Middleware is proud to have two distinguished keynote speakers:
Jim Waldo from Sun Microsystems, and
Ken Birman from Cornell University.

The End of Protocols
or, Middleware for the New Millennium
(click here for the presentation)

Jim Waldo
Distinguished Engineer
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

As networks continue to increase in size, the patterns of communication are less and less centered around a human and more and more centered around programs talking to other programs. At the same time, the variety of things (devices and services) that populate the network is also expanding; we no longer have networks of desktop machines connected to servers but networks of everything from sensors and hand-held devices up to clusters of super computers. Finally, our networks are changing from collections of positionally static machines to mixtures of fixed and mobile platforms.

All of these changes stress the basic design assumptions that have conditioned the production of middleware for the past 25 years. Notions of human intervention to install or remove participants from a network don't scale to the size and changing nature of the networks we are now creating. Approaches to middleware that require simultaneous updating of a server and all of its clients don't scale to these new networks. Internet addresses that are used for both identification and routing do not scale to the mobile, ad hoc networking models that are arising. The very size of the networks calls into question the efficacy of centralized control of these networks.

In this talk, I will argue that our approach to middleware needs to change in fundamental ways if we are to keep up with the changes in networking. I will argue that we need to adopt a network version of object-oriented programming that allows us to abstract what is being done from how it is done, and allow what is done to be changed in ways that can be made transparent to users, which will be programs, not people. We need to adopt identification schemes that are fit for programs, not people, and we need to find ways of building networks that can be self-organizing and self healing. In the process of building such an infrastructure, the role of protocols (which has been central to distributed computing) will become secondary, while the notions of an interface and multiple implementations of that interface will become primary. A first example of such a system, Jini, will be described, and some of the problems that will need to be addressed by this new approach to distribution will be identified.

Speaker biography: Jim Waldo is a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems, where he is the lead architect for Jini, a distributed programming system based on Java. Prior to Jini, Jim worked in JavaSoft and Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he did research in the areas of object-oriented programming and systems, distributed computing, and user environments.

Before joining Sun, Jim spent eight years at Apollo Computer and Hewlett-Packard working in the areas of distributed object systems, user interfaces, class libraries, text and internationalization. While at HP, he led the design and development of the first Object Request Broker, and was instrumental in getting that technology incorporated into the first OMG CORBA specification. He edited the book "The Evolution of C++: Language Design in the Marketplace of Ideas" (MIT Press), and was one of the authors of "The Jini Specification" (Addison Wesley).

Jim is an adjunct faculty member of Harvard University, where he teaches distributed computing in the department of computer science. Jim received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). He also holds M.A. degrees in both linguistics and philosophy from the University of Utah. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM.

Integrating the e-business
(click here for the presentation)

Ken Birman, Chief Executive Officer of Reliable Network Solutions
and Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University

The wave of Internet technologies is making e-business integration mandatory for businesses of all sizes.  Perhaps the hardest problem this raises is the management of large-scale e-business systems, which may be distributed over hundreds of computers running a variety of databases, proprietary applications, and on all sorts of platforms.  Fortunately, recent years have seen important advances in the technologies for fault-tolerant, secure communication, system management, and distributed control.  This talk will review some of the emerging technology options with a focus on presentation through middleware interfaces, tradeoffs between scalability and performance, and on the resulting vision of completely integrated, self-managing e-business solutions that will span a new generation of global enterprises.

Speaker biography: Dr. Kenneth P. Birman is Chief Executive Officer of Reliable Network Solutions, Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, and an ACM Fellow.  Dr. Birman is probably best known for his work on the Isis Toolkit, the technology at the core of the New York and Swiss Stock Exchanges, the French air traffic control system console-replication system, and many other mission-critical applications.  Birman has written extensively on reliable, secure distributed computing.  He invented the virtual synchrony computing model, now widely adopted for tracking membership in cluster computing systems and similar multi-process applications, and recently proposed a new communication primitive called the bimodal multicast, an unusually scalable primitive for reliable communication.  In addition to some 25 journal publications and 50 conference papers, Birman is the author of two books and was Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Computer Systems from 1993 to 1999.