Bob Bickel blog found

Bob Bickel is one of the nicest persons I know. He's also quietly had a huge impact on the software industry, first pioneering the web application server market and later turning the JBoss project into a successful business (and flipped to Red Hat), pioneering the current trend in "professional open source." I thoroughly enjoyed working for him back at Bluestone and HP. Despite a mild demeanor, he drove his team extremely aggressively. I'm not sure I showed proper respect for what I learned from him at the time, but it shaped who I am today.


Cool to find he has a new blog. Looking forward to reading it on a regular basis.

Tuscany Multiplies

Appears that the open source SCA implementations are subdividing.
In many cases, the value of these projects are in the experiments and learning experiences that fall out of the development effort. I'm looking forward to seeing where the different teams take the various branches.

SCA PPT

Just a quick update for those who asked: Philly JUG SCA presentation can be found
here.

Philly JUG SCA Presentation

First of all, thanks to Dave Fecak and the Philly JUG for having me over. It was great to meet everyone and we had some really good follow-up discussions. I'm definitely planning to make it over for some future meetings: next one features Cameron Purdy from Tangosol (soon Oracle!).

I promised I'd post the presentation slides here. Turns out Blogger only allows image uploads. The good news: Dave is loading the ppt on the JUG site. As soon as that is up, I'll post a link back to it from here as well.

In the meantime, feel free to post follow up questions as comments here or send me an email at greg.pavlik@oracle.com. I'm on the west coast now, so bear with me if you don't hear from me right away.

SCA goes to OASIS

Big news, the OSOA alliance has contributed the SCA and SDO specifications to OASIS. Dana Gardner has an interesting take on this: it will do for SOA what J2EE did for application servers. I'll be talking about SCA on the east coast next Tuesday at the Philly JUG and in more depth in Europe at the Systems Integration Conference.

Nex-Gen Application Platform

A brief interview with Thomas Kurian on the important trends that are likely to impact Java developers.

Philly Java User Group talk on SCA

If you are in the greater Philadelphia area, I'll be giving a talk on the Service Component Architecture, SOAs and Java programming at the Philadelphia Java User's Group on March 27.

Oracle Transaction Manager integration with Spring

Many moons ago (2004, which now seems like forever), I was somewhat circumspect about the transaction APIs in Spring. Not so much that I thought the model was bad: it seemed like a nice improvement over EJB. But my concern was that since JTA was usually hidden in the bowels of application servers, there may be equally hidden assumptions that the "container" logic needed to be aware of, especially for managing errors.

Whether I was right or wrong (at the time Juergen, I think, disagreed sharply), the fact is that the major application server vendors have made sure this use case works as coded. In fact, Oracle has also provided an adaptive layer to make working with transactions in Spring even more straightforward for OC4J users. This support will be packaged in the Spring core, I'm glad to say.

We're thinking of doing an update to Java Transaction Processing: not only do I want to add a correction on this topic, I very much want to do a chapter on the Spring framework as an alternative to EJB and to provide thorough coverage of the additional transaction control semantics that Spring introduces.

Rome

The only television program I watch is HBO's Rome. It is far from perfect (and has some gross inaccuracies): the worst aspect is HBO's insistence on proving how far they can push the limits of taste. Having said that, it is immensely enjoyable. Set in pre-Christian Rome, the series starts with the rise of Gaius Julias Ceasar and is currently looking at the early career of
Gaius Octavius (Octavian or Ceasar Augustus, as you like). The first season performance of Ciaran Hinds was absolutely masterful. I have seen Hinds mostly recently as an assassin in Munich, but I believe he took his craft to a new level in Rome. In fact many of the actors in the first season cast, including Tobias Menzies, James Purefoy, Kevin McKidd, Lindsay Duncan, and Max Pirkis, provide standout performances.

