Holiday update

I don't post a huge amount of non-SOA, non-work related things on here, but I've just spent a couple of weeks on vacation and I thought I'd post a vacation blog.

We went to Valentia Island. Its not in Spain (Valencia) but its one of the westernmost parts of Europe, hanging off the edge of Ireland into the Atlantic. It is an amazing place, hence the reason we have been to that part of Ireland for 15 summer holidays. A warning - if you do plan to go there, don't be put off by rain. Valentia is the site of one of the earliest main metereological stations, and continues to contribute metereological data. You can see the average rainfall but according to the papers, this year was on course to have the wettest August on record. Despite this, and despite using factor 30 suncream every day, I have a tan - just from being outside so much.

The first Sunday we arrived we heard there were dolphins in the harbour, which is very rare. Unfortunately we were already late for church and couldn't stop, but a few hours later my wife was looking out the bedroom window and suddenly shouted "Dolphins" and we could clearly see them, about 75m away, a pod of three, arching out of the water as they played around in the sea in front of us.

We surfed a lot. I mean a lot. About two hours a day with only two days off. I just bought a new 8'2 board before we left as its very expensive to rent boards out there. The surfing was great - its very reliable and there are two good spots: St Finian's Bay and Reen Row. St Finian's Bay is simply stunning - facing out over the Atlantic towards the Skellig Islands. Here is a picture of me catching a wave at St. Finian's Bay (apologies for the poor surf style!):
(Thanks to Lauren Martin for the picture).

St. Finian's has a race or rip that runs along the right hand side of the bay. The advanced surfers use it to get out to the best spots to surf, while beginners best stay clear (or need rescuing). So Reen Row is really handy because its much wider and safer than St Finian's, and the waves are much smaller, so if its 6-10ft at St Finian's, then you can expect maybe 3-5ft at Reen Row, which is a lot more acceptable if you have a bunch of kids and beginners all in the water! Here is a picture with my friend Dave and me both catching a wave, with my daughter Anna body-boarding in and Sam (Dave's son) heading out to catch another one. Thanks again to Lauren for the picture.

Anna also learnt to stand up on a board really well this holiday - its a little galling to see how easy she makes it look:

Here is me praying for a good wave!

Apart from surfing what did we do? Well, we caught and found crabs, prawns, razor shells, oysters and mussels - and ate them. Well actually we didn't eat any crabs we found as they were a bit small, but we ate the rest. I went to some cracking seisiúns. The 16th August was the 150th anniversary of the first transatlantic cable coming across to Valentia and there were a bunch of activities and celebrations, including the launch of a new stamp.

Anyway, there was a trad music session in the pub afterwards, where I met Donal Murphy of Sliabh Notes and Four Men and a Dog, together with Melanie his daughter, and Ian (a great whistler from Valentia) and his family. We had a great time playing some good Sliabh Luacra tunes plus others.

Here is a photo of me at a session in the Fertha, Cahersiveen, along with Jane, Dennis, Eddie and Mary.

Finally, I guess the holiday wouldn't have been half the fun without our friends the Martin's who we first met in Valentia and got us into surfing and body-boarding. Amy and Dave are an amazing couple, along with their sons Sam and Esmond, and we also got to spend lots of time with Paul (Dave's brother) and his three daughters, Lauren, Audrey and Christine.

Thanks everyone, and hope to see you next year.

AMQP beyond the firewall

In response to my blog on AMQP and interop, Guy Crets comments that until we have a broker-to-broker specification, AMQP is effectively of no further interest than any other MOM.

Matthew then responded that this is in the AMQP Working Group's sights.

While I agree a broker-to-broker definition is important, it is not necessary. AMQP has a simple model, which is "client" to "broker". But this is a common model for Internet communications. After all, er, HTTP has the same model. And somehow this doesn't seem to have harmed its adoption on the Internet.

So that doesn't worry me. I agree there is something missing from AMQP for real widespread Internet adoption and that is a global addressing scheme. Without that, its very hard to build true Internet wide messaging. Take the e-mail analogy. You don't really need to have a spec of how email servers talk to each other - effectively one server acts as a client to the other using the same protocol that a mail client uses to send mail. But what you really need is a single global email address schema. Of course global addressing is on our todo list too.

Despite this, I think Guy is wrong that AMQP is no better than an existing MOM. Because even within the enterprise firewall, interop is important, and that is what AMQP is aiming for. Guy believes that "this is not a problem within a single organization", but for many organizations it is a huge problem: many companies are locked in to a single vendor for MOM and cannot innovate or change vendors, and the companies that have more than one MOM struggle to bridge them.

AMQP isn't perfect and it isn't complete yet, but the goals are important and as long as we keep making progress it will become an important addition to the Internet protocols.

Stock Ticker for Search

Google have launched a stock ticker for search. Think of it as a indicator of interest. They normalize the numbers, so you can't see the details, but it still shows a lot of information. Here is the graph for WSO2 (click to see the Google page):As you can see, we got a lot of interest when we first launched, a big spike when we launched Tungsten/WSAS, and a steady growth since 2007 when our other products came on stream, with steady growth.

Although I'm sure our search is a fraction of that for major companies, its still quite pleasing to compare our graph to that of IBM's:

Why interop?

This excellent article - "Can AMQP break IBM's MOM Monopoly?" - explains in clear terms the difference between API standardization (JMS) and wire-level interop standardization (AMQP).

This is a distinction that lies at the heart of WSO2. We founded the company on the premise that wire-level interop was a bigger game changer than API compatibility. I think the REST crowd would have to agree .

Five years ago, J2EE was still seen as "the answer" by the enterprise vendors. But even then, most Java programmers weren't J2EE programmers, and most programmers weren't Java programmers. And since then we have seen Spring and dependency-injection challenge the core concept of enterprise APIs, and Ruby, PHP, Python, F#, Scala, Erlang challenge Java. The only points of agreement are web-protocols - HTTP/REST, SMTP/email, XMPP and SOAP/WS-*. I hope we can soon add AMQP to the list as a high-performance reliable protocol.