International Workshop on Clouds for Enterprises 2011

Call for Papers: The International Workshop on Clouds for Enterprises (C4E) 2011

http://nicta.com.au/people/tosicv/clouds4enterprises2011/

held at the 13th IEEE Conference on Commerce and Enterprise Computing (CEC'11, http://www.tudor.lu/cec2011)

on Monday, 5 September 2011 in Luxembourg, Luxembourg

Important dates:

Paper submission: Monday, 20 June 2011 (strict, except for re-submission of papers reviewed by CEC'11)

Notification of acceptance: Monday, 4 July 2011

Description:

Cloud computing is an increasingly popular computing paradigm that aims to streamline the on-demand provisioning of software (SaaS), platform (PaaS), infrastructure (IaaS), and data (DaaS) as services. Deploying applications on a cloud can help to achieve scalability, improve flexibility of computing infrastructure , and reduce total cost of ownership. However, a variety of challenges arise when deploying and operating applications and services in complex and dynamic cloud-based environments, which are frequent in enterprises and governments.

Due to the security and privacy concerns with public cloud offerings (which first attracted widespread attention), it seems likely that many enterprises and governments will choose hybrid cloud, community cloud, and (particularly in the near future) private cloud solutions. Multi-tier infrastructures like these not only promise vast opportunities for future business models and new types of integrated business services, but also pose severe technical and organizational problems.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together academic, industrial, and government researchers (from different disciplines), developers, and IT managers interested in cloud computing technologies and/or their consumer-side/provider-side use in enterprises and governments. Through paper presentations and discussions, this workshop will contribute to the inter-disciplinary and multi-perspective exchange of knowledge and ideas, dissemination of results about completed and on-going research projects, as well as identification and analysis of open cloud research and adoption/exploitation issues.

This workshop invites contributions from both technical (e.g., architecture-related) and business perspectives (with governance issues spanning both perspectives). The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Technical Perspective:

- Patterns and best practices in development for cloud-based applications

- Deployment and configuration of cloud services

- Migration of legacy applications to clouds

- Hybrid and multi-tier cloud architectures

- Architectural support for enhancing cloud computing interoperability and portability

- Architectural principles and approaches to cloud computing

- Cloud architectures for adaptivity or robustness

- Evaluation methods for cloud architectures

- Architectural support for dynamic resource management to support computing needs of cloud services

- Cloud architectures of emerging applications, such as mashup of enterprise/government services

- Impact of cloud computing on architecture of software and, more generally, IT systems

Enterprise/Government Application Perspective:

- Case studies and experience reports in development of cloud-based systems in enterprises and governments

- Analyses of cloud initiatives of different governments

- Business aspects of cloud service markets

- Technical and business support for various cloud service market roles, such as brokers, integrators, and certification authorities

- New applications and business models for enterprises/governments leveraging cloud computing

- Economic evaluation of cloud-based enterprises

Governance Perspective:

- Service lifecycle models

- Architectural support for security and privacy

- Architectural support for trust in/by cloud services

- Capacity planning of services running in a cloud

- Architectural support for quality of service (QoS) and service level agreement (SLA) management

- Accountability of cloud services, including mechanisms, algorithms and methods for monitoring, analyzing and reporting service status and usage profiles

- IT Governance and compliance, particularly in hybrid and multi-tier clouds

Review and publication process:

Authors are invited to submit previously unpublished, high-quality papers before

***20 June 2011***.

Due to the limited time for review, this is a strict paper submission deadline and extensions will be given only to re-submission of papers reviewed by CEC'11 (authors of these papers will have about 3 days after CEC'11 notification to improve their papers). Papers published or submitted elsewhere will be automatically rejected. All submissions should be made using the EasyChair Web site http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=c4e2011.

Two types of submissions are solicited:

* Full papers – describing mature research or industrial case studies – up to 8 pages long

* Short papers – describing work in progress or position statements – up to 4 pages long

Papers presenting and analyzing completed projects are particularly welcome. Papers about on-going research projects are also welcome, especially if they contain critical, qualitative and quantitative analysis of already achieved results and remaining open research issues. In addition, papers about experiences and comparative analysis of using cloud computing in enterprises and governments are also welcome. Submissions from industry and government are particularly encouraged. In addition to presentation of peer-reviewed papers this one-day workshop will contain a keynote from an industry expert and an open discussion session on practical issues of migrating legacy enterprise and government applications to clouds.

All accepted papers (both full and short) will be published by the IEEE and included into the IEEE Xplore digital library. A follow-up journal issue with improved and extended versions of the best workshop papers is also planned.

Paper submissions must be in the IEEE conference paper format. Papers in other formats will be rejected automatically. Guidelines and templates for this format are available at: http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/publishing/templates.html. All submissions should include the author's name, affiliation and contact details. The document format for all paper submissions is Adobe PDF.

All submissions will be formally peer-reviewed by at least 2 Program Committee members. The authors will be notified of acceptance by

***4 July 2011***.

Since this date is very close to the deadline that the workshop chairs have for submission of camera-ready papers to the IEEE, there will be very short time (if any) for improving accepted submissions into camera-ready versions of the final papers. Further information about the procedure will be provided to the authors closer to the notification date.

At least one author of every accepted paper must register for the whole CEC’11 conference (there is no separate workshop registration) and present the paper.

Inquiries about paper submission should be e-mailed to Dr. Vladimir Tosic (vladat at server: computer.org) and include "Clouds for Enterprises 2011 Inquiry" in the Subject line.

Workshop Chairs:

Dr. Vladimir Tosic, NICTA, Australia; E-mail: vladat (at: computer.org) – primary workshop contact

Dr. Andrew Farrell, HP Labs, UK; E-mail: andrew.farrell (at: hp.com)

Dr. Karl Michael Göschka, Vienna University of Technology, Austria; E-mail: Karl.Goeschka (at: tuwien.ac.at)

Sebastian Hudert, University of Bayreuth, Germany; E-mail: sebastian.hudert (at uni-bayreuth.de)

Prof. Hanan Lutfiyya, University of Western Ontario, Canada, E-mail: hanan (at: csd.uwo.ca)

Dr. Michael Parkin, Tilburg University, The Netherlands, E-mail: m.s.parkin (at: uvt.nl)

Workshop Program Committee (to be completed):

Danilo Ardagna, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Tina Balke, Uni. Bayreuth, Germany

