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Ones to Watch 2002
These up-and-comers are developing the technologies that will matter most in the coming months
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Adam Bosworth, BEA Systems: Asynchronous Web services
Building on his experience as chief architect of XML at Microsoft, co-founder
of CrossGain, and now vice president of engineering at BEA Systems,
Bosworth is setting up a framework to describe Web services and push them
to the next level.
BEA's WebLogic Workshop, previously known as Cajun, presents an application
development framework, toolset, and run time that is loosely coupled --
allowing for easier Web services deployment and integration -- and supports
both synchronous and asynchronous Web services. Bosworth believes that
most Web services for b-to-b work will need at least some degree of
asynchronous communication to deal with Web services requests that do not
necessarily need immediate attention.
Asynchronous functionality is especially important to long-running processes
such as customer queries, reverse auctions, or product-status notifications
and to the accessibility and reliability of Web services. Bosworth is still
waiting for the right Web services reliability and security standards to bring
Web services completely into the b-to-b world.
Troy Dixler, Allegro Networks: Multirouter technology/routing as a service
Dixler is looking to give carriers a way out of their inefficient rack-and-stack
router configurations for scaling IP networks by offering Allegro's multiple
routing devices in a single box.
Putting these multirouter boxes at various locations will give carriers the
chance to sell routing as part of their system: Companies will be able to buy
routing services from the same source as their bandwidth, expanding their
networks faster and more easily, says Dixler. The "technical ramifications of
building this kind of system are so deep," he adds, noting that multirouter
technology gets to the foundation of Internet connectivity, which is "almost a
utility at this point -- people rely on e-mail like they rely on a dial tone."
"There are going to be a lot more 'multidevices' [in the future]: multiservers,
multifirewalls, multirouters," says Dixler. "The last-mile problem is not going to
be solved overnight. ... This is where all routers are going to go. It just
doesn't make sense to build them the way they have been. I'd love to look
back 10 years and say, 'Remember when we had racks of routers?' If I can
say that in 10 years, then we're making history here."
Ian Foster, Carl Kessleman, and Steve Tuecke, The Globus Project: Grid
computing
Begun in 1995, The Globus Project combines open-architecture
implementations with the promise of grid computing to "enable the sharing and
coordinated use of resources among dynamically formed groups of individuals
and institutions -- what we call 'virtual organizations,' " says Foster, one of
the project's founding members.
Along with Kessleman and Tuecke, Foster and the rest of The Globus Project
team -- about 50 people at Argonne National Laboratory and the Information
Science Institute at the University of Southern California, plus several others
-- are setting up the foundation to unify distributed computing frameworks
through standard, open grid protocols and open-source implementations of
those protocols.
Currently, Globus is working on integrating grid technology with Web services
through the OGSA (Open Grid Services Architecture), coordinating data
processing across the computing grid to be delivered as Web services. "This
work will produce Globus Toolkit 3.0, which we hope will provide an
open-source, open-architecture grid technology base for e-business and
e-science," explains Foster; this integration work will continue through 2002
and 2003.
Bob Lamoureaux, WorldStreet: FIX protocol
The FIX (Financial Information eXchange) protocol may be the nearest thing
to a standard for the securities industry. The work done by Lamoureaux and
the other members of the FIX protocol group on making it relate to the
industry's need for better electronic exchange technology has the potential to
reach all corners of the global trading process.
As an open messaging standard, FIX focuses on secure, real-time
communication of financial information, linking implementers with FIX-enabled
software. A markup language, FIXML, is also in the creation stage, aiming to
streamline the complex and often numerous FIX application messages across
systems. As FIX evolves, though, it remains to be seen how much of the
industry will adopt the protocol and continue to push changes as business
changes. Still, FIX is likely to play a major role as the securities industry
moves toward greater automation.
The UDDI team: Toufic Boubez (Microsoft), Maryann Hondo (IBM), Chris Kurt
(Microsoft), Jared Rodriguez (Ariba), and Daniel Rogers (Microsoft): Web
services development
UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration) wants to become the
business yellow pages of Web services -- a way for companies to find and
select the services and contacts they need to do business.
Using XML, HTTP, and DNS, UDDI seeks to give software a way to
automatically discover services and integrate them, along with any required
translation; UDDI functionality would be written into software and lean on a
network of UDDI servers for the catalog of services and information available
on Web sites, with access provided by SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol).
Although it first emerged as an open draft in September 2002, co-authored by
employees of Microsoft, IBM, and Ariba, those who crafted and those who
currently work with UDDI expect to eventually submit UDDI to a standards
body after completing two more versions of the spec. But, as with WSDL
(Web Services Description Language), the big question for these Web
services specifications is how they will work together -- or work separately --
as Web services continue to evolve.
The WSDL team: Erik Christensen (Microsoft), Francisco Curbera (IBM), Greg
Meredith (Microsoft), and Sanjiva Weerawarana (IBM): Web services
development
WSDL could be considered a Web services tracking mechanism: It is intended
to keep tabs on what a service does and how and where it can be accessed
and implemented.
Submitted to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in March 2001, Version
1.1 of the language is "an XML format for describing network services as a set
of end points operating on messages containing either document-oriented or
procedure-oriented information. The operations and messages are described
abstractly and then bound to a concrete network protocol and message
format to define an end point. Related concrete end points are combined into
abstract end points [services]," according to the W3C note. Concerns about
WSDL's flexibility and complexity and its relationship with other Web services
standards are still being debated, but the next step in WSDL's development
hinges first on the creation of a WSDL working group, which may be coming
about through the W3C's Web Services Activity and its coordination and
working groups.
John Crawford - Intel's processor pioneer strikes gold again
Mike Lazaridis - BlackBerry genius shares simple secret of success: Listen to your customers
Andy Mendelsohn - Breaking new ground is old hat for Oracle's long-time visionary database developer
Dave Moellenhoff - ASP founder predicts the end of software as we know it
Larry Page and Sergey Brin - The Internet's most famous pair of Ph.D.s are still striving to make data more accessible
Clifford Neuman - For Kerberos co-author, security hasn't lost its allure
Ray Ozzie - Notes inventor envisions peer-to-peer technology supplanting e-mail
Vivek Ranadivé - Real-time computing pioneer is taking his message to the enterprise masses
Dave Winer - SOAP co-author strives for simplicity and drives decentralization
Mark Lucovsky - The brains behind HailStorm sees Web services as a hub for simplifying busy lives
Back to 2002 Technology Innovators
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Related Links |
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Hall of fame 2002 - Several industry icons join InfoWorld's Innovators Hall of Fame |
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Ones to Watch 2002 - These up-and-comers are developing the technologies that will matter most in the coming months |
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Where are they now? - Since the 2000 Ones to Watch were named, many dot-coms imploded and the economy
soured. How have these technological talents fared? |
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