and configuration of middleware


Organization:

General Chairs:
Joe Sventek (Glasgow University, UK)
Shanika Karunasekera (University of Melbourne, Australia)

Program Chairs:
Michi Henning (ZeroC, USA)
Maarten van Steen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Local Arrangements Chairs:
Aaron Harwood and Lars Kulik (University of Melbourne, Australia)

Workshops Chair:
Antony Rowstron (Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK)

Doctoral Symposium Chair:
Karen Henricksen (University of Queensland, Australia)

Publicity Chair:
Egemen Tanin (University of Melbourne, Australia)


Program Committee:†
* Christiana Amza (Toronto University, Canada)
* Ozalp Babaoglu (University of Bologna, Italy)
* Mark Baker (independent consultant)
* Alberto Bartoli (University of Trieste, Italy)
* Yolande Berbers (Leuven University, Belgium)
* Gordon Blair (Lancaster University, UK)
* Michele Colajanni (University of Modena, Italy)
* Geoff Coulson (Lancaster University, UK)
* Fred Douglis (IBM Watson, USA)
* Pascal Felber (University of Neufchatel, Switzerland)
* Indranil Gupta (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA)
* Franz Hauck (Ulm University, Germany)
* Bettina Kemme (McGill University, Canada)
* Anne-Marie Kermarrec (INRIA Rennes, France)
* Fabio Kon (IME/USP, Brazil)
* Ihor Kuz (NICTA, Australia)
* Doug Lea (Oswego State University, USA)
* Mark Little (Arjuna Technologies, UK)
* Ted McFadden (Latent Ventures, USA)
* Philip McKinley (Michigan State University, USA)
* Jishnu Mukerji (HP, USA)
* Bernard Normier (ZeroC, USA)
* Tamer Ozsu (University Waterloo, Canada)
* Gian Pietro Picco (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)
* Frank Pilhofer (Mercury Computer Systems, USA)
* Misha Rabinovich (Case Western University, USA)
* Alexander Reinefeld (ZIB, Berlin)
* Luis Rodrigues (University of Lisbon, Portugal)
* Peter Steenkiste (CMU, USA)
* Stefan Tai (IBM Watson, USA)
* Amin Vahdat (UCSD, USA)
* Aad van Moorsel (Newcastle University, UK)
* Steve Vinoski (IONA, USA)
* Craig Wills (Worchester Polytechnic Institute, USA)


Important dates:

Submission deadline: April 3
Notification of acceptance: July 10
Camera-ready copies: September 1


Submission guidelines:

Research papers:

Research papers are to be submitted electronically via the online submission system:
http://subm2006.middleware-conference.org/
Through this system, you will be requested to upload the file of your
paper (PDF format) to the conference server (please avoid bitmaps!)

Papers must not exceed 20 pages, including abstract, all figures, all
tables, and references. Papers should include a short abstract and up
to 6 keywords. Please also fill in the appropriate information in the
online form.

Submitted papers should follow the formating instructions of the
Springer LNCS Style (please check the Information for Authors page at
Springer at http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs for style and formatting
guidelines).

Submitted papers may not be submitted for conference publication,
journal publication, or be under review for any other conference or
journal.

Another Arjuna leaver

My friend and ex-colleague Dave Ingham is leaving Arjuna at the end of this week to take up a Program Manager job with Microsoft. He's joining the relatively new Connected Systems Division and I wish him all the best in the future.

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.