Paul L. Bannerman, NICTA, Australia

Rajkumar Buyya, Uni. Melbourne, Australia

Shiping Chen. CSIRO, Australia

Torsten Eymann, Uni. Bayreuth, Germany

Felix Freitag, Uni. Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain

Lorenz Froihofer, A1 Telekom Austria, Austria

Ian Gorton, PNNL, USA

Matti Hiltunen, AT&T Labs, USA

Christophe Huygens, Katholieke Uni. Leuven, Belgium

Hans-Arno Jacobsen, Uni. Toronto, Canada

Bastian Koller, HLRS, Germany

Kevin Lee, Murdoch Uni., Australia

Mark Little, Red Hat, UK

Yan Liu, PNNL, USA

André Ludwig, Uni. Leipzig, Germany

John Mace, Newcastle Uni., UK

Patrick Martin, Queens Uni., Canada

Leandro Navarro, Uni. Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain

Rui Oliveira, Uni. Minho, Portugal

José Orlando Pereira, Uni. Minho, Portugal

Nicolas Repp, TU Darmstadt, Germany

Giovanni Russello, CREATE-NET, Italy

Derong Shen, Northeastern University, China

Philipp Stephanow, Fraunhofer SIT, Germany

Francois Taiani, Lancaster Uni., UK

Yazhe Tang, Xi'an Jiaotong Uni., China

Eddy Truyen, Katholieke Uni. Leuven, Belgium

Hiroshi Wada, NICTA, Australia

Philipp Wieder, TU Dortmund, Germany

Guido Wirtz, Uni. Bamberg, Germany

Yun Yang, Swinburne Uni. of Tech., Australia

Liangzhao Zeng, IBM Research, USA

Ubiquitous Computing

Another cross post about JBossEverywhere.

Compute and Data Clouds

I've discussed several times about the need for public and private clouds. Unfortunately it's still possible to find people and vendors who believe that only public clouds are "true" clouds, whatever that means. From a purely technical perspective I am disappointed because the scientist in me always tries to take an objective stance. Factor in the business side and I can understand why they make these statements. It doesn't make it right in my book though.

However, I want to move the debate on because I think some stances are unlikely to change any time soon. So I began to think of the real reasons behind cloud: what brought us to where we are today, both social as well as technical. In some ways this is related to the posting I'll make later on the vision behind JBossEverywhere, but even that goes back even further to the root of cloud: grid computing and ubiquitous computing.

I was involved in some of the grid efforts in the early 2000's, particularly around the area of transactions and, independently, Web Services. In fact it was several of my friends and colleagues, several of whom were working for me at Arjuna, who wrote a seminal paper on the subject that really did stir up a hornets nest at the time.

However, I digress. If you look back at the grid work at the time, it had really coalesced into two different, though related, use cases: compute grids, where the networked resources worked in parallel on a (typically) small set of data that was farmed out to them by some central server(s), and the data grid, where the resources cooperate on processing a (typically) large data set that may have taken hours or days to download to them and which they may all share. The software and architecture of both types of grids could be markedly different for very good reasons, including fault tolerance and security.

Well I think those same reasons need to be applied to the cloud. Why would someone go to the expense of setting up a private cloud, for instance, versus a public clouds? Why would you use a hybrid approach? Ultimately I believe it is because of the data, and have said so before: the cloud will go to the data and not the other way around. But why? For the same reasons as the grid. If you have lots of data that would take hours or days to upload to a cloud, then you probably don't want to go the public route as failures (e.g., the AWS outage) could cost you valuable time and money, not forgetting the headache of ensuring that that much data can remain secure! But if you can split the data into logical quanta that can be processed relatively independently, then you could gain from the public cloud, even if just as an "overflow" mechanism when your private cloud runs out of capacity, as securing smaller amounts of data can be easier to accomplish and a failure should be more self contained.

Hmmm, I wonder if there's also a suitable analogy to make here with traditional ACID transactions and long running (extended) transactions?

Anyway, I believe that the public, private or hybrid debates should move on and we need to be talking about compute and data clouds. At that level the choice of *where* to host the work becomes more obvious and should be taken out of the hands of subjective vendor debates.

Papers, papers everywhere ...

Recently I got harangued by a couple of people for not having a list of my papers and books on the blog. (Go figure!) So here goes, and probably eventually I'll link to downloadable versions (until then just remember that Google Is Your Friend!)

Note, this does not include standards and specifications I've worked on! Furthermore, it's definitely out of date by a few years as well as me forgetting a few things that have happened over the past 20. Check here for a more accurate list, though I suspect even that has some problems.

Journals

• M.C. Little and D.L. McCue, “Construction and Use of a 
Simulation Package in C++," C User's Journal Vol. 12, Number 3, March 1994.
• G.D. Parrington, S.K. Shrivastava, S.M. Wheater and M.C. Little, "The Design and Implementation of Arjuna," USENIX Computing Systems Journal, Vol 8, No 3, 1995.
• D.B. Ingham, M.C. Little, S.J. Caughey, and S.K. Shrivastava, "W3Objects: Bringing Object-Oriented Technology to the Web," World Wide Web Journal, Issue 1, pp. 89-105.
• D.B. Ingham, S.J. Caughey, and M.C. Little, "Fixing the Broken-Link Problem: The W3Objects Approach," Computing Networks & ISDN Systems, Vol. 28, No. 7-11, pp. 1255-1268.
• D.B. Ingham, M.C. Little, S.J. Caughey, and S.K. Shrivastava, "W3Objects: Distributed Objects and the Web," Dr. Dobb's Sourcebook, Vol. 22, No. 13, pp. 19-25, January/February 1997.
• M.C. Little and S.K. Shrivastava, "Providing end-to-end transactional Web applications using the Object Transaction Service", OMG Success Story, August 1998.
• M.C. Little and S.K. Shrivastava, "Java Transactions for the Internet" (Extended version), Special Issue of the Distributed Systems Engineering Journal, Volume 5, Number 4, December 1998.
• L.B. Arief, M.C. Little, S.K. Shrivastava, N.A. Speirs and S.M. Wheater, "Specifying Distributed System Services", BT Technology Journal, Vol. 17 No. 2 April 1999, pp. 126-136.
• Mark C. Little and Santosh K. Shrivastava, "Integrating Group Communication with Transactions for Implementing Persistent Replicated Objects", Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1752, Springer-Verlag, pp. 238-253.
• Mark C. Little, Stuart M. Wheater, David B. Ingham, C. Richard Snow, Harry Whitfield, and Santosh K. Shrivastava, "The University Student Registration System: A Case Study in Building A High-Availability Distributed Application Using General Purpose Components", Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 1752, Springer-Verlag, pp. 453-471.
• Mark Little, “Transactions and Web Services”, HP Middleware Developer Journal, February 2002.
• M. C. Little, N. A. Speirs and S. K. Shrivastava, “Using Bloom Filters to Speed-up Name Lookup in Distributed Systems”, The Computer Journal, Vol. 45, Issue 6, pp. 645-652 Oxford University Press/British Computer Society, 2002.
• S. Dalal, S. Temel, M. Little, M. Potts and J. Webber, “Coordinating Business Transactions on the Web”, IEEE Internet Computing, January 2003.
• M. Little, “Transactions and Web Services”, Communications of the ACM Special Issue, Volume 46, Issue 10, October 2003, pp. 49-54.
• I Houston, M. C. Little et al, “The CORBA Activity Service Framework for Supporting Extended Transactions”, Software: Practice and Experience, Vol. 33, Issue 4, pp. 351-373, 2003.

