[FWD: [QueueNews] A Conversation with Steve Ross-Talbot]

["David RR Webber \(XML\)" <david@drrw.info>]

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DW

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [QueueNews] A Conversation with Steve Ross-Talbot
From: QueueNews <queuenews@acmqueue.com>
Date: Mon, March 13, 2006 11:00 am
To: queuenews@acmqueue.com

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  Queue E-Mail Newsletter
  for the Week of Mar/13/2006
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Latest Articles:


A Conversation with Steve Ross-Talbot
Ever heard of the pi-calculus? This man thinks it can revolutionize
BPM.
http://acmqueue.com/rd.php?c.370
  (scroll down to read an excerpt from this article)


Going with the Flow
Workflow systems can provide value beyond automating business
processes.
http://acmqueue.com/rd.php?c.369



Latest Blog Posts:

Charlene O'Hanlon

Coming Around Full Circle
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=363
At the risk of disclosing my age, I confess I was struck with a tinge
of
nostalgia last week upon hearing the news of AT&T's plans to buy out
BellSouth. Yes, it seems everything old is new again.

RFID Realities
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=358
So here we are, three years after big box retailer Wal-Mart
jump-started
the RFID phenomenon by mandating all its suppliers incorporate RFID
tags
on their cases and pallets. Most of you know the story already:
Wal-Mart
said that by forcing its suppliers to supply the RFID tags, the company
would see greater efficiencies and be able to pass on the savings to
their customers. Maybe, maybe not. But three years later, Wal-Mart is
nowhere near full-bore into the RFID realm with little to no cost
savings, in any area.  

Terry Coatta

Computers Still Cool (and Profitable too)
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=362
The years following the tech bust of 2000 were not the happiest of
times
to be in the high tech industry.  

Fixated on Statelessness
http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=361
Yes, it's true. I'm fixated by the effects that statelessness has on
building web apps. It's probably not healthy state of mind, but maybe
that's just the price one pays for being a developer.


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New article on ACM Queue:
A Conversation with Steve Ross-Talbot
http://acmqueue.com/rd.php?c.370
Merging the Worlds of Academics and Practitioners

>From the Workflow Systems issue, vol. 4, no. 2 - March 2006

article excerpt:
The IT world has long been plagued by a disconnect between theory and
practice--academics theorizing in their ivory towers; programmers
at "Initech" toiling away in their corporate cubicles. While
this might be a somewhat naïve characterization, the fact remains
that both academics and practitioners could do a better job of sharing
their ideas and innovations with each other. As a result, cutting-edge
research often fails to find practical application in the marketplace.

This is why the world needs more people like Steve Ross-Talbot.
He has more than 20 years of experience leveraging cutting-edge
research
and applying it to real business problems. Recently he founded Pi4
Technologies where he and his team draw on the field of the pi-calculus
to improve the ability to design, automate, and analyze business
processes.

In addition to his entrepreneurial experience,
Ross-Talbot holds positions on several standards bodies, including the
Worldwide Web Consortium, where he is chair of the Web Services
Coordination Group and co-chair of the Web Services Choreography
Working
Group.

Interviewing Ross-Talbot is Stephen Sparkes, CIO of
Morgan Stanley's investment banking division. Sparkes is no
stranger to the field of business process management, having spent more
than 20 years working in technology for leading financial institutions
in a range of development and infrastructure roles.

STEPHEN SPARKES In addition to your work with the
W3C, you've been through several start-ups. Can you tell us a bit
about the role of each company and the evolution of your research?
STEVE ROSS-TALBOT In 1997, I started SpiritSoft. It
was then called Push Technologies, but we rebadged it because the term
push technology was getting a lot of bad press, as people were
publishing content over the Internet and consuming vast amounts of
bandwidth. SpiritSoft's mission was to build a generic
event-condition-action, or CEP (complex event processing) facility.
I had worked on a very large project called Hoodini (for highly
object-oriented development) at Nomura International, where I was asked
to deliver an active query facility. It turned out to be a special case
of event-condition-action where the event is the change in the
database,
the condition is the predicate or query that you're wanting to
subscribe to, and the action is to refresh your query results set, to
remove things from it or add things to it, and then inform an
application.

