Dr. Mark Little serves as the senior director engineering, middleware engineering at Red Hat. Prior to taking over this role in 2008, Little served as the SOA technical development manager and director of standards. Additionally, Mark was a distinguished engineer and chief architect and co-founder at Arjuna Technologies, a spin-off from HP. He has worked in the area of reliable distributed systems since the mid-80's with a PhD in fault-tolerant distributed systems, replication, and transactions. Mark and his family reside in Newcastle, UK.
Mark Little presents the constituents of a modern SOI and where open source implementations stand in terms of standards, tools, ease of use, performance and reliability, making a case for using open source against close source solutions.
OASIS recently announced that v4.0 of the ebXML Registry and Repository standard has been approved. However, in an age where Web Services appear on the wane, REST is taken for granted, and Cloud is on everyone's lips, does ebXML have a role to play?
Steve Jones, Global Head of Master Data Management at Capgemini and a SOA practitioner, thinks that Facebook's recent announcement about deprecating their REST API in favour of what they call a 'Graph API', is actually a good step for REST in that it may offer a way to cut through the "religious fundamentalism" that often surrounds it.
Recently Steve Jones, from Cap Gemini, questioned whether NoSQL/Big Data is the panacea that some vendors would have us believe. He suggests that in some cases in-memory RDBMS may well be the optimal solution and that approaches such as Map Reduce could be too difficult to understand for typical IT departments. He concludes with a suggestion some sometimes Big Data may be a Big Con.
In this interview we talk with representatives of the BPMN 2.0 standardization effort from Oracle, IBM and SAP. Here they discuss the evolution of BPMN as well as how it relates to other efforts such as XPDL, WS-BPEL and BPEL4People.
In another "virtual panel session", we took the opportunity to talk with representatives of the new OASIS BPEL4People Technical Committee and get their feedback on just why we need this work. Apart from asking them what BPEL4People (and WS-HumanTask) are all about, we asked them how this relates to other BPMN efforts and what else we can expect in this area.
Mark Little makes an introduction to cloud computing pointing to the fact that the middleware needs of the cloud are similar to SOA’s, showing some of the benefits of running SOA along with the cloud, asking if cloud computing and SOA should evolve together and giving some future directions to consider.
In this presentation, recorded at QCon London 2008, Mark Little explains the history of SOAP/WSDL/WS-*-based web services and RESTful HTTP and shows that both approaches have their roles to play in any good architects toolkit. He elaborates on where possible convergence could, or should, occur within the industry.
In this interview, recorded at QCon London 2008, Red Hat Director of Standards and Technical Development Manager for the SOA platform Mark Little talks about extended transaction models, the history of transaction standardization, their role for web services and loosely coupled systems, and the possibility of an end to the Web services vs. REST debate.