Articles

• “The Business Transactions Protocol”, Developer.Com, March 2002, http://softwaredev.earthweb.com/sdtech/article/0,,12065_1121331_4,00.html
• “SOAP for the masses”, WebServices.org, July 24th 2005.
• “Web Services Transactions and Heuristics”, WebServices.org, 10th March 2005.
• “The OASIS WS-CAF Approach to Web Services Business Transactions”, WebServices.org, 25th January 2005.
• “The Smorgasbord of Web Services Transactions”, WebServices.org, 17th January 2005.
• “End-to-end transactionality: myth or reality?”, Java Developer Journal, March 2002, pp. 56-62.
• “An overview of support for extended transaction models in J2EE”, Developer.com, May 2002.
• “The Business Transactions Protocol”, Developer.com, May 2002.
• J. Webber, V. Corrales, M. Little and S. Parastatidis, “Making web services work”, Application Development Advisor, November/December 2001 issue.
• B. Martin and M. Little, “ACID is Good. Take it in Short Doses”, The ServerSide article, October 2004, http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss?l=AcidShortDoses.
• S. Parastatidis, M. Little and J. Webber, “Stateful Interactions in Web Services”, Web Services Journal, May 2004.
• M. Little and J. Webber, “Introducing WS-CAF”, Web Services Journal, November 2003.
• M. Little and T. Freund, “A comparison of Web services transaction protocols”, IBM DeveloperWorks article, October 2003. http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-comproto/
• M. Little and J. Webber, “Introducing BPEL4WS 1.0”, Web Services Journal, July 2003.
• M. Little and J. Webber, “Introducing WS-Transaction part 2”, Web Services Journal, June 2003.
• J. Webber and M. Little, “Introducing WS-Transaction part 1”, Web Services Journal, May 2003.
• J. Webber and M. Little, “Introducing WS-Coordination”, Web Services Journal, April 2003.

Conferences/Workshops

• M.C. Little and S.K. Shrivastava, "Replicated K-Resilient Objects
in Arjuna," Proceedings of IEEE Workshop on the Management of Replicated Data, pp. 53-58, Houston, Texas, November 1990.
• D.L. McCue and M.C. Little, "Computing Replica Placement in a Distributed System," Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Replicated Data, pp. 58-61, Monterey C.A., November 1992.
• M.C. Little, D.L. McCue and S.K. Shrivastava, "Maintaining Information about Persistent Replicated Objects in a Distributed System," Proceedings of Thirteenth International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, pp. 491-498, Pittsburgh, May 1993.
• M.C. Little and D.L. McCue, "The Replica Management System: a Scheme for Flexible and Dynamic Replication," Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Configurable Distributed Systems, Pittsburgh, March 1994.
• M.C. Little and S.K. Shrivastava, "Using Application Specific Knowledge for Configuring Object Replicas," Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Configurable Distributed Systems, pp. 169-176, Annapolis, Maryland, May 6-8, 1996.
• S.M. Wheater and M.C. Little, "The Design and Implementation of a Framework for Configurable Software," Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Configurable Distributed Systems, pp. 136-143, Annapolis, Maryland, May 6-8, 1996.
• M.C. Little, S.K. Shrivastava, S.J. Caughey, and D.B. Ingham, "Constructing Reliable Web Applications using Atomic Actions," Proceedings of the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference, Santa Clara, USA 7-11 April 1997.
• S.J. Caughey, D.B. Ingham, and M.C. Little, "Flexible Open Caching for the Web," Proceedings of the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference, Santa Clara, USA 7-11 April 1997.
• D.B. Ingham, S.J. Caughey, and M.C. Little, "Supporting Highly Manageable Web Services," Proceedings of the Sixth International World Wide Web Conference, Santa Clara, USA 7-11 April 1997.
• M.C. Little and S.K. Shrivastava, "Distributed Transaction in Java," Contribution to High Performance Transaction Systems (HPTS) workshop, Monterey, Sept. 1997.
• S.J. Caughey, M.C. Little and S.K. Shrivastava, "Checked Transactions in an Asynchronous Message Passing Environment", The 1st IEEE International Symposium on Object-oriented Real-time distributed Computing, Kyoto, Japan. April 1998.
• M.C. Little and S.M. Wheater, "Building Configurable Applications in Java," The 4th International Conference on Configurable Distributed Systems (ICCDS'98), Annapolis, Maryland, USA, May 4-6, 1998.
• M.C. Little and S.K. Shrivastava, "Java Transactions for the Internet," The 4th Conference on Object-Oriented Technologies and Systems (COOTS'98), Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, April 1998.
• M.C. Little and S.K. Shrivastava, "Understanding the Role of Atomic Transactions and Group Communications in Implementing Persistent Replicated Objects," The 8th International Workshop on Persistent Object Systems: Design Implementation and Use, Tiburon, California, USA, 30th August - 1st September 1998.
• M.C. Little and S.K. Shrivastava, "Integrating the Object Transaction Service with the Web", Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE Workshop on Enterprise Distributed Object Computing (EDOC'98), November 3-5 1998, La Jolla, California.
• G. Morgan, S.K. Shrivastava, P.D. Ezhilchelvan and M.C. Little, "Design and Implementation of a CORBA Fault-tolerant Object Group Service", Proceedings of the Second IFIP WG 6.1 International Working Conference on Distributed Applications and Interoperable Systems, DAIS'99, Helsinki, June 1999.
• M.C. Little and S.K. Shrivastava, "Implementing high availability CORBA applications with Java", Proceedings of the IEEE Workshop on Internet Applications, San Jose, California, June 1999.
• M.C. Little, "Object decomposition in transactional applications", Contribution to the Eighth International Workshop on High Performance Transaction Systems, Pacific Grove, California, September 26-29, 1999.
• M.C. Little and S.K. Shrivastava, "A method for combining replication with cacheing", IEEE International Workshop on Reliable Middleware Systems (WREMI'99), Proceedings of the 18th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems, Lausanne, Switzerland, October 19-22, 1999.
• P.D. Ezhilchelvan, S.K. Shrivastava and M.C. Little, “A Model Architecture for Conducting Hierarchically Structured Auctions”, Proceedings of the 4th IEEE Symposium on Object-Oriented Real-time Computing (ISORC), May 2001, Magdeburg, Germany.
• M. Little, S. Shrivastava and S. Wheater, “Theory and Practice of building Reliable Distributed Applications”, Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on Distributed Objects and Applications, September 2001, Rome, Italy.
• M.C. Little et al, “The CORBA Activity Service Framework for Supporting Extended Transactions”, Proceedings the IPIC/ACM International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms (Middleware 2001), November 2001, Heidelberg, Germany.
• M. C. Little and S. K. Shrivastava, “An Examination of the Transition of the Arjuna Distributed Transaction Processing Software from Research to Products”, In Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX Workshop on Industrial Experiences with Systems Software (WIESS '02), Boston, MA, USA, 8 December 2002 (Co-located with OSDI '02)
USENIX Association.
• A. I. Kistijantoro, G. Morgan, S. K. Shrivastava and M.C. Little, “Component Replication in Distributed Systems: a Case study using Enterprise Java Beans”, 22nd IEEE/IFIP Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems (SRDS2003), Florence, October 2003.
• M. Little, “Full Circle for Web Services Transactions?”, Proceedings of the High Performance Transaction Systems Workshop, Asilomar, October 2003.
• M. Little and E. Newcomer, “Interposition, Web Services and the Bable Fish”, Proceedings of the High Performance Transaction Systems Workshop, Asilomar, October 2003.
• M. Little, “Web services transactions: past, present and future”, Proceedings of the XML 2003 conference, Philadelphia, December 2003.
• M. Little, “Models for Web services transactions”, Proceedings of SIGMOD 2004, Paris, France, June 2004.
• M. Little, “An Open Standards Approach to Web Services Business Transactions”, Proceedings of XML Open 2004, Cambridge University, September 2004.
• D. Bunting and M. Little, “Business Process Context: Context, coordination and transactions in the Web Services architecture”, Proceedings of XML 2004, Washington DC, November 2004.
• M. Little and D. Bunting, “WS-CAF and the Web Services architecture”, Proceedings of XTECH 2005, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, May 2005.
• M. Little and S. Shrivastava, “The evolution of a transaction processing system”, Proceedings of the High Performance Transaction Systems Workshop, Asilomar, September 2005.
• M. Little, “Blackadder and the micro-kernel approach to Web Services transactions”, Proceedings of the High Performance Transaction Systems Workshop, Asilomar, September 2005.
• M. Little, E. Newcomer and G. Pavlik, “WS-CAF: Contexts, Coordination and Transactions for Web Services”, Proceedings of the High Performance Transaction Systems Workshop, Asilomar, September 2005.
• M. Little, G. Pavlik and A. Kumar, “The Session Concept for Web Services”, Proceedings of XML 2005, Atlanta, GA, November 2005.
• M. Little, G. Pavlik and A. Kumar, “The need for sessions in Web Services”, Proceedings of 3rd European Conference on Web Services, Sweden, November 2005.
• M. Little, “The need for a general context definition in Web Services”, Proceedings of the W3C Workshop on the Web of Services, February 2007.
• M. Little, “Transactions and open source: two steps forward, one step backwards?”, Proceedings of the High Performance Transaction Systems Workshop, Asilomar, October 2007.
• M. Little, “High Performance Name Lookups”, Proceedings of the High Performance Transaction Systems Workshop, Asilomar, October 2009.
• M. Little, “REST-based transactions”, Proceedings of the High Performance Transaction Systems Workshop, Asilomar, October 2009.
• Achmad I. Kistijantoro, Graham Morgan, Santosh K. Shrivastava, and Mark C. Little, “Enhancing an Application Server to Support Available Components”, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 531-545, July/August 2008.

