Is anyone out there?

Our industry is always revisiting past debates. The only thing that changes is the periodicity. However, in the past when arguments raged around CORBA versus DCOM, or Mac versus PC (for example), you could be forgiven for not knowing what was said in the past, because online archiving facilities were ad hoc and references to debates within hardcopy literature required access to that literature. However, with the advent of Google there are fewer excuses for not doing your homework before re-launching those arguments. These days it's REST versus SOA, or OSGi versus Sun, but the background material exists in copious amounts if you want to search for it.

However, one debate I had hoped never to see again was: WS-AT Considered Harmful to SOA. No sh*t Sherlock! But then we've been telling people that for years. It's a bit like saying: jumping out of an airplane without a parachute will kill you. Or: playing with electrics in the bath is a bad idea. These are fairly obvious truths and I'd hoped that the same was the case with the use cases for WS-AT. But maybe not!

Many of us (the group of various WS transaction specification/standards authors) have been saying that "one size does not fit all" for years: it's why all of the specifications/standards supported multiple models. Don't get hung up on two phase commit. It's a consensus protocol. Using it does not mean you are using all ACID properties of a traditional transaction. Protcols like WS-AT and WS-ACID exist for one very important reason: interoperability. As I said on Arnon's blog:

"WS-AT, WS-ACID (from WS-CAF) and Atoms (from BTP) were never intended to be used for loosely coupled interactions. They are there for short duration interactions between heterogeneous transaction system implementations. If you've ever tried to get CICS to talk to Tux, or Tux to talk to JBossTS (as examples), then you'll know that it's not easy to do out-of-the-box! We tried to do transaction interoperability in the OMG through the OTS, but that took a long time and not everyone supports OTS/JTS (when was the last time you saw Microsoft with an OTS implementation?) Web Services offer interoperability as one of their main benefits. We now have demonstrated transactional interoperability between all of the major TP vendors (excluding BEA, who haven't got a WS-AT implementation). For customers who have heterpogeneous implementations, then this is a critical component.

As authors of the specifications, we have *never* said that WS-AT et al should be used for long duration interactions. Over the past 8 years the reasons for not doing so have been well documented. If people are still arguing this question then they're not reading the literature, which basically agrees with them anyway!"

Web Services != SOA. Just because you're writing applications with Web Services doesn't mean you are (or necessarily need to) developing with SOA principles in mind. That does not mean Web Services are less important a technology. But it seems to be something that people are still having trouble understanding.

Now we can't prevent people from using WS-AT in other situations. Just like we can't prevent people from using electrical devices in the bath. But in that case, you'd better watch out and know what you're doing and why you are doing it!

Change of role? Not quite.

I forgot to mention, but back in June I was made Director of Engineering at Red Hat. Some people who've heard about this at the time have asked me what difference does it make to my role? At the moment I'm not sure it makes any difference: I seem to be doing the same things day and night.

Interesting

Yet another interesting addition from our friends at Google.

Feeling old!

Many things can make you feel old. For instance, it's my youngest son's 5th birthday party tomorrow, and yet it seems like yesterday when we brought him back from the hospital.

Then of course there's looking back over the work you've done. These days I tend not to have time to think about what happened last week let alone what happened twenty years ago! So it was actually quite interesting for me to spend time and try to put the various components within JBossTS into perspective for some of our newest users.

I started with the core, then went on to JTA and JTS, finishing with XTS. I didn't say as much as I could (time didn't permit), but the links within the entries cover everything. It was good to recollect for a change.

Red Hat and JBoss

In case you missed this. Looks good for the future.

Middleware for Service-Oriented Computing Workshop

I'm on the PC again and the submission deadline in 26th of July. Check out the CFP.

Some form of closure?

Some of you may know that in the 9/11 attacks, I lost a friend, Ed Felt, on United 93. Ed had been traveling to San Francisco on business. I obviouslty feel bad enough about the attacks, but to also lose a friend drives it home much more. Plus, and this is something I've never really shouted about (for obvious reasons), I was meant to be on that flight! The only reason I canceled was because I'd just got married and had promised my wife I'd not travel out of the country for 6 months after the wedding.

So you can probably understand why it was with some trepidation that I finally watched the United 93 movie. I deliberately took a while to buy it on DVD and I've never watched it on TV. But last night I decided to bite the bullet and sit down to watch it alone. I've read reports and seen documentaries over the years about the whole event, but this movie was good in showing the utter chaos and confusion that was going on at the time. The scenes on the plane itself were the hardest: I fly a lot and could empathise with the passengers just from that perspective, but when I considered that I could have been there ...

I'm not sure if I'll ever watch the film again. I don't think I have to in order to understand what Ed's family and those of the other victims, are still going through today. I'm one of the lucky ones, but this is something that will always stay with me.

Woo Hoo!!

Some good news. I don't think I have to do an acceptance speech, but I'm really glad to be on the team. SCA is definitely an important industry standard in the making.

