Middleware Matters

The WWW2006 chairs have asked that I help spread the following news.

Due to a serious fire at the University of Southampton, UK, the www2006.org website and mailing lists are temporarily unavailable.

THE SUBMISSION PROCESSES have been unaffected by this fire, only information about the submission url, deadlines, tracks, document formatting etc. has been affected. A temporary replacement website has been set up with all the information for submitting papers, panels and tutorials.

The deadline for paper submission is UNCHANGED. It remains 4th November 2005 midnight Hawaii time. The panel and tutorial submission deadlines are also unchanged.

Access to the format instructions on the web site has been patchy. We therefore WAIVE the formatting regulations. Submitting a 10 page pdf document in any format is sufficient.

TEMPORARY WWW2006 WEBSITE: http://www.soton.ac.uk/~lac/ SHOULD be visible at www2006.org but we know that this isn't always the case due to networking irregularities.
DIRECT ACCESS to the paper submission website: http://www.openconf.org/www2006/
TEMPORARY EMAIL FOR ENQUIRIES: lescarr@gmail.com

Information about the fire can be found at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/4390048.stm.

The WWW2006 chairs have asked me to help publicize the following news.

Extension: The submission deadline for WWW2006 refereed papers has been extended to Friday November 11, 11:59PM Hawaii time (hard deadline).

As you may know, on Sunday October 30 there was a significant fire at the site hosting the www2006 server. No one will be allowed into the building until Christmas and half the research labs are completely destroyed.

We attempted to mask the failure with a temporary site and have restored the site as quickly as possible in order to maintain the original deadline. But we have become aware that DNS and routing problems are still causing locations to be unable to reach the site even as late as Friday November 4th 2005.

Given these technical difficulties, the fairest thing to do seems to be to grant a blanket 1-week extension, until November 11th 2005.

In fairness to those who submitted on time and managed to find the web site, we will allow revised versions of papers to be uploaded up to the new deadline.

We apologize unreservedly for the confusion stemming from this fire and its aftermath -- it's been an interesting exercise in network complexity, and at least nobody was hurt -- and we thank you for very much for submitting your work to WWW2006.

WWW2006 Co-chairs: Les Carr, Dave De Roure, Arun Iyengar
WWW2006 PC Chairs: Carole Goble, Mike Dahlin

My blog has been really quiet lately, in part due to an extremely heavy workload over the past couple months, but more importantly because my wife gave birth to our 4th child, Jake, a few weeks ago.

My latest Internet Computing column, entitled "Old Measures for New Services," is now available at DSOnline or in PDF form. This time around, I jump into the way-back machine, go back to the days of structured programming, and examine how its notions of coupling and cohesion apply to today's service-oriented systems.

As always, feedback on the column is welcomed. Also, if there are topics you'd like to see me cover in future columns, just let me know.

One out of seven SOA efforts have already failed? While I don't doubt that there are failing SOA projects out there, the implication of that blog posting -- that it's all somehow caused by SOA itself -- is highly dubious. After all, what percentage of general IT projects fail? Might it be one in seven? Or could it be that the folks whose projects are failing are just blaming it on SOA? How do we know that they even know what SOA is? Did a large number of failing projects respond to the survey, while those succeeding with SOA were too busy succeeding to respond? Were those failing projects going to fail regardless, due to reasons that have nothing at all to do with SOA?

Let me turn the tables. I'm not lying or exaggerating when I state that every SOA project I'm personally aware of at our customer sites is succeeding. That's a 100% SOA success rate! That's not surprising, given how savvy our customers generally are, but surely anyone can see that just like the "one in seven SOA failures" claim, my numbers are also questionable, due to my basing my conclusions exclusively on the results of skilled development teams with excellent track records.

Remind me not to read that blog anymore.