Others

• “Replication of Transactional Objects”, International Symposium on Distributed Objects and Applications (DOA’01), Rome, Italy, September 2001.
• “The development of Web Transactions”, OMG Web Services Workshop, San Jose, March 2002.
• “Transactions and Web Services: present and future”, OMG Workshop, Zurich, March 2002.
• “Beyond the Stock Quote: BTP, the long and short IT (Internet Transactions)”, JavaOne, San Francisco, March 2002.
• “Extended transactions”, ServerSide.com Tech Talk, February 2003.
• “Demystifying Java Transaction Processing”, JavaOne, San Francisco, July 2004.
• “The Future of Grid Technologies”, JavaOne, San Francisco, June 2005.

Project Deliverables

• G. Ferrari, P. Ezhilchelvan and M. Little, “Realistic and Tractable Modelling of Multi-tiered E-business Service Provisioning”, TAPAS Project deliverable, April 2005.
• S.M. Wheater and M.C. Little, "The Design and Implementation of a Framework for Extensible Software," BROADCAST Project Technical Report.
• M.C. Little and S.K. Shrivastava, "Object Replication in Arjuna," BROADCAST Project Techical Report, 50, October 1994.
• G.D. Parrington, S.K. Shrivastava, S.M. Wheater and M.C. Little, "The Design and Implementation of Arjuna," BROADCAST Project Techical Report, 65, October 1994.
• M.C. Little and S.K. Shrivastava, "Object Replication in Arjuna," Draft Version Newcastle University, Computing Science Laboratory, August 1993.
• M.C. Little, D.L. McCue and S.K. Shrivastava, "Maintaining Information about Persistent Replicated Object in a Distributed System," BROADCAST Project Techical Report, October 1993.
• S.K. Shrivastava, P.D. Ezhilchelvan and M.C. Little, "Understanding Component Failures and Replications in Distributed Systems," ISA Technical Report, UNT/TR1, May 1990.
• S.K. Shrivastava, G.N. Dixon, M.C. Little, G.D. Parrington, F. Hedayati and S.M. Wheater, "The Design and Implementation of Arjuna," Technical Report Series, 280, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Computing Laboratory, March 1989.

Books

• M. Little, J. Maron and G. Pavlik, “Java Transaction Processing: Design and Implementation”, Prentice Hall. July 2004.
• J. McGovern, A. Williamson, M. Little, A. Jain et al, “The J2EE 1.4 Bible”, Wiley Associates, December 2003.
• J. McGovern, M Little et al. “Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture”, Prentice Hall. Publication date to be announced.
• Chapter on Web Services Transactions, MIT Press Publication on “The Web Services Architecture”, 2005.

A worrying lack of physics!

Half of my undergraduate degree was spent in advanced physics, including astronomy, astrophysics and high-energe particle physics. I loved all of those subjects and they continue to influence me today. Despite moving from academia to various companies, I've stayed pretty close to the University, so it's with great sadness that I've witnessed the collapse of subjects such as physics within it over the past few years.

Therefore, it's even more worrying to read articles such as this. People who don't really understand the importance of science are making judgements about its future without seeking the right level of consultancy, or listening to what they are being told. But then what's new? Maybe they'll understand history more?

JBoss Everywhere

It's a catchy title but manages to capture in two words a lot of what I've been thinking about as the future of middleware for well over a decade (or two!) I'll dig into detail in future entries, but for now it's worth just cross linking the article I wrote earlier.

We live in interesting times ...

To paraphrase Robert Kennedy, "we definitely live in interesting times", or at least you do if you're part of JBoss. What with the language work we're doing around Ceylon, some great work with JRuby over in TorqueBox-land, major improvements in transactions performance, world domination from the Infinispan team (well, most of our teams to be perfectly honest!), strong involvement in the EE7 standardisation process, yet more world domination and great work from the Drools team, and so many other things going, it has been impossible for me to write about them all. We've even seen several of our competitors start to copy our PaaS story in recent weeks (well, they do say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!)

