Monday June 07, 2004
General introduction  For most people, their first blog posting is autobiographical; who am I to buck tradition? I'm Geoff Arnold, a Distinguished Engineer in Sun's CTO office; I work for Rob Gingell, the Chief Engineer of Sun. I generally work on "future stuff", but I'm also involved in matters affecting the engineering community at Sun. I've been with Sun since 1985, always in New England (despite occasional pressure to relocate to California).
My primary blog/website is at GeoffArnold.com, where you can read more about me and my professional background. The content is all over the map - personal, political, technical, whimsical, reflective, musical, occasionally professional. The first posting that got any attention is this one on the Sun-MS deal; occasionally I'll get TB'd which causes real bandwidth spikes.
And finally (in the spirit of full disclosure that seems appropriate for Sun's new blogging policy), I should mention that I am a huge supporter of both Java and Jini. Back in the early 1970s I worked with Simula 67 - arguably the first usable OO language - and I regarded the whole BCPL to C to C++ evolution as a colossal digression. When I finally got my hands on Java, I had a feeling of coming home. I'm also a distributed computing kind of guy: I worked on my first distributed OS in around 1979. Doing the first implementation of NFS for the PC in the mid-80s convinced me that the idea of network transparency, trying to make remote resources look as though they were local was just plain wrong. Everything is distributed. Even when it's local, treat it as remote. We can take a distributed system and optimize it for localized deployment, but the other way round just breaks. And Jini is, fundamentally, distributed Java done right - dynamic discovery, leases so that things will fail-safe, distributed events and transactions, interface contracts and private protocols. Those who don't use it are doomed to reinvent it.
That doesn't mean I don't believe in the value of XML web services. (I spent a year on the W3C Web Services Architecture WG.) But I do believe in using the appropriate technology for the job: I am suspicious of universal solutions. We barely know how to do real distributed computing; today it's mostly client-server stuff, synchronous, static, asymmetrical. Let's not pretend that we know the One True Way to do it.
(2004-06-07 14:37:11.0)
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