Give us your headaches

Have I already mentioned that I liked reading the Richard Branson's auto-biography ?

I honestly think it was a gem of a book which I picked up in the Gatwick airport on the way to Dublin from Minsk. That is a story about the life journey told with a lot of humor, filled with some absolutely hilarious accounts of various events and with some very serious thoughts about doing business and contributing to saving the humanity.

You might want to ask, what is it all to do with the web services or software development given this post is not marked with [OT] ?

During his student days, Richard set up the Student Advisory Centre which consulted students on all the issues they could have, free of charge. One of their slogans was "Give us your headaches". This centre still operates today.

I thought, when I was reading about it, that to some extent, this is what the OS business model was partly about. In OS we are working on projects such as CXF and we are determined to make it all work really well, without any headaches, in the most demanding environments.

The OS business model is partially about providing the insurance that customers will experience no headaches when running such OS-driven projects in their productions. In fact this model has been proven very successful, by such top companies such as RedHat for example.

Are you considering to start using CXF but a bit concerned what will happen further down the road with all the OS development going on into it ?

Give us your headaches :-)

CXF : Here we come !

I'm happy to confirm that after a short break I'm going to have a chance to resume working on CXF and its JAXRS project in particular.

I'll join Dan and the rest of the Sopera OS team and we will be determined as ever to bring you the best production-quality web services framework around.

And with your help we will make the CXF users and dev lists the "hippiest place to be", the phrase is borrowed from a Richard Branson's auto-biography.

CXF won't be the only effort we will focus in Sopera but it is going to be one of the main ones.

Stay tuned.

Goodbye JBoss

So after less than 6 months after starting to work for JBoss I decided to quit and accept an offer from Sopera. In hindsight, I'm thinking that talking about the career publicly is not always the very best idea - spending such a short period of time at one of the leading company in the industry is not something that will improve my CV.

Back in April/May I was indeed looking forward to that great opportunity and it was not a stop-gap measure by any means. But CXF and CXF JAXRS are calling me back - it is next to impossible to resist. I'll blog about it next but this post is about JBoss and I'd like to talk about it a bit.

Just 6 months ago I had a fairly vague idea about what JBoss were doing, apart from knowing that they were part of RedHat, that it was an application server and that their JBossWS project was providing a CXF JAXWS integration option. And of course I knew about RestEasy.

In the reality, JBoss is a very live, active and progressive project, with a lot of very clever and innovative people working on it and who are really passionate about JBoss. And they have a very open and democratic environment with everyone being able to express their thoughts aloud.

I've promised in my previous post I'd link to various JBoss subprojects. Here are the links to some of them :

JBossWS : Web Service Framework for JBoss AS
RestEasy : JAX-RS implementation with various features
PicketLink : STS, etc
JBossTS : While many are saying that WS transactions support is next to impossible to provide this team just does it
HornetQ : Putting the buzz in messaging


As far as I'm concerned it is obvious I've given away the real opportunity with a great company. That said, the life is about many opportunities, and I'm about to pursue the new and exciting one, with the young and innovative company.

Goodbye JBoss, Hello Sopera !