James Pasley's Just Enough XML to Survive

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 12:56:35 GMT

Excellent video presentation from James Pasley, Cape Clear's CTO, on XML, XML Schema, SOAP and WSDL. 15 minutes that could just change your (professional) life for the better!

Farewell PaceMetrics

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 17:43:52 GMT

In a few days time I'm finishing up at PaceMetrics, the company I've been with for the last three years. Leaving Pace was a tough enough decision for me. I joined on an up curve just as the company was starting to build its fourth generation BAM (Business Activity Monitor), and winning a huge deal with a tier one investment bank. To deliver that project and productise it, I was lucky enough to quickly assemble one of the best software development teams I've ever had. This team was world class, all experienced, seasoned, innovative, agile engineers. We had a really stellar project manager and business architect in Colm Toolan, and a super professional services team, and the result was PaceMaker 4:

- fully Java, J2EE (POJOs of course!) and JMS based, leveraging best-of-breed open source components and tools
- loosely coupled components communicating asynchronously using XML-based messagess
- a simple maven based build
- a super-scalable, fully reliable, and architecturally innovative BAM engine - thanks James :-)
- a scalable web front end built on some pretty cool caching technology
- enterprise ready monitoring and management through JMX from our own custom web based admin console
- Eclipse based tooling (courtesy of yours truely)

Its been a great few years, but in the end I've been tempted away by the shimmering lights of SOA and ESBs. I'll post more on that in a couple of days.

David Black: XML

James Pasley's Just Enough XML to Survive

Farewell PaceMetrics