The Hampton Hornpipe

Sea Grass near Shelter Island

SOA Summer School and Vendor SOA training

Firstly, I'm very happy to announce the WSO2 SOA Summer School. Basically, we are offering a set of free SOA online training courses throughout the summer. Aimed particularly at helping people who are affected by the downturn, these classes cover a wide range of subjects from Enterprise SOA patterns through scalability and security.

Picking up on this, JP Morgenthal has written a blog entry "Is Vendor Based SOA Training a Good Idea"? Its an excellent blog entry from JP and as usual he thinks things through pretty deeply. And he has some very good points. I agree that vendor based SOA training has been an issue. I've written on the negative impact that the large ESB vendors have had on the SOA landscape before.

That said, I know that people will get value from our Summer School. Our approach is simple: we know that there will undoubtedly be some WSO2 product bias in these courses: the technical examples will be based on our and Apache's Open Source code and frameworks, and of course our thinking and approach affects the way we build those products too. But please be clear - these courses are NOT product pitches. We are talking about basic principles, approaches and architecture that span across products. And of course we get a huge amount of input from the Open Source community that integrates into our thinking and feeds into these classes.

My advice: if you think these classes will be useful, attend, make up your own mind and don't be afraid to challenge us as well.

CA and WSO2

I guess maybe its time to start tweeting when a blog entry is simply a link to another tweet. R Ray Wang from Forrester seems to have noticed that CA are using WSO2 Carbon to underpin their middleware and integration strategy.

Politics vs Innovation

An excellent article about how internal politics in large companies stifle innovations getting to market. A lesson that still hasn't been learnt 40 years on!

Working Boats

On Friday, I spent the day helping out on a historic narrowboat. BCN 108 is a butty built in 1883, that is being used to carry aggregate (sharp sand and gravel) from the quarry to the asphalt/concrete works 4 miles downstream in Uxbridge. A butty is a traditional boat without an engine that was pulled behind a tug. Here is BCN 108 moored up at Uxbridge waiting for the loading to begin.

BCN 108 moored up

I arrived at about 7:20am just in time to find the fire lit and the kettle on. Peter, who owns BCN 108, had spent the night aboard. He and Richard take 55 tons of aggregate down every Friday. Richard also takes around 60 tons of aggregate down on Thursdays in his boat Arundel. On Fridays Arundel pulls BCN 108.

Kettle's on

You may be wondering why a 100 year old boat is being used for the supply chain of a modern asphalt factory? Well, as well as the two traditional boats, there are two modern boats. The boats are significantly greener than sending the cargo by road. Unfortunately the modern boats weren't designed quite right. They were specified to take 100 tons each, but they didn't take the canal quite into consideration, and when filled with 100 tons, they simply sit on the bottom! So they take 70 tons a run, and the traditional boats take the extra load.

Richard loading 30 tons of sharp sand into Arundel

When I was a teenager, I used to take holidays on traditional narrowboats, and the opportunity to see one in action doing something useful was irresistable. The main work is the loading and unloading, interspersed by a very relaxed trip down the river. I was sent on ahead to set the two locks (get them ready). Here we are going through Cowley Lock.

Arundel and BCN 108 in Cowley Lock

The unloading is the real hard work. The main part is done by a JCB, but in between Peter and I got into the hold and dug the sand out of the corners!

Unloading the sand at the Hanson plant

I entertained Peter with a couple of tunes on the whistle. Since it was St. Georges Day yesterday, I mainly played English tunes - the Morpeth Rant, Not for Joe and Barham Down.

Peter about to take the boats through Uxbridge Lock

It was an enjoyable day - the weather was perfect too - and it was interesting to wonder if the green revolution might bring back some more use of Britain's canals - typically freight on a narrowboat uses 1/5 of the diesel of the same freight on the roads.

Why the Internet is Anglican

Today is St. Georges Day, the patron saint of England, and I think its an interesting day to reflect on why the Internet is Anglican. For those of you who don't know what I mean by Anglican, its the term that refers to the many churches around the world that inherit their approach from the Church of England.

Before I explain what on earth I'm talking about, I'd like to explain what brought this to mind. I was reading Joe Gregorio's blog entry "The Atom Publishing Protocol is a failure". To summarize, AtomPub "hasn't seen the level of adoption" that Joe "had hoped to see at this point in its life."

I think this is probably common to every protocol inventor, except maybe Tim Berners-Lee, Jon Postel, and a couple of others. After all, how many protocols could be the main protocol used for everything on the Internet:

• BEEP. Well this has gone very quiet, but this used to be considered a contender.
  
• SIP. A while ago, everything was going to work on SIP - IM, Voice, Video, SOAP/SIP, the works. SIP is actually a very nice protocol for bootstrapping peer-to-peer comms.
• SOAP. Nuff said.
• AMQP. Designed to be the main protocol for everything businessy.
• XMPP. With enough extensions you can do anything.
  
• and of course: HTTP. Of course this is the protocol on which everything works. But it hasn't got complete domination yet!

Now let's go back to my analogy of churches. Most churches have a single approach, almost like a single protocol. If you go into a Catholic church in one country, its very similar to a Catholic church in another. The Anglican church is pretty unusual in that it varies massively. In some Anglican churches you can find a Tridentine Mass. This is the old Catholic service from the middle ages which until recently wasn't allowed in most Catholic churches! In other Anglican churches you will find the opposite end of the spectrum with very Protestant forms of worship.

Maybe its in the English character to have a wider, more open view - it might explain why we have a Turkish/Roman soldier (St. George) as our national Saint!

Back to AtomPub. Joe says:

"There are still plenty of new protocols being developed on a seemingly daily basis, many of which could have used AtomPub, but don't."

In my view, Joe is expecting too much. I think AtomPub is a fantastic protocol, and I see it succeeding. But I start off from a basis that any protocol that gets even a small market share of the Internet is a success. No protocol is ever going to take over the Internet, and there will always be plenty of different approaches to do the same thing. That is simply the nature of the Internet.