I've been meaning to write about several of these items for a while. But what with JBossWorld/JUDCon, working on the long term vision for JBoss, various off site meetings, and a vacation to Orlando (which turned into a successful working holiday), I simply haven't had time. But once we get over conference season I hope to get a bit of breathing room and revisit one or two of them. At the very least I'll be writing more on what I'll be talking about during my keynote, though if you were at my presentation during QCon London then you might be able to make an intuitive leap before then!

In conclusion it's worth saying that in the 6 years that I've been a part of JBoss I can't recall a time when there was as much innovation and excitement within the projects and their communities. This is definitely a great time for us!

JBossWorld 2011

Not long now until JBossWorld and JUDCon. I'm presenting at both this year, but probably the most important aspect will be my keynote. Since taking over from Sacha 2 years ago, I've given a state of the union at each JBossWorld, but this time will be different: yes we'll cover what has happened over the past 12 months, but the real meat of the presentation will be unveiling where we are going in the next few years. So if you haven't registered yet for either event, do so now (I think JUDCon attendees get free access the my keynote!)

True Grit

I remember vividly the first time I saw True Grit: I was 7 years old and on a family holiday and my father and I snuck off to watch it. I loved it then and I continue to love it whenever I watch it. So it was with some apprehension that I heard they were making another movie. I still haven't seen it but I probably will eventually.

However, it was while I was reading about the new movie that I realised I'd not actually read the book. I did some research about it and kept hearing how good it was. When I saw some reviewers likening it to one of my favourite books of all time (To Kill A Mockinbird), I knew I had to give it a go. Well I'm almost finished the book and I have to admit it is definitely up there as a classic. If the new movie is as good, then I think it'll be worth a viewing. Though it'll have to go some to displace the original movie in my heart!

HPTS 2011 Call For Papers

Call for Participation

14th International Workshop

on High Performance Transaction Systems (HPTS)

October 23-26, 2011

Asilomar Conference Grounds

Pacific Grove, CA

The ubiquity of the Internet and the proliferation of "smart" devices have led us to a world where large, scalable, data-intensive systems -- once the rarified domain of mainframe computers and financial institutions -- now permeate virtually every industry. Social networks, online ticketing systems, and massively multiplayer online games are just a few of the applications regularly used by hundreds of millions of users that depend daily on such systems. System architects and engineers face increasingly complex challenges: larger scale, lower power, more client heterogeneity, etc. In addition, the skies are rapidly "cloud"ing up -- and some of the world's largest systems are being built from parts or platforms that are "non-traditional" in nature. The "NoSQL movement" is upon us, data analytics are running on thousand-node clusters, and almost every one of our traditional assumptions is being questioned by a new generation of data system architects.

Every two years, HPTS brings together a lively and opinionated group of participants to discuss and debate the pressing topics that affect today's systems and their design and implementation. Past workshops have included topics such as emerging directions in systems infrastructure, new applications, and current developments in software and technology. The topics are limited only by the imagination of our participants. The workshop will include position paper presentations, panels, moderated discussions, and significant time for casual interaction. And of course beer.

We ask potential participants to submit a short (two paragraph) technical summary, a one-page position paper, or an abstract of their current work. Submissions can present a viewpoint on a controversial topic, a summary of lessons learned, experience with a large or unusual system, an innovative mechanism, an enormous problem looming on the horizon, or anything else that convinces the program committee that the participant has something interesting to say. The submission process is purposely lightweight, but we require each submission to have only a single author.
The workshop is by invitation only and is limited to approximately 75 participants. The submissions drive both the invitation process and the workshop agenda. Participants may be asked to be part of a presentation or discussion session at the workshop.

Send submissions, in plain text, to hpts2011@ics.uci.edu no later than 11:59 PM (EST) April 1, 2011.

A note to Program Committees

Over the years I've written over 50 papers, many technical reports, quite a few magazine articles and several books, not to mention a PhD thesis. I've sat on enough program committees over the past 20+ years to know that it is a difficult job, particularly if you've got a lot of papers to review and very little time. That's why assembling the program committee is often one of the most challenging tasks for the conference/workshop chairs.

Throughout this time I think I've had a pretty good paper acceptance ratio, but I have had papers rejected by conferences and workshops. I think if you weren't disappointed about a rejection then you probably didn't put in enough effort to the paper writing in the first place, and that's definitely something I do for every paper. So it's true to say that when our WS-REST paper was rejected we were all disappointed.

I'm not going to go into whether or not I agree with the reviewers: that would be inappropriate. But at least one of them did frustrate me with something I've seen done once or twice elsewhere and each time I see it I get really annoyed. As a reviewer, whether for a conference/workshop, a journal or elsewhere, you often want to illustrate your points, both positive and negative, by drawing the attention of the authors to other papers or works. But if you're going to do this make sure that those papers or citations are publicly available or it really is pretty pointless: you may as well be saying "You are wrong; I know it but I refuse to tell you why and you just have to believe me because I am a reviewer!", which is obviously not what you expect from peer review! It also doesn't reflect well on the conference.

Over the past few decades some journals and conference/workshop publications have gone private, only being available to paying readers. This does make it hard, but not impossible, to achieve publicly available copies. I remember us doing this back in the 1980's, by publishing technical reports that covered roughly the same content and were primarily there for others to access when the original papers were unavailable. As a member of a program committee you could then refer to these. But one way or another, if you are on a program committee and you're going to want authors to learn from the experience of others and improve their papers based on your comments, either refer to papers that they can access, or don't bother!

ZX81 is 30 years old?!

Now this brings back memories! I was never a ZX owner, nor did I own a Spectrum. But they did come out when I was at school and I did write programs for them, so I have fond memories (including using a milk bottle as a heat sink!) My personal computer ownership started with a Commodore Pet (still have it at home!) and then a BBC Model B, both of which were a step up from the punch-tape mainframes that we used in school prior to their arrival! Ah, those were the days!

I confess ...

I have to confess that I'm a Bob Hope and Bing Crosby fan. I grew up with their movies, with the Road To ... series as my favourites. But Pale Face is a classic Hope-only movie and that's where I came across Jane Russell. So it's very sad to hear that she has died.

Starlite

I remember a few years ago watching a demo of Starlite on Tomorrow's World. I always wondered what happened to Starlite and was reading today that it continues to be stalled and yet apparently passes a host of tests to prove that there really is something behind it! What a shame. It has immense potential.

The future of Java middleware

I'm speaking at QCon London again this year and it's on a topic I've been working on for a number of years: where is (Java) middleware going? I'm not going to spoil things too much here, but suffice it to say that anyone who has heard me talk about middleware over the years, probably won't be surprised. I'll blog more about it after the event.

My presentation may be on Java, but what I've got to say transcends any particular language implementation. If Java hadn't come along and we were all still happily working on C++, then I'd be saying similar things. The middleware component of the larger software industry is at an inflexion point and no, Cloud didn't cause it: we've been heading towards this event at full speed for several years. We can either keep heading blindly down the route of inventing bespoke wheels that are often just as round as their cousins elsewhere, or we can start to think and work more efficiently.

