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

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