David Ingham

ApacheCon US 2009

I'm writing this from ApacheCon in Oakland. Apache is celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). My first involvement with Apache was way back in 1995 when I wrote a plug-in module for the Apache HTTP Server as part of my W3Objects research work. It's amazing how ASF has grown in the intervening years.

My main reason for being here is to talk about AMQP and Apache Qpid.

Microsoft joined the AMQP Working Group a year or so ago and I'm our representative there. I'm also the technical lead for the work we've been doing to make Windows a great platform for Qpid. Specifically we've made the following contributions to Qpid:

• Ported the C++ broker and client library to Windows
• Added a WCF channel to allow .NET developers to write clients that communicate using AMQP using our standard network programming API
• Added a Microsoft SQL-based persistence store for the Qpid broker
• Packaging for Windows including a Windows installer with samples

I've been spreading the word at every opportunity.

First was BarCamp. It was the first time that I've attended an "unconference" but I enjoyed it very much. If you haven't heard of BarCamp, it works like this - the organizers provide some basic infrastructure (rooms, projectors, etc.) but there is no program defined in advance. The attendees turn up prepared to speak on some topic and then spend the first 30 minutes of the day devising the schedule for the day. I gave a session on the challenges of enterprise messaging in a heterogeneous environment, covering AMQP and Apache Qpid. It was a good session with lots of discussion. [slides here]

A number of Apache project meetups were organized for ApacheCon and a last-minute slot opened up. Jonathan Robie, a Qpid contributor from Red Hat, stepped up and organized a Qpid meetup. Unfortunately there wasn't a big attendance due to the lack of advance notice. We reconvened to the bar ;-)

Yesterday I presented again in a joint session with Kent Brown of Microsoft and Prabath Siriwardena of WSO2. The title was "Interoperability Through Community" and covered Apache Stonehenge and Apache Qpid. Stonehenge is an Incubator project focused on Web services interoperability. They've built a real-world application, StockTrader, that demonstrates through code how to achieve Web services interoperability between different Web services stacks. Today this includes Microsoft, Spring Source, Sun and WSO2. I gave a pitch on AMQP and Apache Qpid as solutions for building heterogeneous message-oriented middleware applications. [slides here]

So, it's been a good few days geeking out at ApacheCon. I plan to attend again.

2009 AMQP Conference

I spent the last 3 days in La Jolla Shores near San Diego for the AMQP Conference. Microsoft joined the AMQP Working Group in October 2008 and I’m our representative in the AMQP Project Management Committee. This was my first opportunity to meet many of the working group members face-to-face; it was good to put faces to the disembodied voices that I’ve been talking with on the phone every week.

The setting for the conference, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, was just perfect; right on the beach with the sun shining and sound of waves crashing in the background. Many thanks to Matthew Arrott and Rita Bauer for making us feel so welcome.

The first day of the conference was open to the public and I’m pleased to say that we were full to capacity. Representatives from a broad range of companies came to hear about AMQP and the details of the upcoming 1.0 version of the specification. John O’Hara (JPMorgan), the originator and Chairman of the AMQP Working Group, began with an introduction to AMQP that covered the motivation and real-world use cases that it’s designed to address. Mark Blair (Credit Suisse) then presented the findings of the User SIG - the features and characteristics deemed necessary by the end-users participating in the working group. Next up was an “AMQP in detail” session presented by Rob Godfrey (JPMorgan) and Rafi Schloming (Red Hat) that covered the new AMQP 1.0 messaging model and wire-level transport. The vendors of the main three AMQP implementations, iMatix, Rabbit Technologies and Red Hat, then described how their products were being used in real-world deployments today. Finally there was a chance for the audience to provide feedback. I’m pleased to say that response was uniformly positive.

The slides from the session are available:

• Introduction to AMQP and User SIG findings
• AMQP technical overview
• AMQP transport overview

The remaining two days were a closed session of the AMQP Working Group. Good progress was made on a range of subjects. I was impressed how a group of people with diverse opinions were able to work together productively and reach consensus on a range of issues.

The next few months are going to be a busy time for the Working Group as we finalize the 1.0 version of the specification. The pressure is on as if this event is anything to go by, there’s a real demand out there.

Microsoft joins the AMQP working group

I first heard about AMQP (the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) back in early 2005 when John Davies first announced its existence at the Web Services on Wall Street Conference. I loved the concept of an open standard for messaging middleware and was excited by the potential for wire-level interoperability for enterprise messaging.

I’ve been tracking the progress of AMQP ever since. The formation of the AMQP.org working group in summer 2006 was another great milestone. Today AMQP.org consists of a broad group of software vendors and end-users: Cisco Systems, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Börse Systems, Envoy Technologies, Inc., Goldman Sachs, IONA Technologies PLC, iMatix Corporation sprl., JPMorgan Chase Bank Inc. N.A, Novell, Rabbit Technologies Ltd., Red Hat, Inc., TWIST Process Innovations Ltd, WS02, Inc. and 29West Inc. Last

Last Friday, Microsoft joined the party by becoming a member of AMQP.org. You can get more information from the press release and Sam Ramji’s blog posting.