The series also deals with religion as a facet of culture. It is at first shocking then sobering to see the sincerity the Romans paid to the religions that we now call myths. After watching a recent episode which features the rise of (I believe) a Zealot group, I wound up revisiting Norman Cohn's fascinating book on ancient religions. If the series prompts people to actually study the ancient world in a thoughtful way, its overt shortcomings certainly deserve to be overlooked.

Food blog

I guess my biggest weakness in life is food. I put together a blog to track restaurant and dining experiences as a reference for myself and for others in the area where I live. It's a bit rudimentary at the moment, but once I'm done with school, I hope to develop it into something a bit more. If you are visiting the Philadelphia area, you may find it to be a useful reference, at least over time.

Written Languages

You may find the site omniglot interesting, as it has an overview of many written languages. My wife is part Cherokee, but I did not know there was a syllabary for the language.

Jean Ichbiah passes

The creator of Ada passed recently. I never met Jean but I did program in Ada 83 for a while, back when I worked on spacecraft simulation environments. I always thought Ada was clever and useful. I assume it failed due to poor compilers and paid the price for being a higher level than C when hardware was (by comparison to today) slow.

Thoughts and Prayers

Our thoughts and prayers are with Jim Gray's family right now.

Oracle SOA Suite Reviewed

Infoworld reviews the Oracle SOA suite. This product just keeps getting better and better....

Agile Atheism Redirect

An interesting perspective on the Agile programming community from my old colleague Jim Webber. I spent several years experimenting with agile techniques (some details captured here) ultimately coming to somewhat aligned conclusions. I have the outline of a post on this same topic together, just need to find some time to actually write it up...

Japanese Melodies

I am not an expert on traditional Japanese music, so I have no authority to critique Yo Yo Ma's rendition on the album Japanese Melodies. I can say, however, that this is a beautiful, simple and sometimes quite sad recording. I find Japanese music often makes me think of it as a re-interpretation of the beauty found in nature, while I think of western classical music as having more of a man-made splendor. This album is not really a merger of the two; it strikes me as being more squarely Japanese. However you classify it, Japanese Melodies is worth adding to a music collection.

Web Services Policy

This paper was written to capture ongoing discussions about how to put structure around ws-policy and make it more generally useable. It was delivered at ICSOC2006, but I forgot to post a link back in December. Feel free to email me thoughts.

Oracle SOA Platform and Amazon EC2

An interesting article on pairing EC2 and Oracle's SOA Suite. I thought this was pretty cool. After plowing through a year's worth of program committee reviews for various Web services and SOA conference tracks, I've come to realize that Oracle's SOA platform really is the industry standard for service orchestration.

iPhone

I held off on picking up a new phone to see what Apple would announce. Indeed a slick product. The suggestion that Apple is all about style over substance is wrong: the key to the success of the product line is useability. The Apple line is just better to use, almost to a product, than competitors. True to form, prices will be very high and its not clear that the useability features in the iPhone are sufficient to differentiate it from other cheaper products in a crowded market -- though it may be premature to call it an "iFlop" as some have suggested. In the short run, I'm picking up a Blackjack from Cingular: this will likely lock me out of an upgrade to the iPhone at a reasonable cost, another factor Apple will need to contend with.

The interesting question is whether this signals the end of the iPod-as-standalone music-player as a viable product. Only time will tell. From a consumer perspective, this should put a good deal of pressure on other device manufacturers to work on useability issues, which will be a welcome change.

Swiss Time

I just got back from a holiday in Switzerland. We spent 3 days in Geneva, a city that is nothing if not Calvinist. The old town is lovely and our time there was thoroughly pleasant. Geneva has rapidly moved toward the top of my "favorite cities of the world" list, doing battle with Stockholm, Sweden and Portland, Oregon. We spent 5 days in the alpine town of Saas-Fee at a family owned chalet, where we we received exceptional treatment. The ski conditions were a bit icy, but we were fortunate in that Saas-Fee was one of the few ski areas that actually had snow. Saas-Fee is charming and very much oriented toward families.