Icons

I wanted to make a small note on the passing of several icons of culture. First, Ed Bradley, who always distinguished himself as a gentleman throughout his life as a reporter. The passing of Bradley and earlier of Peter Jennings seems to mark the end of the era of broadcast television and of more civil and urbane news reporting. I'll miss both the figureheads and the genre as it was. Bradley also hosted an NPR program Jazz at Lincoln Center, worth checking out if the archives are available online.

Second, Milton Friedman died at 94 this past week. There are few economists that can lay claim to the level of influence and intellectual energy of Milton Friedman. In this century, the other great influencer was John Maynard Keynes. Friedman may not have been right about everything, but he managed to direct the course of history in his lifetime.

On a slightly less somber note, I had a chance Saturday night to see the newest James Bond film, Casino Royale. In the US, at least, Bond reruns seem always to have been on television, with the Connery and Moore eras dominant. The old James Bond has been killed off. Casino Royale is a complete re-invention of the character, carried off well by Daniel Craig. The new Bond is darker, more reckless and the film itself has a more developed realism. The Craig Bond is aggressively targeted at a female audience with a perhaps ironically dulled carnal appetite. The film is the best in years, perhaps ever, with the primary drawback being the relentless brand advertising.

Open Source Java

Sun announced that the core Java platforms will be made available under GPL. In general, I think this is a useful turn, but at this point I wonder how many people really have a keen desire to hack Java platform code. The main benefit is likely to be in areas like performance and memory management, where ISVs have a vested interest in tuning the platform.

It's strange to see how GPL has moved from being the license of open source purists to a preferred vendor license.

Blue Moon

Once in a great while, something utterly simple comes along that changes the way you work and do business. I'm wondering if Zotero may be a such a thing on a massive scale?

SOA Suite Release

The latest release of Oracle's SOA suite is available with ESB functionality, policy management and governance, and process management tools and engine. Check it out. Note the article is from an Indian software development site: Indian IT news coverage is getting really strong!

Unbreakable Linux

There's a flood of commentary coming out on Oracle's move to offer Linux support, most of it speculative. I prefer the simple explanation: its good business to give customers what they want at an attractive price... One thing for sure, this is going to be a major, major shot in the arm for Linux.

SOA at Oracle Open World

Open World is this week and it is truely huge this year. To keep up with the latest and greatest on middleware, you should check out Thomas Kurian's keynote tomorrow. For a high level overview of where we see things moving forward in the SOA space, there are a series of customer-oriented white papers worth checking out.

The Road Less Taken

After years of labor, OSGI has started to gain critical mass. In fact, OSGI is popping up all over the place: Eclipse, Spring, SCA discussions, etc. It seems like almost everyone is interested in leveraging OSGI. I won't go in to the details of OSGI, except to say that there are some genuinely useful things that can be done with OSGI for building product software: some of the most interesting capabilities have to do with dynamic loading and unloading. Sun has spearheaded an alternative model in JSR, 277. It is interesting to look at the reaction of the OSGI community to 277. Will this be the dividing line that marked the transition to a new generation of middleware technology?

Kid Safe Internet

There's been a rash of local stories of kids stumbling on inappropriate content on the Internet over the last few months, so I decided to pick up some filtering software. The package I chose was BumperCar 2 for the Mac. As far as I can tell, BumperCar is essentially a customization of Safari.

The software provides the standard white list/black list facilities. The white lists are useful for young kids and the black lists are useful in a way I hadn't thought of initially: you can filter out specific domains associated with an otherwise useful site. For example, BumperCar blacklists Google images by default. Google searches are automatically kid safe on BumperCar, which is imperfect but useful. Lastly, BumperCar will filter on both the content coming in and going out. Incoming content appears to be checked before rendering, which is a nice way to catch things that might slip through.

I've only looked at the filters briefly, but they appear to check for sexual content and violence. In this day and age, it would probably be best to check for extremist material of all sorts as well.

First, impressions: a good product.

Oracle JPA and Spring

I've found the Spring framework to be a very useful addition to the J2EE platform. I've been working with early releases of Spring 2.0 over the last year and its a genuine point release for sure. I've long been a fan on the TopLink toolkit (long before coming to Oracle, I might add), so it is even cooler to see that the core of TopLink and Spring will be packaged together. A new standard for Java development?

Human, All Too Human

I spent last weekend in Paris. Only on my return did I realize this was my first time in France as a tourist, rather than a business visitor. My wife and I had the opportunity to spend some sustained time in the Louvre, which is a wonderful repository of human achievement.

