My years toiling away on web services seem to be paying off: I’ve been invited to be a member of the JCP Expert Group for JSR-261 (Web Services Addressing). A primer: JCP is the Java Community Process: it’s the mechanism for developing standard technical specifications for Java technology. Basically, whatever is decided upon in a JSR goes into the next version of Java. JSR is a Java Specification Request: the formal documents that describe proposed specifications and technologies for adding to the Java platform.

OK, so WSJ is Web Services Journal and not the Wall Street Journal, but still. This was a nice little surprise: even though I left Cape Clear a few months ago to move stateside, an article I submitted to Web Services Journal just got published in their print edition. Front page and all. The checkout guy at the Borders (an American bookstore) asked me why I was buying so many copies of the magazine, and then shook my hand and told me he’d “never met an author before”. My mother is very proud.

Little bit of deja-vu. It feels like I was just in Germany speaking at a conference only recently… This time I was in Frankfurt, at JAX2002 (JAX being Java Apache XML). I gave a talk on Web Services and the WSDL Design View, seemed to go down fairly well, although one of the (German) attendees told me afterwards that he had a bit of trouble with the accent. The feeling was mutual mein Freund!

Another trip to Germany, this time for Microsoft’s Visual Studio .NET launch event, in Karlsruhe. I gave a joint talk with my buddy Darius (from Microsoft) on Java/.NET web services interoperability. It was a bit nerve-racking, we were on stage in front of probably close to a thousand geeks, and I could barely see the audience with the kleig lights pointed down at us. I’ll tell you this much, either the Microsoft events people have way too much money on their hands, or else they just plain love to have a good time. It was quite the show. And the .NET tools are pretty decent compared to what’s available in the Java world at the moment.

This is definitely not the worst thing about working for Cape Clear… I just came back from a trip to Munich to speak at the OOP2002 conference, where I was a member of panel discussing Web Services interoperability. Unfortunately they don’t seem to have any material from the conference online, so I’ll spare you the suspense re interoperability. The conclusion is: we’ll get there eventually!

Other conclusions: Munich is wonderful, the food is wonderful, the beer is wonderful. I could get used to that place.