I’m excited. More on this to come…

Windows Home Server Power Pack 1

Announced yesterday, Power Pack 1 for the excellent Windows Home Server is finally available. If you have automatic updates enabled then you'll eventually get this via Windows Update. If you can't wait, you can get it now at the Microsoft Download Center. For me, the main reason to pick this up is the fix to the data corruption bug but there are a few bonus features too:

• Support for PCs running Windows Vista x64 editions
• Backup of home server Shared Folders
• Easier, enhanced remote access capabilities
• Better energy efficiency
• Improved performance

More info here.

I'm currently working from the UK and being able to access files from our server back in Seattle has been especially useful. It's a really great product.

Expanding interoperability

In case you missed it, Microsoft made a major announcement today regarding some significant changes being made to foster interoperability. A key piece of this is the publication of some 30000 pages of API and protocol documentation; here's an extract from the press release:

To enhance connections with third-party products, Microsoft will publish on its Web site documentation for all application programming interfaces (APIs) and communications protocols in its high-volume products that are used by other Microsoft products. Developers do not need to take a license or pay a royalty or other fee to access this information. Open access to this documentation will ensure that third-party developers can connect to Microsoft’s high-volume products just as Microsoft’s other products do.

There has been a massive amount of effort invested in this documentation work. I've had the pleasure of working on some of these documents myself, specifically some of the message queuing ones, and so it's great to see them out in the open.

Windows Home Server

Like many geeks I have a server at home that we use as a central place to store music, photos and documents. I used to use an old Fedora Core linux box to do the job, based on a vintage dual processor PIII. This trusty old box had served me well for several years and accompanied me on the trip across the Atlantic from Newcastle to Seattle. Well, a few weeks back it finally gave up the ghost, leaving me to look for a replacement.

My initial thought was to buy a few new components and resurrect the box, again as a linux-based server. Before I did though, I thought I’d check out the newly released Windows Home Server, you know, being a company man and all ;-)

For those that haven’t heard of it, Windows Home Server (WHS) is pretty different from the other flavours of Windows in that, rather than being a general-purpose platform, it’s squarely focused on being an appliance for the home. It’s intended to run as a headless thing that you can stuff in the closet, or, if you prefer, in the wardrobe.

So what does it do? Well, first it acts as a central file store. You can create a bunch of shares and make them accessible over the network by your client PCs. Not much new there I hear you say. True, not on the surface of it, but if you look under the covers you’ll see a few smarts in how the server is storing the data. Instead of using RAID-based storage for data redundancy, WHS allows a bunch of different sized discs work to work together as a single volume. If you mark a particular share as requiring duplication, WHS will make sure that each of the files are stored on multiple physical disks. If you need more storage just go ahead and add some more drives and WHS will add it to the pool. If you have a disc failure, pull it out, stick in a replacement and WHS will do the necessary re-shuffling to restore the duplication. Very cool.

Another very useful feature is the integrated support for automated backups of the other computers in the house. By installing some ‘connector’ software on each client box, WHS will automate their backup using a nice incremental backup scheme. Using the server console you can configure the backup schedule that you want. The machines then wake up in the middle of the night and back themselves up to the server. You can open any of the backups and restore individual files or you can restore a complete machine using a special recovery disk. As the guy from The Fast Show’s Jazz Club would say, nice!

But wait, there’s more. WHS also provides a remote access feature that allows you to get at all your files or remote desktop into any of your home machines through a remote desktop protocol tunneled through HTTP.

One of the nice things about WHS is that it’s based on Windows Server 2003 so, if you know what you’re doing, you can get under the covers of the very simple-to-use interface and get to the real server underneath, allowing you to install other software on the box. I installed my streaming music server which works great; I’ll talk about this in another post.

Anyway, I’m sold, WHS is a really great product. If you’re looking to centralize your family’s photos and music or implement a backup strategy for all your precious data, I’d recommend that you take a look at WHS. You can buy pre-built, typically headless, machines from the likes of HP and smaller specialist providers, or you can buy the software and install it yourself. I’m running mine on a relatvely beefy system (2.33GHz E6650 Core2Duo) but others have reported respectable performance on some really old boxes. You know you’ve been looking for something to do with that old PC you’ve got lying around. You can register for an evaluation at the Windows Home Server website.

OneNote Live Sharing

I've been using OneNote 2007 quite a bit since I joined Microsoft. It's a really nice tool for taking and organising notes. I particularly like the way it integrates with Outlook so that I can right-click on an Outlook meeting and automatically create a new note with all the meeting info (participants etc.) right there. Anyway, it has a bunch of cool features but I discovered a new one yesterday that blew me away, it's called OneNote Live Sharing. Using this wizzo feature it's possible to share a note with a group of others over the network. You can either use this in broadcast mode where the group see the changes the owner is making, or you can enable it so that the group can collaborate on updating the content - it's very cool. A copy of the note gets also saved in each user's notebook. I think it synchronises offline updates too but I haven't tried that yet.

I was in a Scrum planning meeting yesterday and we used this Live Sharing feature to collaborate together to edit the plans - very agile! It's kinda like a giant whiteboard that everyone can update. If you have OneNote, give it a whirl.