I obviously can't speak on behalf of other vendors, but I can say that JBoss will be heading in the right direction! Of course this does not mean we are ditching Java Enterprise Edition, or any of the other investments we've made! But we have been expanding over the years from just JBossAS to other things like Hibernate, ESB, portal, etc. I see what we need to do over the next few years as just another evolution of what we've been doing. And if you look around at the plethora of projects we've got on JBoss.org then you'll be able to see that we've been heading in the direction I'm hinting at for some time.

The next few years are going to be exciting for JBoss. I'm also hoping that we can energise the open source communities as a whole around some of these ideas so that a wider audience can participate and benefit. Like I said ... exciting!

Another era draws to a close

For those of us who grew up huddled behind the sofa or simply asking the question "How do Daleks get up stairs?", this is a sad day.

DEC founder dies

It's likely that many of the current generation of developers will never have heard of DEC, but they had a profound impact on the way our industry developers. So it's sad to hear that Ken Olsen has died. The PDP-11 will always have a place in my heart!

What do developers want in the Cloud?

OK, so the title is a loaded question, because I'm getting hit from all sides with conflicting information. Plus as a developer myself, it's often hard for me to be objective. For instance, not everyone loves emacs the way I do! This could also be a very wide ranging discussion on aspects from repositories through to runtime management. Maybe I'll revisit some of those in later entries, but for now I feel compelled to focus on the editor/IDE component of the development experience.

Over the years I've used a range of different editors and IDEs. I'm not going to list them all here, but the fact that I still use emacs and the command line shows that perhaps I'm not easily pleased. However, whether it's emacs, Eclipse or (shudder) vi, I always have my development code on my laptop or desktop. Yes it may get pulled down from a remote repository, but it's edited locally before being committed back. This is a fairly standard way of doing things and probably the only thing to change over the past 20+ years is the repository aspect. Before cvs, svn and git there were ad hoc solutions, but the result was essentially the same: remote backup/sharing mechanism but local development.

Does cloud change this? Well I hadn't really put too much thought into this because I really didn't (don't) think it does. As a developer I still need a repository (OK, that could be hosted in the Cloud - I don't care as long as it is available when I check out and check in code). And I still need a local development environment with an IDE or editor, right? Well there's the problem. I think I do and I know quite a lot of people who think similarly. These folks are long time developers across a range of industries and academia, who expect to be able to code locally and deploy remotely into the (public or private) Cloud.

However, it seems that there is an alternative option, where everything is remote, including the code on which you develop. In this scenario the code is maintained in the Cloud (it may still be checked out of some repository, but maybe not). You edit it through a browser (Web 2.0 meets the Cloud) and the environment within the browser is (hopefully) as feature rich as your non-Cloud IDE. And typically this is all based around a 4GL offering.

Now don't get me wrong: I can see how this can all work. From a technical perspective it's pretty straightforward. Plus I don't have a problem with 4GL as far as they go. My problem with this approach is centred around the remote development aspect. As a developer I want to be able to code when I want and where I want, without having to worry about network connectivity issues. I need that off-line aspect. It's actually one of the reasons I'm still not entirely happy with using maven, but I'm getting over that now and am in rehab!

So is this really the kind of development environment/working pattern that Cloud developers want and need? Isn't Eclipse, or even emacs, sufficient and perhaps even preferable? As I said before, it's hard for me to separate what I'd want and expect as a developer from what others might want and expect.

Marc on Hudson/Jenkins

I haven't been tracking the Hudson/Jenkins issue in depth, but from what I do know I have to agree with Marc. Community is critical to the success of an open source project, and if your licence allows a fork of the code then it's also possible to fork the community too. Even if forking the code isn't possible, if you don't embrace, support and nurture your communities then they'll either go elsewhere or start a competitive effort themselves. This may sound strange, but this is one of the things that I love about working in open source: it's not just about having the best technology; you need to have the best communities too.

HPTS 2011

Anyone who knows me probably knows how much I love the High Performance Transaction Systems workshops that Jim created and mentored for years. I've been going to it for many years and have been on the program committee for the past few. Well I'm pleased to say that we've just announced the Call for Papers for the event this year. If the past workshops are anything to go by then it'll be a great workshop and I'm really looking forward to October!

Beanstalk and PaaS?

I didn't get a chance to write up everything I've got to say about the Amazon Beanstalk announcement, particularly as it applies to JBoss. I agree with some of what Sacha and the CloudBees team have to say: it's a good step for Java, but I also think it's pretty obvious that this would happen. I'm not sure if this is an "I told you so" moment.

However, once again I have to say that I agree with Paul on his assessment: it's not quite a PaaS ... yet. It seems that others agree, though not everyone is so sure. I'm sure we will see (have to see) further improvements to what is being offered, but as things stand, this doesn't fit my definition of PaaS. But this is a fast moving arena at the moment, so I wouldn't be surprised to see things change in the future, particularly as the competition starts to heat up.

Steve on public vs private Cloud

Steve Jones makes some very similar points to my earlier posting on data and its role in the public versus private cloud debate. Definitely worth checking out.

Edsac being rebuilt

Wonderful news. Guess I'll be making a trip once it's completed then!

Software Craftsman

I didn't even know there was a Software Craftsman Manifesto, but Dan North makes some good points.

IO, objects and messages

I mentioned that one of my Christmas projects involved playing around with the IO programming language. I took it a little further than I'd planned originally and started to look at integrating transactions with it (in the form of the C++ version of Arjuna). I got to know the language pretty well, despite the poor documentation which often caused more delays and hair pulling.

One of the things I realised about half way through was that I really like IO because it has a lot in common with Smalltalk: everything is an object and methods are invoked via the exchange of messages. In some ways it made me realise how much I miss programming with Smalltalk, though that's not to suggest that I preferred one language over the other; it's been a few years since I really used Smalltalk so I'd have to refresh that knowledge to make a qualified judgement.

IO also reminded me that while I love C++ and probably still like it above others, as an object-oriented language it has a number of quirks that don't make it, or similar languages, ideal for beginners learning the ins and outs of OO. One of the things I miss, which was part of the original Smalltalk implementation and Simula, though removed from Smalltalk-80, is the concept of message passing to interact with objects. I always found this concept more natural when thinking about object orientation.

It's probably one of the reasons I took to distributed systems: in the early days of Arjuna, when C++ was chosen as the implementation language over Concurrent Euclid and others, we (mainly Graham) spent a lot of time on making C++ (opaquely) distributed (trailblazing this at the time). Obviously what we ended up with was a system where C++ objects interacted via messages! Since the work Graham did also supported multiple inheritance as well as overloading, it went much further than simply distributing an object's implementation.

