Aehso’s Output

Sun GPL Java.

Sun’s GPL’ing of Java SE, Java ME and Glassfish is definitely interesting - Tim Bray has some interesting commentary from the inside, no doubt slightly sanitized! Kudos to Sun for going GPL, thereby enabling it to be shipped with the GNU/Linux distributions. I am sure there are those in the OSS community who will remain suspicious.

Plenty of other questions yet to be answered, the governance model of the new OSS projects will be critical - it’ll be interesting to see that is set up (Eclipse.org style perhaps?). Interesting to note that Sun are retaining the TCK code (to retain control of Java brand compliance) and they are not changing the JCP. The latter decision is very interesting as if the specification process is still tightly controlled by Sun then that leaves limited latitude for the implementation project to go in other directions.

Once the dust settles, Java ISVs around the globe should be ready to re-validate their software platforms and distributions. Questions now exist about the viability of some GPL-licensed J2SE, ME and EE projects and their future viability. It is bound to impact Apache Harmony , a project largely driven by IBM (who predictably have reacted by suggesting that Sun should contribute their Java technologies to Apache.org - haha). And no doubt this will make GlassFish more competitive with JBoss. I’m sure this also impacts the ME space - interesting to note that the GPL nature of the license means any derivatives for other embedded platforms also have to be GPL’ed.

Interesting times…

On Net Neutrality

Tim Berners-Lee weighs in on the net neutrality issue with a beautiful opening line:

When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission.

Well worth a read.

Although the current debate is centered on what is happening in the US remember most of the valuable content on the internet flows from the US and those US telcos have to interconnect at some point with international telcos…

ComReg forces Eircom to calculate wholesale bitstream rates from their retial product prices.

ComReg have determined a formula for the price that Eircom charge other licensed operators (like UTVinternet, BT) for their wholesale bistream product - the formula links the wholesale price to Eircom’s retail broadband product prices. The intent is to stop Eircom from reducing the cost and increasing the speed of their retail broadband offerings while maintaining a static price for their wholesale bitstream product, thereby undercutting their customers/rivals based on cost/performance.

A couple of comments:

• Where is this magic formula? Is it a secret? The one page ComReg press release gives no specifics.
• Eircom are apparently happy with this regulation. Eircom are never happy with ComReg or any regulation - they obviously see a hole in it somewhere.
• It does nothing to address the exorbitant wholesale line rental charge Eircom continue to charge.
• Was it a co-incidence that Eircom announced a pending speed bump to up to 5Mb downstream/512Kb upstream (and murmurs of future ADSL2+ trials) in the same week that ComReg release this report?

Irish Broadband to roll out WiMAX networks for Intel.

This is an interesting development. Irish broadband (in cahoots with Intel) are going to roll out WiMAX networks in Athlone, Arklow, Carlow, Cork, Dublin, Ennis, Galway, Kilkenny, Killaloe, Letterkenny, Limerick, Newbridge, Portlaoise and Wexford.

Experience with some Principles for Building an Internet-Scale Reliable System

For distributed system engineers only, three Akamai engineers have submitted a very interesting paper to the World ‘05 Second Workshop on Real, Large Distributed Systems. You don’t have to be building a large distributed system for many of the principles they employ to apply though - their approach addresses a couple (but not all) of the Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing. They do employ some very simple but effective tricks to increase availability - reducing the TTL of just 20 seconds for IP mappings in their LLNS servers is a good example.

Akamai is a company I’ve always been fascinated with. They managed to quietly develop a truly transparent, global and reasonably intelligent content delivery platform that is second to none. For example, if you’ve ever bought music from the iTunes Music Store then you’ve used Akamai’s servers. Most global high-bandwidth sites like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft/MSN use Akamai to distribute their brunt of their HTTP content. You wouldn’t know this from Akamai’s customer testimonial page but last years Akamai DNS outage highlighted who their customers are and how much they depend on Akamai.

Google: Don’t look like you’re doing evil

It would appear that Google’s corporate philosophy is being bent, twisted and re-interpreted by their desire to expand their product portfolio and their new need to satisfy shareholders now that they are public.

I’m not sure I like this one bit, especially this AutoLink ‘feature’ - anything that can obscure copyrighted content for (possibly conflicting) commercial reasons shouldn’t be encouraged or even legal. I certainly don’t want to have to opt out - how about Google asking or paying me to opt-in?

“You can make money without doing evil”? Yeah, but not much when everyone else is evil. Google grows up…

Steve Maine, isomorphism, canonical forms, SOA and CORBA.

Brain.Save(), Steve Maine’s blog, has an excellent piece on Isomorphism that, in the ideal world, everyone could swear they undertood before attempting to write a web service. The vast majority of coders out there will never get this write for a very simple reason - they are too used to cutting writing code in a particular language/environment/platform and they make the mistake of carrying over these habits when it comes to modelling services.