Wonderland and JavaOne

Probably the best presentation I saw at JavaOne was left to last. James Gosling previewed Wonderland. At first I thought this was just yet another Second Life, avatar-based demonstration. However, when they started showing the avatars working within the virtual world with the same programs (Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.) as you'd use in the real world, it took on a completely new importance. This was very cool. Being able to create rooms where you could display your code dynamically and updateable (on "glass" walls, no les ;-) as though you were in a physical equivalent, show presentations, have true meetings where (almost) everything you'd want to do if you were face-to-face could be done, is a significant step forwards. Nice.

JavaOne 2007

I'm at JavaOne once again, to give a couple of BOFS (one on transaction bridging with the other members of the JBossTS team and one on JBI 2.0. Over all I haven't been as impressed with the conference this year as in previous years, but maybe I've just chosen to go to the wrong presentations and BOFs. Plus, why why why why why can't Sun manage to set up a decent wireless network for the conference? For a company who used to talk about The Network is the Computer, they do a pretty bad job of it year on year!

Red Hat and MetaMatrix

I first came across MetaMatrix at JavaOne in 2002/2003 when at Arjuna and we did some work with them over the next year or so. This should be interesting.

New post on JBossTS blog

I just posted this on the JBossTS blog site.

Anyone know Chinese?

Apparently this is one of my articles in Chinese. Not knowing the language, I have to believe it, although I do wonder if this is a case of The Hungarian Phrasebook again.

TDM

It's been a while since I've really been able to blog and that's all down to lack of time. Towards the end of last year, as part of the reorganisation of JBoss under Red Hat I was made Technical Development Manager of our SOA platform. What that basically means is that I'm in charge of the technical direction, development and productisation of everything SOA within the company. I went from managing 2 groups to 7 over night, with all that entails. Pretty interesting, I have to say, but definitely a time sink!

Arjuna and the history of middleware

Wolfgang has written a great paper on the impact of research on middleware. Arjuna gets several references, although there are a few inaccuracies (e.g., Arjuna Technologies wasn't sold to JBoss). Well worth a read.

John Backus dies

Some sad news. It's been a long time since I programmed in Fortran but I was always impressed with it.

Red Hat and Exadel

This is interesting news in a number of ways. I think it's great news for our products and projects.

Nooooooooooo!!!!!

This just got pointed out to me through the minutes of the first day at the W3C workshop onWeb of Services. I must have missed this stirling move on the part of the TAG. I've mentioned before about sessions and Web Services and how WS-Addressing is not the right way of doing this, but WS-Context is better. Of course it's no surprise to see that contributions to this TAG effort are from heavy WS-Addressing users, but us WS-Context supporters need to be more pro-active.

Vinoski leaves IONA

I meant to post this last week but work got in the way. I first met Steve back in the early 1990's at a Usenix conference where we were both presenting. He'd recently joined IONA from HP and I knew of him because of his great work on ORB Plus, still one of the best implementations. We had several Guinness drinking sessions and he could easily drink most people under the table! We kept in touch over the years though I don't think I've drunk as much since! I wish him the best in his new job.

Red Hat and interoperability

I'm not sure if this got much publicity, but it's worth checking out. Interoperability with different vendors is very important. Web Services are a way of achieving some interoperability, but they're not the entire solution.

Memories

Ah, this brought back memories. I remember using Spring around 1991 and reading many of the Sun papers on the subject. It was very cutting edge for the time (and still today in many respects).

Update on Jim

I hope this is wrong and he turns up! It's good to see the community coming together to help the search.

Jim Gray lost at sea!

Just saw this (thanks Stuart). Fingers crossed that Jim's safe and sound!

Nice

I want one. This sounds interesting too.

Submit a paper

I forgot to mention, but Eric asked me to be on the program committee for the W3C workshop on Web Services for Enterprise Computing. The deadline is fast approaching, so if you've got a paper or a position on the topic, please submit it.

WS-Context progressing to standard

This dropped through the cracks, but I'm pleased to say that WS-Context has passed the TC vote to proceed towards a standard.

It's Christmas Time ...

In the words of Band Aid, "It's Christmas time ..." and I'm now officially on vacation (hence the time to write a blog entry!) However, it'll be a busy festive season for me. We're in the final stages of releasing the first GA of JBossESB in January; I'm a reviewer on the Web Services track for WWW 2007 (8 papers!); a reviewer for Dependability and Security in e-Government (2 papers); I'm finalising a new book proposal with a couple of friends; I want to submit a paper to HPTS 2007 (I'm on the PC too); I want to submit a paper to the W3C workshop on Web Services for Enterprise Computing (I'm on the PC for that too). Plus, I'm sure I'm forgetting something!

Anyway, all of this blog writing is taking me away from paper reviews! Back to the grind.

InfoQ article

A while ago I was asked by Floyd if I'd like to be another editor on SOA side of things, joining Miko and Stefan. Needless to say I was happy to be asked and agreed. Well here's my first article.

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!

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!