The only reason for doing that is to reduce
bandwidth on the server so that you can start distributing the
processing, and therefore you don't have to go back to the server
to read your queries. You obviously change the programming model on
most
of the applications because they have to be event-driven. But if
you're doing GUI interfaces, generally you have an event loop, so
being event-driven is not so strange.

The key was to build
something that was flexible around this notion of active queries. I
left
Nomura in `97 to start SpiritSoft in order to deliver a generic
capability for event-condition-action computing because, at that time,
I
certainly felt that it was a very interesting and perhaps a fundamental
way of building systems. These days we talk about event-driven
architectures and service-oriented architectures as if they have been
around forever, but there was a lot of stuff that went on before we got
to this point, and event-condition-action and active systems were part
of that.

I believed for a long time that event-condition-action
was fundamental to the notion of autonomic computing and went on record
as using event-condition-action to build workflows.

I left
SpiritSoft in about 2001, because, like all start-ups, you have to
focus
on the things that you can deliver immediately, and SpiritSoft needed
to
focus on messaging, not on the high-level stuff that I very much wanted
to do.

I got a dispensation to leave and do more work on
event-condition-action, whereupon I met Duncan Johnston-Watt, who
persuaded me to join a new company called Enigmatec.

At
Enigmatec we went back to fundamentals. This really is the thread upon
which the pi-calculus rests for me. When you do lots of
event-condition-actions, if the action itself is to publish, you get a
causal chain. So one event-condition-action rule ends up firing
another,
but you do not know that you have a causal chain--at least the
system does not tell you.

It troubled me, for a considerable
time, that this was somewhat uncontrollable, and certainly if I were a
CIO and somebody said they were doing stuff and it's terribly
flexible, I'd be seriously worried about the fragility of my
infrastructure with people subscribing to events and then onward
publishing on the fly.

So causality started to trouble me, and I
was looking for ways of understanding the fundamentals of interaction,
because these subscriptions to events and the onward publishing of an
event really have to do with an interaction between different services
or different components in a distributed framework.

Many years
before I did any of this, I studied under Robin Milner, the inventor of
the pi-calculus, at Edinburgh University. I came back to the
pi-calculus
at Enigmatec and started to reread all of my original lecture notes,
and
then the books, and finally started to communicate with Robin himself.
It then became quite obvious that there was a way of understanding
causality in a more fundamental way.

One of the interesting
things in the pi-calculus is that if you have the notion of identity so
that you can point to a specific interaction between any two
participants, and then point to the identity of an onward interaction
that may follow, you've now got a causal chain with the identity
token that is needed to establish linkage. This answered the problem
that I was wrestling with, which was all about causality and how to
manage it.

At Enigmatec, we told the venture capitalists we were
doing one thing, but what we actually were doing was building a
distributed virtual pi-calculus fabric in which you create highly
distributed systems and run them in the fabric. The long-term aim was
to
be able to ask questions about systems, and the sorts of questions that
we wanted to know were derived from causality. For example: Is our
system free from livelocks? Is our system free from deadlocks? Does it
have any race conditions?

These are the sorts of things that
consume about half of your development and test time. Certainly in my
experience the worst debugging efforts that I've ever had to
undergo had to do with timing and resource sharing, which showed up as
livelocks, deadlocks, and race conditions. Generally, what Java
programmers were doing at the time to get rid of them, when they were
under pressure, was to change the synchronization block and make it
wider, which reduced the opportunity for livelocks and deadlocks. It
didn't fix the problem, really; what it did was alleviate the
symptom.
Read the rest of this article at acmqueue.com
http://acmqueue.com/rd.php?c.370

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