e mërkurë qershor 29, 2005

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/pat and my new blog http://blog.chanezon.com

I have left Sun on monday, so I cannot blog on blogs.sun.com anymore. You can find my new blog P@ Log at http://blog.chanezon.com/. The new feed is at http://blog.chanezon.com/xml/rss/feed.xml.

For my new blog I use a new blogging engine called Typo. It is much less fully featured than Roller, which powers blogs.sun.com, but it is a promising server written in Ruby On Rails, a framework I've been playing with a lot lately, and it makes it very easy to play with the engine and add features to it, such as the Ajax Hierarchical Category and Calendar browser I created last month.

Happy blogging to the Sun bloggers: I was very happily surprised at the explosive adoption of blogs at Sun, and the overall quality of the blogs.

Sun Blogmasters, good luck to you: it was a pleasure working with you and a really fun experience. Dave, you can freeze my account now.

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/pat and my new blog http://blog.chanezon.com

I'll give a talk with Dave Johnson and Kevin Burton at JavaOne on thursday: beyond blogging. See Dave's announcement. Too bad Alejandro Abdelnur, our fourth speaker, won't be there. This is the result of my January proposal to make a common presentation of the various syndication projects in java.

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/pat and my new blog http://blog.chanezon.com

Parting haiku

Netscape, let a thousand protocols bloom
AOL, pick the fruits of the boom
iPlanet, autumn rains loom
Sun, shines amid winter gloom
Time to find my way home, like Poldy Bloom!

My career as a code snippet

A little pseudocode snippet to summarize what I've been doing these past 8 years (full details in my resume :-) I have lived through it, but haven't compiled it!

package com.sun.hr.career; 

import com.netscape.server.*;
import com.aol.portal.*;
import com.iplanet.marketmaker.portal.*;
import com.sun.portal.*;
import com.sun.syndication.*;
import com.sun.hr.exceptions.*;

public class PatCareerAtSun {
    public static void main(String [ ] args)
    {
        //consulting Netscape France
        AppServer.importTo(FRANCE).sell();
        //AOL MyNetscape Portal Mountain View
        MyNetscape.get().manage();
        //Sun/iPlanet Market Maker
        MarketPlace iMM = new MarketPlace();
        //Sun Portal France
        Portal.getVersions().next();
        //Sun ROME open source project
        SyndFeedInput input = new SyndFeedInput();
        SyndFeed feed = input.build(new XmlReader("http://blog.chanezon.com/xml/rss/feed.xml"));
        throw new ResignException("let's try something else");
    }
}

I left Sun on monday after 5 years. But among merger and acquisitions I've stayed in the same entity (enterprise servers) for the past 8 years: Netscape, AOL, iPlanet, Sun, doing Portals, eCommerce and Enterprise Servers, so it's a big good bye!

I mosly enjoyed my time at Sun. The things I really liked at Sun are:

• Good people: it was a pleasure and a learning experience to work with so many bright engineers from all over the world. I made many friends at Sun over the years and will keep fond memories from my time here.
• Passionate people: Sun people are passionate about what they do, and very opinionated. This very often brought on us some laughs from the analysts, or the rest of the industry. But in the technology business we're in, I think it is a valuable quality.
• Cool technologies: even if recently I've played a lot with Ruby, Java is still pretty cool in my book (AOP, annotations,...) and the most suitable language and environments for many type of projects. And the Sun Labs people churn out regularly some cool new stuff: Fortress (scientific computing language), Barcelona (multi process VM), Looking Glass (3D Desktop)
• Interesting problems to solve: scalability, maintainability, huge code base, dependencies management, public API definition and deprecation, platform andf app server issues... At Sun I learnt to program in the large and take into account all aspects of the software lifecycle.
• Excellent remote working policy: among the many software companies I've talked with, Sun is ahead of the pack with its remote working policies and infrastructure. I've been working from home in France since 4 years, designing products that were implemented in the US or India, and it worked really well.
• Great recent focus on open source: OpenOffice, NetBeans, OpenSolaris, Sun is putting the lines of code where its mouth is. I did my share with ROME.
• Best corporate bloggers in the world: thanks Jonathan for giving the impulse from the top for blogs.sun.com. Participating to its birth was one of my most fun job at Sun.

Thank you all for these good years, and good luck!

Special thanks to Alejandro Abdelnur: it was really fun working with you!

