UPDATE:  Discover Magazine reports that other scientists are skeptical, with some supporting reasons, but in the same article the original researchers stick by their analysis.

RAIN DELAY: the concert has been delayed one day, to July 15, 2010, also at 6:45 PM.

Dan is a good friend, and he has contributed more deeply and more selflessly to the success of the Web than most of the public will ever understand.  Unfortunately, I will not be able to join the dinner group in Cambridge, but with luck I might manage a little musical acknowledgement on Wed evening.

UPDATE: pictures from Cambridge #danfest

Although I am pleased about the positive impact that SOAP has had, I am also frustrated about how it turned out.  I always hoped we could build a stack that would be portable (we mostly achieved that), and that would scale comfortably from use in the smallest and simplest scriptable Web clients, to reasonably sophisticated enterprise applications.   The hope was for a system that could be used for highly secure, asynchronous, streamed communication between enterprise applications, but that could also be accessed from a single line of Javascript or PERL script to make simple queries or updates to those same applications, and that would integrate smoothly with the Web and with REST.

Unfortunately, SOAP was ultimately positioned at the base of a stack that is far too complex to be appealing to the sorts of communities that now, for good reason, gravitate toward JSON-over-REST.  Whether XML could ever have been a good base for such simple applications is an interesting question, but a serious effort was never really made.  WSDL, WSA, and WS-Security were from the start complex, heavyweight technologies that fit best into systems built using sophisticated tooling.

SOAP and the associated WS-* standards are indeed widely used today in conjunction with systems like Websphere and .Net, and I suppose that’s a good thing as far as it goes.   Conversely, REST is good for many things, but it doesn’t scale to high-end application-to-application communication.  I think we missed a chance to build something far simpler than WS-*, something that would have scaled from very simple to quite robust, and that would have achieved better consistency and integration for more users and more applications.

Nonetheless, SOAP was at least an important step on the way to building simple, data-driven Web applications, and perhaps it’s had some more success than that.  Either way, it’s been 10 years.

IBM has been kind enough to give me the honorary position of Distinguished Engineer Emeritus: although I am no longer an employee, this gives me the opportunity to remain part of the community with my many friends at IBM, and occasionally to use some of their facilities.

I’m also pleased to be continuing as chair of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Technical Architecture Group (TAG), which is the senior technical body responsible for the World Wide Web.  I remain an invited expert on the W3C XML Schema Working Group too.

During the past week or two, I have mentioned this news to some friends and colleagues, and the most common reaction I have gotten is: you seem a bit young to be retiring, and you look way to young to have a title with the word “emeritus” in it. What’s going on? Well, I may be just a bit older than I look, but not much, and I have every intention of doing much more work in the computer field.  I started working as a professional programmer nearly 40 years ago when I was still a teenager, before heading to MIT for my bachelor’s degree;  I first joined IBM 4 years later, in 1974. When you leave a company like IBM after so many years, it’s officially a retirement, no matter how many years of creative work you have ahead of you. So, I’ve retired!

The next question is, typically, how could anyone spend so much of a long career in one place? The answer is: I really haven’t. During my first 18 years with IBM, I had multi-year assignments with the Computer Science department at Stanford University and at MIT Project Athena, and I also spent nearly three years working in partnership with startup Locus Computing Corp. I also took several years off to do graduate work at Stanford, and in 1992 I left IBM to join Lotus Development Corp., where I remained until IBM bought Lotus in 1995. During that first stint at IBM, I also worked on a number of exciting internal projects, the best known of which was the VM Pass-through networking system. I wrote the core code for that (in IBM 360 Assembler language!) within a year or two of joining the company in 1974; it became very popular with users of the VM Virtual Machine operating system and, amazingly, it’s still being offered to customers of IBM zSeries mainframes, 35 years later. From 1988 to 1992, I led the software team for Datacube, a hardware/software prototype of a fault-tolerant massively parallel data processing computer, using commodity parts;  it in some significant ways anticipated the systems that a decade later were deployed to provide Internet-scale services like search.

Since rejoining IBM in 1995, I have had one exciting opportunity after another: first, working for several years representing IBM in a partnership with Sun Microsystems to create the specification for JavaBeans; then, joining teams of world-class experts at the W3C to create the specifications first for XML Schemas and after that, as the technical lead for IBM’s contributions to SOAP; and finally, being appointed by Tim Berners-Lee as a member and recently as chair of the TAG.  After nearly 40 years of work in computing, my participation with the W3C has helped me achieve one of my original goals: to make at least a small contribution to systems that make a difference, not just in the computing field, but for everyone.

As this retirement day has approached, I’ve become more and more aware of how exciting it has been to work in such a young field, on such a broad range of state-of-the art technologies, and with some of the best computer scientists, systems designers, linguists, and teachers in the world. I expect to be doing much more of that, and also to be teaching, consulting, “speaking”, and perhaps doing some community work. For now though, springtime in Boston is beautiful, and I’m looking forward to spending some more time with my wife and my boys.  My heartfelt thanks to everyone who has made the first 40 years of my career so much fun!

Robert plays acoustic guitar and sings a mix of covers including Van Morrison, Al Green, Southside Johnny, Roy Orbison, etc., and some originals too.   We’ll be joined by Ron Chancey, who is a terrific guitar player.  Robert and Ron have for years been in the legendary Boston-area blues band, the Urge, and these local gigs give them a chance to get and do something a bit quieter.

The gig will be at:

Next Saturday, April 10th, will be a smaller, quieter gig with my good friend Robert Cedrone.  We’ll be playing for an hour or so in the early evening at the Starbucks on Bedford Street, on the north side of Lexington MA (map).  I will post more details here when I have the exact time (probably 7PM) and other information.

(And yes, if you were quick enough to catch the first version of this blog entry, I had the Princeton/Lasting Room dates backwards;  it’s really Princeton on Friday.)

He also mentions that my friends in the IBM “fabs have managed to put DRAM on the same silicon as the POWER7 logic”.    Getting DRAM densities and power consumption on on the processor chip is a big deal;  I hadn’t noticed IBM had pulled that off.