Thursday, April 01, 2004

I'm general chair of the International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2004) this year - to be held in November in NY. If you're doing work on Web services stuff, on general service-orientation etc. I strongly encourage you to submit to this conference - last year we received a record 180+ submissions and accepted only 38 of them. We are expecting to maintain the same high quality this year! See: http://www.icsoc.org/ 4:29:04 PM

Friday, February 20, 2004

I saw Sam's blog about bloglines and boy he was right .. it is very nice; I've converted too. Thanks Sam! 8:11:32 PM

Thursday, February 19, 2004

I'm thrilled that Brian Behelndorf, co-founder of Apache Software Foundation, and CTO and co-founder of CollabNet will be visiting Sri Lanka next week for a few days. Brian has agreed to give two presentations - one to the IT sector CEO types on how companies can make money with open source and the other to techie types on open source history and Apache history etc.. I look forward to an exciting few days and to meeting Brian finally! I'm also organizing a one-day excursion to the Sigiriya area and hopefully to the Minneriya National Park (see this blog entry for some pictures). 12:13:53 AM

Jivaka Weeratunga, co-founder of LSF with me, and I have written a report for the Swedish International Development Agency on open source in developing countries. We welcome any and all comments on it! The report is here. 12:06:41 AM

On January 23rd the Lanka Software Foundation organized an open source conference in Sri Lanka to get local folks interested and excited about open source. The entire conference was organized in < 3 weeks and our target was to get about 100 to show up. We were overwhelmed with more than 170 people attending the conference! It was a 1-day affair and it was very very high energy. We had two visitors gracing the conference too - James Clark (of XML fame) and Ken Coar (of Apache fame) and had a very lively event, ending with a dynamic panel discussion about the role of open source in developing countries. The conference material will soon be up at the LSF Web site. (I have to get around to updating that one of these days ..) 12:00:57 AM

Saturday, January 10, 2004

I'm proud to blog the Apache Axis/C++ v1.0 has finally been released. See: http://ws.apache.org/axis/cpp/index.html This is the first major open source project that was lead by a team of developers from Sri Lanka .. of course we're trying hard to attract a wider developer group, but the main team is from here right now. The developers were organized by the Lanka Software Foundation (LSF) (http://www.opensource.lk/) which I helped form. LSF's mission is to help local developers participate in and contribute to global open source projects. 2:04:22 AM

Tuesday, November 04, 2003

I'm very happy to blog that we have just released the alpha version of Apache Axis/C++ v1.0. See http://ws.apache.org/axis/cpp/index.html The main development was done by a group of developers in Sri Lanka and was organized by the Lanka Software Foundation (http://www.opensource.lk/). This is only the start down a long road .. we hope to have v1.0 released within a month or so, depending on the level of feedback against the alpha and betas. 6:30:11 AM

Friday, May 02, 2003

I have finally gotten the open-source foundation in Sri Lanka off the ground. The Lanka Software Foundation is a non-profit foundation whose mission is to do whatever it takes to get local developers to participate and hopefully become leaders in the open-source world. I am playing the role of its voluntary technical director. We are already working on our first project - finishing the Apache Axis C++ implementation I started working on with a group of volunteers from here in Sri Lanka about 1.5 years ago. The new team consists of 7 people - 4 full timers and 3 part timers - who are working currently on the design of the server-side of the C++ implementation. The old codebase we contributed to Apache did not have any server-side code. Lilantha Dharshana (who was the lead developer of the old codebase) has been restructuring the old code to be nearer to the Axis/Java stuff, but we've so far taken a slight left turn and re-architected the server side in what I believe is a more performant potential, more flexible architecture. We will of course still have the handlers, WSDD, and other cool Axis concepts in this version, but the guts will be different. Thanks to Dims (Davnum Srinivas) for taking the time to take these guys thru the current Axis/Java architecure a few weeks back! The 7 developers are all folks working in various companies in Sri Lanka whom I've managed to convince to contribute their time. The convincing was based on showing them how open-source can become a significant game changer for their business! Going forward, we are expecting to get funding from the Sri Lankan government to increase the number of developers using a fellowship program. I will blog more about this effort as we move along. 1:47:45 AM

I read Yasser Shohoud's "RPC/Literal and Freedom of Choice" article that Don Box's blog pointed to with interest. I agree with most of what he says, but I believe he makes a fundamental mistake in thinking that there are two message formats. I totally disagree - there is just one message format and people have used two different ways to describe them .. RPC style and document style. I now think we made a major mistake in making such using such dichotomic terms to describe the two styles of describing things. I have been thinking about radically re-doing the SOAP bindings in WSDL to eliminate the use of the word "rpc" completely. I will write that up soon .. and hopefully convince Yasser that there's only one message format and that we don't even really have two ways of describing things. Its all a misunderstanding. ;-) 1:28:09 AM

Tuesday, April 08, 2003

Finally back to blogging after a nearly 8 month hiatus. Looking forward to it .. 10:28:57 AM

© Copyright 2004 Sanjiva Weerawarana.