Steve makes some references CORBA in his article, commenting that

Previous distributed object systems focused on establish a common local programming model and treated the mechanism of inter-object communication as an implementation detail. The late arrival of a standardized inter-ORB wire protocol to the CORBA scene is, I think, evidence that wire-level interoperability was a secondary concern for them.

History illustrates that IIOP did arrive late but I don’t think Steve is giving CORBA the credit it deserves here. (Some comparisons before reading on - SOA has XSD/WSDL/Policy for definition and SOAP for protocol, CORBA has IDL for definition and IIOP for protocol)

• The early CORBA specifications were more concerned with constructing a canonical form for service interfaces (IDL) than defining the local programming model. In fact, it wasn’t until the arrival of the POA in CORBA 2.3 that the local programming model for implementing CORBA servers was tied down in fine detail.
• The OMG had no choice but to pin down the IDL specification before tackling the underlying IIOP specification. There’s a very, very good reason for that - it allowed the various language mapping experts to start writing language bindings, ORB vendors to develop products and early adapters to start modelling solutions on CORBA IDL, knowing that better interoperabily was on the way.

Would it have made sense for the OMG to have produced the IIOP specification first? If they had done that, there would have been no way of expressing the service contract between the peer local programming languages involved in the interaction. Remember, IIOP uses binary encoding, not verbose text/XML encoding! It may be that Steve is forgetting the vacuum that CORBA filled at the time. People just didn’t want interoperability beyond a single vendor’s offering - everyone was used to being locked into COM or using sockets or an client/server RPC on Unix

Steve’s statement that “wire level interoperability is the only thing that matters” is an interesting one. Wire-level interoperability is all well and good but SOA still needs a higher level canonical form that humans can use to interpret service definitions.

Let me put it this way, which would you be happiest with receiving if you were thinking of interoperating with a 3rd party’s service:

1. A set of raw SOAP messages (and the SOAP/WS-Adressing/WS-Policy specifications) illustrating wire-level interoperability
2. An annotated XSD/WSDL/Policy document
3. An Indigo interface of CLR types annotated with custom attributes.

(There’s no need to answer that, it was a rhetorical question) From a SOA tool vendors perspective, it would be nice not to have to wrry about all those intermediate constructs like WSDL and just go straight from the native definition to “on the wire interoperabilty” the way you know best. But you are assuming that your tool developers have the competence to hand craft the mapping perfectly and you are assuming that your customers don’t have some other requirement for at least producing WSDL (e.g. modelling tool interop).

I’ve always wondered if the CORBA vendors wouldn’t gain wider acceptance into the SOA ’scene’ if they just went and renamed CORBA to CSORBA (Common Service Object Request Broker Arch). Folks get so hung up on the difference between a “service” and a CORBA object. Steve rightly hints at this again in his article when he states:

…distributed objects are a perfectly reasonable way of looking at web services. I think that’s true to some degree; as long as you recognize that those ‘distributed objects’ are an illusion of your model and don’t exist in any real way beyond your network port, distributed objects are as good a model as any other isomorphism

Hmmmmm, the Portable Object Adapter anyone?

P.S. Steve, I did enjoy the SOAP vs REST comment at the end!

Skype now available on Linux and Mac

A while back, my sister in the US told me she was using a telco service called Skype - that didn’t mean too much to me but she forgot to tell me she was calling from her PC, not her telephone. Yesterday I noticed Skype released v1.0 on the Mac (and Linux).

Here’s a good article with the low-down - think IM client but with the ability to dial regular land lines, for as little as 0.017euro per minute, to many countries, including Australia and the U.S.

Well worth using, if only to teach your local incumbent telco a lesson. Of course the big telco’s will bully the hell out of them, it’ll be interesting to see how long they last before being bought out…

SOAP vs REST

Does anyone else think the W3C have lost control of their own standards process? The WS-* specification collection seems to get bigger and bigger. Not surprisingly there are now calls for a WS-Architecture to try define how all these WS-* specifications fit together.

Nobody seems to be stepping up to the plate though, possibly because it would be an impossible task without dropping or heavily revising some of the specifications that have been poorly written or developed in splendid isolation. Not surprisingly, nobody wants to do that as it would cost commercial software companies money to change their products.

Some claimed that CORBA ‘failed’ because is was complex to use but the WS-* collection of specifications is surely surpassing CORBA in terms of complexity - does that mean WS-* is facing failure?

Back in the real world, I’ve noticed references to some commercial online services are up and running on the alternative REST architecture style - for example Amazon. This seems to be causing some friction between the two camps and the good news is we all get to watch the fight/debate in public. The w3c’s architecture mailing list archive is a good place to start and then there are blog discussions like this one

Bittorrent to live on or return of the sneaker-net?

It looks like LokiTorrent are taking the brave (or foolish?) decision to stand up to the MPAA and are looking for funds to pay for a legal defence. Bittorrent in the past should think of donating (using PayPal) to their cause.

This will be a real bell weather case so it’ll be interesting to see how it pans out. Otherwise, I think we’ll see the return of the sneaker-net. There’s nothing like progress, eh?