GP@

e premte qershor 17, 2005

Francois is a well known voice in the blogging community: he gives Sun praises about how we use blogs.sun.com as a marketing tool.

e premte qershor 03, 2005

The ROME logo contest was very successful, with 21 submissions ranging from fun to clean, functional or creative: this will be a tough choice! If you care about ROME, visit the ROME Logo contest page on our wiki and vote!

This is the announcement email from Mark Woodman, the ROME commiter who very efficiently organized the contest.

All, Let the voting begin! Please help us choose our new logo. We have some really great concepts from which to choose, but we're going to leave the decision up to you. This page has now been updated with information on how to vote: http://wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javawsxml/RomeLogoContest Good luck to everyone who submitted an entry! - Mark

A big thank you to all the volunteers who took some time to give a graphic face to our small open source RSS and Atom utilities library, and kudos to Mark for organizing the contest.

e mërkurë prill 27, 2005

Today John Hoffmann posted a picture of our award ceremony. The title of the award was Humanizing Sun. I like it, it's in line with my post about blogs and corporate culture.

I could not attend, I'm in vacations these days (we, french people, take vacations very seriously:-). So I just added myself to the picture in Photoshop, in my "Sun Humanizer business casual attire". As I wrote before, Danese Cooper and Dave Edmondson are also missing on this pic.

e martë prill 26, 2005

Bosworth's Web of Data: "Google's Adam Bosworth's keynote at the 2005 MySQL Users Conference was a call to audience members to "do for information what HTTP did for user interface." The web was successful because it offered a simple, sloppy, standards-based, scalable platform, and the challenge is to take a database and do the same. Daniel Steinberg covered Bosworth's talk, and provides this report."

...Bosworth predicts that RSS 2.0 and Atom will be the lingua franca that will be used to consume all data from everywhere. These are simple formats that are sloppily extensible. Anyone who wants to can use these formats to consume content or to author content...

(Via O'Reilly Network Articles.)

Looks like the ideas I express in our common JavaOne talk are not completely off topic: I'm in good company:-)

Very graphic, I like the dynamics of the arrows, which illustrate very well my belief that filtering syndication applications will be very important. I prefer it to his second entry.

Kenny Redman #1: "

Rome Logo Contest posted a photo:

This logo design basically shows how versatile ROME can be. I tried to use the colors of your web page.

wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javawsxml/RomeLogoContest

"

(Via Rome Logo Contest's Photos.)

Both hilarious and elegant.

Michael Lewcio: "

Rome Logo Contest posted a photo:

Rome burning - that's news.

wiki.java.net/bin/view/Javawsxml/RomeLogoContest

"

(Via Rome Logo Contest's Photos.)

I just sent Dave Johnson my slides for our common session on syndication at JavaOne. The first part is an introduction about syndication history, formats and standards. I've given similar talks many times for the past 3 years and always had too many slides. This time I concentrated on a typology of syndication applications, and reduced my 10 slides on the topic in a single graphic. This typology is based on technical characteristics, as opposed to the typology used by business people or VCs to partition these applications. If you want to read a more business oriented analysis I recommend Richard McManus' comments about the JupiterResearch report on RSS readers, and Brad Feld's thoughts about why he's hot on Feedburner, where he identifies 8 segments for RSS and blogging applications (Brad is a VC who invested in FeedBurner, Technorati and NewsGator).

Partitioning syndication applications based on their technical characteristics, client vs server, producer vs consumer, helps to highlight where the opportunities in this space are, from a technical perspective (after that you need to find the business model that goes with it:-).

My own take on it, and what I've been advocating at Sun for the past year, is that the biggest opportunities are on the horizontal axis, ie applications that both produce and consume syndication formats.

On the client side I call these Desktop Syndication Suites, examples being the venerable pioneer Radio UserLand, and the newcomer dynamic duo NetNewsWire + Marsedit on the Mac. I expect Office Suites (Open Office, MS Office) to follow this trend and integrate an aggregator and a feed producer.

On the server side I call these server side filters Server Syndication Engines. Examples are the grandfather O'Reilly Meerkat, that I use since a long time to filter out O'Reilly feeds, Feedster, oriented on search, Feedburner, oriented towards publishers, and AllConsuming which provides topical aggregation based on books. I expect this last category to grow a lot in the next few years. One of the category of software that will merge with this one is server side aggregators: today they are sinks for feeds, they read all, and spit it out in HTML for browser clients. I think they will evolve into server side filters, letting you consume feeds in feed readers (it could be client side, but also other server side readers or filters). Bloglines/NetNewsWire feed synchronization is a first step in this direction.