I stopped halfway through the Greek sculptures to ask myself how much we've improved as a species in the last several thousand years. Clearly, we've seen advancements in mathematics, including the algebra and the (recent) development of the fundamental theorem of calculus. As a result we've seen significant advances in sciences, especially in conjunction with the adoption of inductive reasoning. Along similar lines, we've seen progress in medicine, which has extended our lifespan and often (though not always) our quality of life.

In contrast to the ancient world, we've virtually eliminated human slavery, which seems to me to be our most important social advance, since it implies at least the idea of basic and universal human dignity. At the same time, we keep finding reasons to kill each other en masse, as the horrors of the twentieth century remind us. Those retrograde instincts of hate, dogmatism, and fanaticism to which we all may be susceptible to some degree threaten to pull us back to barbarism and to make our scientific advances tools of evil.

In some ways, a uniform measure of progress may be an impossible thing to measure, but it is clear that there is a basic human drive toward humanism, greatness and beauty. The
Louvre is a fine place to rediscover that fact.

Travesty

I've lived within proximity of Amish communities most of my life, more specifically near the community in Pennsylvania that just suffered a tremendous loss. These people live a meaningful and peaceful life. I cannot imagine in my worst nightmares what would motivate someone to try to harm their children. My heart goes out to them.

WWW2007: Call for Papers

I'm a big fan of the www* conferences, which bring together folks from almost every middleware company, the large ecommerce companies like Google and Amazon, and end users every year. I've participated in the conference as a presenter or program committee member for several years running and I'm pleased to be on the Web services track program committee again this year. If you have some good ideas, interesting experiences or novel research, you should consider submitting a paper.

Oh, and the setting for this years conference is Banff.

********************************************************************
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, USA
* Alan Fekete, University of Sydney, Australia
* Jinpeng Huai, Beihang University, China
* Hiro Kishimoto, Fujitsu, Japan
* Frank Leymann, University of Stuttgart, Germany
* Mark Little, Jboss, 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

Engineering at its best

I have a more than passing interest in mechanical watches. Part of it has to do with a fascination with time itself, but the main motivator is a deep appreciation for the engineering involved with the design of a high quality movement. The essential elements of watch design include economy of space, efficiency of operation and constraints on implementation techniques -- all factors that software engineers should be forced to take into account. Unfortunately this is often not the case, as software developers are able to get away with things that would cause immediate break down in mechanical systems. And even incremental improvements in the practice are fraught with serious regression. Lately, I've thought about what has been most interesting in software development practices in the last 10 years in a very critical light: XP provided several advances in terms of what we know from job enrichment theory and process control in operations management, but also insists on using craftsmanship as the driving metaphor to explain away the need to industrialize the practice -- all the while, industrialization continues to occur as, for example, IDEs are normalized. If only the patterns folks had not fixated on building architects...

In any case, here's a fascinating, detailed look at a movement from a true Manufacture. An interesting thought experiment: If you are a software person, do you think you would be able to provide a reliable movement design? If so, why? If not, why not?

History of Beauty

I had the opportunity this Sunday to read most (not quite all) of Umberto Eco's History of Beauty. It's a survey of the kind of the things that, according to Eco, men admire but do not need to possess. Here was a fascinating opportunity to look at how time, history, ideas and culture define standards and perception. The book is not so ambitious, or at least not so good. In practice, the book is a survey of art and its relationship to social philosophy in the West. Far too much time is spent on some subjects (eg, 19th century decadents, though much of the youth culture of today seems to be a shallow echo of the aesthetes). The book partially disappoints for focusing exclusively on the West, though a world survey would require many volumes. The 20th century treatment is abysmal, which is quite puzzling given Eco's fascinating novel with graphics, the Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.

As a survey, the book is readable and probably worth taking the time to page through. I found it stilted at times and thin in many places, with echoes of important insights here and there. The book's graphics are often stunning and it's probably worth the price for the painting prints. I can imagine the text being used as a companion to a series of university-level lectures, which may have been the author's intent. The US release, however, is marketed as a stand-alone work of art critcitism. Overall, I fear this book will be quickly relegated to the coffee table by most readers (at least those without young children).

ICSOC 2006 Workshop: CFP

This year I am a PC member for ICSOC 2006. Last year I presented at the workshop in the Netherlands with Jon Maron on SOA application design; this year, I'm doing the program committee (and for the main conference, if I remember all if this correctly!). The first call for papers follows...

