Middleware Matters

Like Werner says, he and I are both on a conference tour at the moment. We were at Middleware 2004 last week in Toronto, and are currently at the Distributed Objects and Applications conference (DOA) in Agia Napa, Cyprus, this week. Lots of travel.

Middleware was a good conference. I was the conference general chair, but the program committee chair, Arno Jacobsen, was a workhorse and took care of almost everything himself. I finally got to meet Roy Campbell in person, who along with his students has produced many great papers over the years, and I learned a lot from those papers along the way. As Werner reported, we had a panel at Middleware about web services, and it was great fun for all. John Lam and I took the industry side with the stance that web services are good, and Rachid Guerraoui and Bettina Kemme took the academic side with the stance that web services are just the same old thing all over again. Werner ran the panel in the style of the recent US presidential candidate debates, requiring anyone in the audience to ask questions in a form like you might hear from the audience in a townhall-style debate. If they did it well, Werner rewarded them on the spot with a beer or other drink. I don't know that we shed much light on the subject, but it was fun, and Rachid was especially funny as he loudly preached "Don't listen to them!", much like a doomsayer racked with paranoia and conspiracy theories.

So far, DOA is going OK. It's a smaller conference than Middleware, but that allows for more questions and discussions during presentations. Other than that, the weather here in Cyprus is amazingly beautiful, not that I'll get to see much of it from inside the presentation sessions. I brought a flying disc with me, though, and hope to get at least a few minutes to freestyle on the Mediterranean beach.