The other trend I talk about in my JavaOne presentation is syndication formats as a universal envelope format for time based queries. What this means is that for many web services application, when the operation is a query type, the envelope format won't be SOAP but Atom or RSS 2.0. The payloads will be embedded as namespaced extensions under the entries. The next evolution in syndication applications is UBL embedded in Atom! This is for this type of application that we built the modules support in our ROME library. Amazon's recent OpenSearch standard, where they added 3 elements to RSS 2.0, mainly for managing result pagination, in order to aggregate search results from various engines on a9, is a first step in that direction. I will also expand on this theme at our Xtech 2005 presentation in May (this time with Alejandro only).

Crazy ideas? Comments are welcome.

e premte prill 22, 2005

I've been asked this question a few times: here's my roller blog settings in Marsedit

e hënë prill 18, 2005

e martë prill 12, 2005

Mark Woodman has been very active in the ROME project lately: with Amin he created the ROME Aqueduct subproject, to add a pluggable persistence layer to ROME (they already have a Prevayler implementation)

More recently he organized the ROME logo contest, in order to get a cool logo for the growing number of projects that are powered by ROME.

You can see the current submissions, and because ROME is all about syndication, we have a feed for the latest entries in the contest!

For now I really like Mark's elegant and essentially typographic entry, as well as Jerrold Maddox's minimalist ROME-XML using the very nice Trajan font type.

Robert Copper posted 2 fun variants of Sun's Duke, as a roman legionnaire, and an orator, but I think we'd have some problems with Sun lawyers in order to adopt these ones in an open source project:-)

So if you have any talent for vector graphics art, please enter the contest: we need a cool logo for our T-shirts, in order to replace the quick design I made a few months ago. A software project is never complete until you ship the right T-shirt!

It was not an april fool's joke: we shipped ROME 0.6 beta on april 1st. Alejandro has the details.

Many bug fixes and enhancements in this release.

e premte prill 08, 2005

Hurray! According to Will our virtual team won what is called at Sun the chairman's award (I don't know what it is exactly but it sounds good:-), for creating blogs.sun.com.

The mail I received mentioned Will Snow, Simon Phipps, Dave Johnson, John Hoffmann, Tim Bray, and myself.

I guess there must be money involved and you need to be currently employed by Sun to be part of it: because Danese Cooper with her constant evangelism for blogs, and Dave Edmondson who created the PlanetSun and PlanetSolaris aggregators would really deserve it as well.

I say virtual team because we're all from different organizations within Sun: Will and John from sun.com, Simon and Tim from CTO office, Danese from the evangelist group, Dave Edmondson from Solaris, myself from Portal, and Dave Johnson, who created the software that powers our blogs was from SAS before Will got him in. And it worked out really well: today, after a year in operation, blogs.sun.com is humming, growing both in audience and number and bloggers.

For Dave Edmundson and myself it was really a side project, what folks at Google call their 20% project...except that at Sun we don't have this formal notion of 20% project:-(

The few lessons I take out from this experience helping build blogs.sun.com:

• Dare speak up, however experienced and wise the other people in the room are supposed to be: at that initial meeting Tim Bray suggested to have all of us signup for Typepad. I was a user of MovableType at home, and a user of the Sun reimbursement process, and thought it would be a bad idea. I had installed a Roller instance internally, so I spoke up and suggested we used Roller, which was in java, well designed for hosting, and open source. Then Will spoke up and said "I manage sun.com and we can install it next week".
• Do first what you're passionate about: at that time I helped blogs.sun.com get started, and with Alejandro Abdelnur and Elaine Chien we were starting the ROME Rss and atOM utilitiEs (ROME) open source project. These were 2 "20% projects", with no recognition from my manager, and I put them first in my priorities. Looking back 1 year after this was the right thing to do: they're both thriving.
• Virtual teams work better than formal teams when they are bound by passion: what is true for individuals is true for teams as well. Passion about what the team is doing is what makes things tick and remove all obstacles that would be problems in virtual teams doing more mundane type of work.

We've had a blast building and growing this system: I'm glad that we get this kind of recognition for our work. Too bad Danese and Dave can't benefit from it as well.

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