-------------------------------------------------------------------


C A L L F O R P A P E R S

2nd INT. WORKSHOP ON ENGINEERING SERVICE ORIENTED APPLICATIONS:
DESIGN AND COMPOSITION (WESOA'06)


In conjunction with the 4th Int. Conference on Service Oriented
Computing (ICSOC 2006) http://www.icsoc.org
Chicago, USA, December 4th, 2006

WESOA Workshop Website

http://fresco-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/wesoa06/

Abstract Submission Due: September 8th, 2006

Big SCA Update

The SCA working groups have been hard at work updating a baseline set of specifications for SOAs. Today, the official Open SOA web site has been launched. I encourage you to visit it and provide feedback.

A few points to note:

1) It's great to see that a bunch of new partners have joined the effort, including RedHat (I keep running into this Mark Little guy), Sun Microsystems, Tibco, Progress/Sonic, CapeClear, Software AG and others. This represents a real consolidation of the integration space around SCA as the standard basis for describing SOA components and their interactions.

2) The focus has really moved firmly to SOA as the design center. There has been significant attention paid to BPEL and managed policies. To my way of thinking, BPEL support is a key bellwether for credibility in the SOA space, since most organizations are moving in this direction to leverage service functionality in more sophisticated business processes. Second, managed policies are a key part of a global strategy for SOAs, so this is an important step in improving customer comfort in the Web services management space.

3) The updated Assembly spec is simpler and that translates to "simply better".

4) Oracle's SOA Suite will leverage SCA as the basic description unit of the integration technologies in Fusion middleware, as Thomas Kurian pointed out at JavaOne this year. With the momentum that our applications and middleware businesses are gathering, this is going to be a fantastic showcase of what we're doing. I've had a lot of fun working on the service fabric. It's also built using Spring, which has been a blast to use. More on that subject....

5) Last, and from a Java programmers perspective, some very interesting news: there is now a Spring integration that allows Spring-based applications to tie in directly to an SCA-based SOA environment. As Spring becomes a de facto standard in many organizations for building J2EE applications, we're opening the door to transparent SCA-based integration for these investments. Plus now there's a practical open source story for Java developers to get on board with SCA without worrying about new learning curves or lots of new constructs. With Spring, it can be just POJOs: turtles all the way down. I had a lot of folks ask me directly about Java programming and SCA. Spring is a great answer.

So why is this important? At least two reasons.

1) It means that customers can expect to see some structure and standardization around how SOA components are built. For example, SCA will describe the packaging and metadata around a BPEL process, which will move beyond process standardization to deployment standardization. It also means that there will be a normal model for understanding services and their interactions. The same metadata can describe relationships between BPEL process and ESB functionality, for example.

2) This will start to cut down on proprietary aspects of SOA infrastructure that have lead to interoperability nightmares. For example, the use and definition of Web services policies will be more clearly constrained. With WS-Policy, we have grammar, but with SCA, we'll have real usage models that vendors can work together to define across product sets.

Good stuff.

Java Development on the MacBook

Many of the top Java developers I know are running on a Mac laptop, self-financed.

Wake Up Call

Brazil will soon be running transportation on a biofuel basis. A single act of will by a bold American president could change our destiny.

Trouble with Aspects

There's an interesting article worth reading arguing that transparency around caching is problematic. This was recently posted by Manik Surtani who is the lead for JBoss clustering. The interesting thing is that not too long ago, JBoss was trumpeting "transparent middleware" based on AOP as the wave of the future. With caching, you are of course stuck with a number of semantic implications that the developer needs to be aware of. But the situation is much worse for something like transactions where the semantics should be unambiguous and touch deeply on the application logic itself. Transactions and the question of transparency was very much at issue at one point as well. I guess a little experience went a long way since then. I hope.

The Middle

The nobel prize winning chemist Roald Hoffmann wrote an illuminating essay on moderation, which he delivered this morning on NPR. You can follow the link to read it, but its even better if you listen to it being read by Hoffmann.

There's something about ideology -- any ideology -- that can take people teleologically to extremes. It seems to me that is primarily because ideology rests on abstraction and theory, which can deviate sharply from reality. Moreover, ideology tells us exactly how things should be, or rather, must be, for the true believer. We know that humans are rationalizing animals, so sometimes ideology can be an excuse for releasing our basest instincts. But often it just blinds people to the world around them and leads them to a path of callous and cruel behaviors.

We just don't live in a world of simple absolutes, or at least there are very few. Anything that focuses on a perfect world is a problem: whether that be a perfect past that conservatives fantasize existed or a perfect future that progressives believe they can create for us. Don't get me wrong: we can and should strive for improvements in our world, but -- and this is the crucial point -- not at the expense of the human reality around us. And that, to me, sounds a lot like the middle too.