Looking back at that period now, I could imagine doing something with that work to move a non-distributed C++ language varient in the direction of message passing, but that would probably have been pointless. C++ is good for what it was aimed at. But I think it, and similar languages such as Java, may not necessarily be the right basis from which to learn initially about object orientation (I still long for multiple inheritance and operator overloading in Java!) I believe that programmers should always have a broad knowledge of languages under their belts and I'm glad I came at C++ through the likes of Simula, Smalltalk, Lisp, Fortran and Forth, to name just a few. Some of them have little to say about object orientation, but I'm sure that all of them have influenced the way in which I think about and approach problems, no matter what the implementation language.

So back to IO. It may have a small following compared to the mainstream languages and it may suffer from poorer documentation than most, but if you've used Smalltalk or thought about learning it, then I'd recommend looking at IO as well. It's not perfect (which language is?) but I'm sure you'll learn something, or perhaps it'll refresh your memories about other languages as it did for me. The result may well be that you chane the way in which you think about object orientation or at least the way you use your favourite language today.

Well done Cambridge

Very well done! A bonus Christmas present. Fix the security issue(s) rather than ignore them and attempt to silence those who might call attention to them. OK, the latter might be cheaper and easier in the short term, but as a user I'd much prefer the former was the avenue explored!

And the thesis can be obtained from here.

I must be a traditionalist?

Two of my favourite movies at any time of year, but particularly at Christmas, are Scrooge with Alastair Sim (the definitive version IMO, with only Scrooged coming close) and It's a Wonderful Life. Both in black and white as they were intended originally. So what happens this year? The TV is showing colourised versions of them! No, no, no, no, no! That is wrong on so many levels! Almost as bad as "dogs and cats living together".

Now it's entirely likely that if colour film had existed when both movies were made then the directors would have chosen it and those movies would likely look and feel different to their colourised cousins. But the fact is that it wasn't and the film director's, writers etc. used the black and white medium to great effect. It's part of the atmosphere of the movies and is so ingrained in the making of them that when you watch you don't notice it's not in colour. And when you see it in colour today it's just wrong. Almost like watching a program or film based on something that was intended originally for radio. The act of moving it from one medium to another alters it, but rarely do the people involved in that alteration seem to understand that or take it into account.

Colourising films is a great example of the adage that "just because you can do something doesn't mean you should"! So if you have a choice between seeing the above two movies in colour or black and white, I recommend sticking with the original. You won't be disappointed.

A late Christmas present?

It's probably too late to expect this for Christmas, but I think a reprint of Geoffrey Hoyle's book is definitely on the cards for the new year!

End of an era

It's a bit of a sad day today. For over 10 years I've been using an HP Jornada 720 for a lot more than it was originally intended. But since I got it in 2000 it has become harder and harder to interface it with any of my desktop or laptop machines. You tend not to find machines today with IR or RS232 ports! And getting up-to-date versions of Java for it, for example, have proven difficult, to say the least!

Ultimately over the last couple of years I've been using it as a glorified address book. But as I use my smartphone more, or the built-in equivalent applications on my laptop, resorting to the Jornada became more and more of a hassle. So despite the fact that it is the machine I've used the longest over the past 30 years, I've decided to retire it and it is now resting comfortably in the loft. Maybe, just maybe, I'll resurrect it if the need arises. Until then I'll have fond memories of one of the best and most versatile machines HP ever built!

JUDCon 2011 in Boston

I've been thinking about tracks for JUDCon next year and posted a preliminary Call for Presentations earlier today. Take a look if you're at all interested in JBoss as a developer or as a user.

IO

Recently I've been reading up on IO the language, not to be confused with IO the moon of Jupiter. It's a very interesting prototype language, based on very few concepts (everything's either an object or a message, objects have slots which are either attributes or methods). It reminds me a lot of Smalltalk. But what surprises me the most is that it is such an extremely simple language and yet it's possible to do some extremely complex things with it. Although this wasn't one of my original pet projects for Christmas, I think it will be now!

I'm not sure if I'll take it further than that, but it's sufficiently different to other languages I've been playing with recently that it may well get some quality time from me as I figure out exactly what it's good for and where its limitations reside. If you're looking for something different in the language arena then take a look too. It won't take long to get to grips with the basics and you might well be pleasantly surprised by what you find.

Data on the outside (of the public Cloud) versus data on the inside (of the public Cloud)

A few years back Pat Helland wrote a nice paper about the issues of data outside and inside the services boundary and how the locale impacts traditional transaction semantics. This was around the time that there was a lot of work and publicity around extended transaction models. Pat used an analogy to relativity to drive home his point, whereas I'd been using quantum mechanics analogies. But regardless of how it is explained, the idea is that data and where it is located, is ultimately the bottleneck to scalability if total consistency is required (in a finite period of time).

So what's this got to do with Cloud? Well I've been thinking a lot about Cloud for quite a while (depending on your definition of Cloud, it could stretch back decades!) There are many problem areas that need to be worked out for the Cloud to truly succeed, including security, fault tolerance, reliability and performance. Some of these are related directly to why I believe private Clouds will be the norm for most applications.

But probably the prime reason why I think public Clouds won't continue to hog the limelight for enterprise or mission critical applications is the data issue. Processor speeds continue to increase (well, maybe not individual processor speeds, but when stuck on the same chip the result is the same), memory speeds increase, even disk speeds are increasing when you factor in the growing use of solid state. Network speeds have always lagged behind and that continues to be the case. If you don't have much data/information, or most of it is volatile and generated as part of the computation, then moving to a public cloud may make sense (assuming the problems I mentioned before are resolved). But for those users and applications that have copious amounts of data, moving it into the public cloud is going in the wrong direction: moving the computation to the data makes far more sense.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not suggesting that public clouds aren't useful and won't remain useful. It's how they are used that will change for certain types of application. Data has always been critical to businesses and individuals, whether you're the largest online advertiser trying to amass as much information as possible, or whether you're just looking to maintain your own financial data. Trusting who to share that information with is always going to be an issue because it is related directly to control: do you control your own information when you need it or do you rely on someone else to help (or get in the way)? I suspect that for the vast majority of people/companies, the answer will be that they want to retain control over their data. (Over the years that may change, in the same way that banks became more trusted versus keeping your money under the mattress; though perhaps the bank analogy and trust isn't such a good one these days!)

Therefore, I think where the data will reside will define the future of cloud and that really means private cloud. Public clouds will be useful for cloud bursting and number crunching for certain types of application, and of course there will be users who can commit entirely to the public cloud (assuming all of the above issues are resolved) because they don't have critical data stores in which they rely or because they don't have existing infrastructure that can be turned into a protected (private) cloud. So what I'm suggesting is that data on the outside of the public cloud, i.e., within the private cloud, will dominate over data on the inside of the public cloud. Of course only time will tell, but if I were a betting man ...

It's Christmas!

In the immortal words of the great Noddy Holder and Slade ... It's Christmas (or will be very soon!) I have a couple of weeks off due to not taking much vacation throughout 2010 (which is a pattern I seem to follow every year). So as is usual for any vacation (at least mine), I've written a list, checked it twice, ruled out those things that are naughty, leaving only those that are nice and come up with way more things that I can do in the time available. But hey, it's better to be over active than under!

