I'm here in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, and just delivered the closing keynote for the 9th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies Ada Europe 2004. This town and island are unbelievably beautiful -- or so I'm told. I've been holed up in my room for two days finishing my keynote and working on presentations for next week. :-(
I'm not an Ada person, nor a reliability expert, and I don't know anybody at this conference or in this technical community, so I've felt somewhat out of place being here. But that's part of the reason they invited me -- they wanted someone from outside their community to come and talk about middleware. I first gave a general overview of middleware history, talked about some of the reliability challenges middleware has faced in the past, and then presented some future challenges, including
- "middleware for middleware" integration (which we tackle with our Artix product)
- middleware for distributed real-time and embedded environments
- mixing "ilities" (i.e., effectively combining qualities such as security, transactions, management, versioning, configuration, etc. all within a single cohesive system)
- the woes surrounding Web Services standards
- and one of my favorite topics, middleware "dark matter."
It's hard to give a meaningful middleware talk in only an hour, but it seemed to be well received, or maybe they were just being polite. :-) Overall, these are a great bunch of people who made sure that I didn't feel like a stranger. I might have to go learn Ada just so I can hang out with them some more!
I would love to stay and vacation on this Mediterranean island, but duty calls. On Monday I'm presenting at the OMG meeting in Orlando to continue to convince them that issuing a request for proposals (RFP) for a standard CORBA binding for WSDL would be a good thing to do, and also to present a status report on my continuing work on CORBA reflection.