I just returned home from attending ICSOC in New York. I wrote some of this as I was listening to Tim Berners-Lee's keynote. I've heard Tim give a similar talk to this one before, at WWW2003, but this version is better and fairly compelling. He's looking back over the development of web services and is presenting pros and cons for WS design approaches at different levels. It's quite interesting to step back and look at the big picture that way. Of course, with Tim it all leads up to the promotion of the Semantic Web as the right answer. His slides are here.
Tuesday night after the conference was fun. My friends Joey Hudoklin and Rob Fried are a guitar duo called Bluefish, and they play acoustic blues and ragtime (ala Hot Tuna). They are damn good. They play regularly at the Alphabet Lounge (Ave. C and 7th St). On Tuesday night I sat in with them on harmonica, and it was a blast. It was a small place with a small crowd very familiar with Bluefish's music, and in such a setting, the potential problem with anyone sitting in is that they might change the music so much that the regular fans dislike the result. Fortunately, that didn't happen. The regulars agreed that the addition of the harmonica definitely enhanced the music. I haven't played very often in public, so it was nice to get that kind of positive feedback. Now I have to find reasons to visit New York more often, so I can sit in with Bluefish more regularly.
I've mentioned the following here before, so forgive me for repeating myself, but I can't say it often enough: Joey and Rob are also some of the best frisbee freestylers in the world, with Joey being widely acknowledged as the greatest freestyler ever. How mint is that?
Unfortunately the late night Tuesday meant missing Adam Bosworth's Wednesday keynote -- doh!
In the afternoon today I was the moderator for a panel on industrial service oriented architectures. My panelists were Hugh Grant from Credit Suisse First Boston, Thomas P. Kozempel from Verizon Communications, and Francisco "Paco" Curbera from IBM Research (T.J. Watson) whom I pressed into service after one of the panelists didn't show up. They were all excellent. Thomas in particular gave a great overview of what they're doing with services at Verizon, how getting there required a few non-technical and cultural changes, and how they're now much more able to measure return on investment. It was a great SOA success story. Hugh had some good insights too, and spoke in detail about the many shortcomings of UDDI for his organization. And despite being a researcher, Paco is definitely in touch with what the real world needs in terms of SOA and web services, so I'm glad he agreed to join the panel at the last minute.
Overall, the conference was pretty good, and I recommend it for researchers and practitioners alike. I had a variety of interesting conversations with people I normally would not see at the middleware and distributed systems conferences I typically attend, including finally getting to meet Sanjiva Weerawarana in person. (He also introduced me to Tim, whom I had not met before either.) A number of these conversations have centered around the notion of multi-protocol or multi-access services, which I've worked on now for over a decade. I'll write more about those conversations in a separate blog entry.