So what's in the list? Well there's the usual smattering of work related efforts. But I've tried to make the majority of them "pet projects". Of course they'll probably have some impact on work eventually, but that's not the reason for them at this point. Top of my list is doing some refreshers on some languages I haven't had a chance to use much recently, including Ruby and Erlang. Then I've got a paper I want to write on REST and transactions with Bill and Mike (OK, so this is work related, but I do like writing papers, so it almost doesn't count). I want to do some work on JavaSim too and if there's time, get back to my STM effort.

Lots to do. Lots to look forward to. Oh and then there's Christmas too! I love this time of year.

Another CloudBees acquisition

This is *not* a CloudBees blog, but yet again I have to say congratulations to Sacha and the team for their latest announcement! Very impressive move.

Nearly two years as CTO

A cross post. A quick summary: thanks Sacha!

Cloud 2.0? Give me a break!

Over 4 years ago a group of analysts and vendors got together to try and rally around the term SOA 2.0. In an attempt to stop that in its tracks, I said a few things that maybe played a smaller part in helping to show the problems behind the term. I haven't seen or heard of SOA 2.0 much since, so maybe the community effort helped to bring a little sense to the world.

Unfortunately it seems that adding 2.0 to something is still a favourite pastime for those that either can't figure out a good name, or simply don't understand why it works for Web 2.0. With today's announcement that Salesforce have bought Heroku, it seems that we've entered the world of 'Cloud 2'! Oh come on! Let's inject some reality into this again, before it gets jumped on by other vendors or analysts that believe an increment to a term really makes a difference when the technology or architecture hasn't actually evolved.

Apparently Cloud 2 is oriented around social, mobile and real-time. So is this hard real-time, soft real-time, or some other form of real-time, given that when you're using applications in the Cloud today the response is happening in your frame of reference and within your lifetime!

I do believe that the current perception of Cloud is limited to servers and that does need to change, but that can be sorted out by having a true architectural definition of Cloud that is agreed by everyone. But there's no need to call it Cloud 2. In fact that just adds more confusion!

And social aspects of Cloud? Well I'm not a big fan of social networks; I think they're anti-social: go down the pub to see your friends, don't chat to them on IRC!

So let's get a grip on reality! Sticking 2 on the end in the hopes that it'll help will only do the opposite. And as I said for SOA 2.0, if this "social, real-time and mobile" Cloud really is different than what we're getting used to today, then coin a proper term for it, e.g., The Social Cloud.

More sad news!

I met Maurice Wilkes a few times when he came to the University to talk. So it's sad to hear that he has passed away. Definitely a pioneer and definitely a very nice man. A sad day indeed.

Busy Bees

Once again, congratulations to Sacha and team!

Android woes coming to an end!

My time as an Android user is drawing to a close. I may come back when they sort things out so that I am no longer at the mercy of the vague policies from then handset manufacturers or operators for upgrades, when in reality they really want me to buy a new phone and contact every 6 months in order to get even security upgrades.

It was fun whilst it lasted and even with the benefit of hindsight I think it was the right choice at the time. However, it has left a bad taste and Google needs to sort out the mess. Until then I'll probably move to an iPhone. And I can't really think of a better way of putting it than Douglas Adams: So Long, And Thanks for All the Fish!

Management and PaaS

Many years ago I spent a few years working for HP as a Distinguished Engineer via their acquisition of Bluestone. Now I learnt a lot through that experience and one of those things was the importance of system management software such as OpenView. In truth I already knew, having done research with HP, IBM and others over the years prior to this; but spending quality time with the team was still informative and illuminating.

Managing middleware systems is a complex task, particularly if you want to do it efficiently and without adversely impacting the system that is being monitored/managed. (Almost like Schrodinger's Cat experiment!) But for large scale, dynamic systems such as those I mentioned previously, good monitoring and management is critical. This remains true if you remove the dynamic/autonomous aspects and assume that a human system administrator will be using the information provided.

This shouldn't come as a surprise. Even your favourite operating system has enjoyed monitoring and management capabilities of various quality over the decades. The good implementations tend to remain in the background doing their job and you don't even know they are there. And of course as soon as you add in the distributed factor, the need for good monitoring and management cannot be over stated.

But of course you can do without; it's just that you may then have to put up with sub-par performance or efficiency as you need to manually cope with failures, changes in network or machine characteristics, etc. Worse still, issues may go unnoticed until far too late, e.g., the lack of orphan detection can lead to multiple competing services corrupting data or conflicting with one another.

So why am I mentioning this? Is it because it's not obvious, or that I'm running out of interesting things to discuss? Not quite! It should be clear that management/monitoring software is important for middleware solutions (and others). Depending upon what you consider to be monitoring and management, it may be a core component of middleware, or a component in middleware (e.g., the previous example on orphan detection and elimination.) But if you're looking at a separate monitoring/management component or infrastructure, then you wouldn't consider that to be your development platform for arbitrary applications, right? You wouldn't, for instance, consider such a software system to be a replacement for your middleware platform, e.g., for CORBA or Java EE.

Over the years I've never heard anyone suggest such a thing, so this isn't something I've even considered people would think. However, recently this has come up in several conversations I've had. And yes, it's in the area of Cloud and specifically PaaS. The statements have been made that PaaS is the monitoring/management, or is all about the monitoring/management. Why would that be any more sensible a statement or position to take in the Cloud world if it wasn't sensible prior to Cloud? I really don't know. It doesn't make sense any more than ...

"Why would a Wookiee, an eight-foot tall Wookiee, want to live on Endor, with a bunch of two-foot tall Ewoks? That does not make sense! But more important, you have to ask yourself: What does this have to do with this case? Nothing. Ladies and gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case! It does not make sense! Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company, and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca! Does that make sense? Ladies and gentlemen, I am not making any sense! None of this makes sense! And so you have to remember, when you're in that jury room deliberatin' and conjugatin' the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No! Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, it does not make sense! If Chewbacca lives on Endor, you must acquit! The defense rests."

With PaaS we're talking about a Platform (the first letter in the acronym kind of gives it away). Now unless you're only developing applications, services or components for your favourite monitoring/management infrastructure, you'll probably consider your platform to be something else entirely, e.g., Java Enterprise Edition with all of its capabilities such as transactions, EJB3, POJOs, messaging, persistence etc. This (as an example) would be your definition of your platform. Very few people would consider OpenView (or whatever they're calling it these days) as their platform. So although something like OpenView, or even JON, are important to any platform, I certainly wouldn't consider them to be the platform.

Or maybe I'm missing something?!

REST + transactions paper

We've been working on REST+transactions for a long time now, with a number of iterations and implementations spanning over a decade. After various discussions over the past few months I'm hoping that a few new organizations (academic and industrial) will be coming forward in the near future to help contribute to this work. However, I think it's time we wrote a paper on this and got it published. We've got enough material and experience to target a range of conferences and workshops. Plus I haven't written a paper in a while: I'm starting to feel rusty!