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Ärende: Interview with Tim Bray 
================================
 
Interview with Tim Bray 
By James Gray 
Created 2006-09-29 01:00 

The loud Atom evangelist Tim Bray talks about everything from Ruby to
simplified equal opportunity. 

No history book on the Internet would be complete without a chapter on Tim
Bray.  Not only was Tim a co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification, but he also
created the first parser software for XML documents and has been co-driving the
development of Atom.  Today, fulfilling a dual role as tireless
Netizen-evangelist and Director of Web Technologies for Sun Microsystems, Tim
continues to build on his early work by advocating for a more elegant,
platform-independent and user-friendly Internet. Linux Journal recently checked
in with Tim Bray to get an update on where he is channeling his creative
energies these days.

LJ: You have been Director of Web Technologies for Sun Microsystems for just
more than two years now.  Can you tell us what kinds of projects you've been
pursuing in that role?

TB: The most important project is helping return Sun to the position it should
be in: profitable and growing.  At Sun, I've been a generalist, which is good
for someone with adult-ADD.  I did a lot of work on launching the employee
blogging (see blogs.sun.com [1]).  I've been an evangelist in favor of Sun
embracing alternatives to Java-both running languages like PHP and Ruby on the
Java platform, and embracing those languages in their native form as perfectly
viable options for developers.  I've been a vocal skeptic of the WS-* project,
preferring simpler, more lightweight alternatives based on proven Web
technologies.  And I've been doing a ton of work on the Atom technology, both
co-chairing the IETF working group and evangelizing it to developers.  I've
also done some work on disk I/O performance (I'm the original author of the
venerable "Bonnie" benchmark).  Finally, I've been whittling away at a
skunkworks named Sigrid for a couple of years now, but <blush> have yet to
release anything.

LJ: Does the position at Sun give you an effective "bully pulpit" from which to
effect positive change on issues important to you?

TB: No change comes easy, and no single individual has a fulcrum placed in such
a way that he or she can move the earth.  I've put my weight behind a few ideas
and efforts that have moved forward in a way that pleased me, and I've failed
to make much progress in some other areas.  I think the degree to which I'm
listened to has more to do with what I say-whether it makes sense and is
interesting-than who I work for.

LJ: What issues and trends are you currently most passionate about, and what
form is your advocacy taking?

TB: I think Atom, both the format and the protocol, are going to be pervasive
technologies that will have highly visible consequences. Based on my XML
experience, I'm now too smart to try to predict exactly what those consequences
will be.  But I'm evangelizing it everywhere I get a chance, most recently from
the stage at OSCON.  Enough others have taken up the task of questioning WS-*
that I no longer feel compelled to speak up quite so often.  Second, I am a
very small part of the groundswell of developers heading in the direction of
dynamically typed languages.  I am personally quite passionately convinced that
almost all DRM technologies are technically broken and bad for business, but
this has little to do with my day job.

For all the things I care about, I find my blog (www.tbray.org/ongoing [2]) the
most effective way to share my views with the world; mostly because it's a
conversation, not a bully pulpit.

LJ: As you say, you have been devoting a great deal of energy to Atom.  What is
your specific role in it, and what are your thoughts on where it is headed?

TB: I'm the co-chair of the IETF Working Group, and one of the loudest Atom
evangelists.  Both the Atom data format and the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP)
are going to be big.  The data format will be used in some places where RSS is
now, but it turns out that there is a demand for a general-purpose "collection"
format-something XML has never had, and Atom suits that bill.  The APP provides
a low-friction, simple, standardized way to post anything (words, pictures,
movies) to the Web, to update it, and to delete it.  There's an excellent
chance that it will be included in a high proportion of the future's cell
phones, not to mention e-mail and Web and news and office-productivity clients,
which will thus be able to post to any Web-publishing service that plays by the
rules.

LJ: You were one of the three editors of the original XML 1.0 specification. 
What are your thoughts on the results eight years later?

TB: I'm horribly unsatisfied and keenly aware of all the ways in which XML
could have been better, mostly by being smaller and simpler.  XML addressed a
huge, painful problem (standardized machine-independent data format) at the
right time, and it didn't suck just enough, so it became the default solution. 
That aside, I'm happy that the world has bought into the notion of sending data
around in a way that is thoroughly internationalized and radically independent
of any programming language or operating system or hardware.

LJ: From what I understand, XML grew out of the unwieldy SGML and a project to
put the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) on-line, is that correct?

TB: Not quite.  XML grew out of SGML, which was used in a lot of high-end
publishing systems, but not the New OED project, which I managed. The
electronic OED, at the time I was there, used a markup system that was an awful
lot like what we now call XML; as a side effect of working with it, and then of
founding a company, Open Text, to take our inventions to market, I became
familiar with SGML.  In 1996, when Jon Bosak was getting the XML Project
launched, there were maybe a dozen people in the world who were familiar with
both SGML and with the Web, and I was one of them.

LJ: How do you think things stand regarding XML as a document format, post
controversy with the State of Massachusetts regarding the Open Document Format?

TB: The fight is basically over; the public sector has noticed the risk
reduction and flexibility you get from storing long-lived documents in an
XML-based format and has started a move in that direction that will become
pervasive, world-wide.  After years of trying to convince them that proprietary
formats for public data were okay, Microsoft has shifted gears and is
frantically trying to apply a thin coat of "standards" paint to its own Office
XML formats; the spec is thousands of pages in length and will never be fully
implemented by anything but Microsoft Office, which kind of misses the point. 
I'm pretty confident that the public-sector policy-makers will see through this
pathetic ruse.  The private sector, which typically has a shorter temporal
horizon, is less far along the road to taking good care of its information
resources, but it'll get there too.

LJ: Can you tell us more of your thoughts on the state of Web Services?

TB: It depends what you mean by "Web Services".  There are two core ideas,
taken from the Web (hence the name).  First, instead of trying to define APIs
across networks, you specify the messages that are exchanged, and second, that
XML is a decent data format for the messages.  I personally believe both, and
this is the only sane way to integrate applications in a heterogeneous
environment.  Unfortunately, the attempt to standardize this excellent idea,
under the WS-* label, has gone off the rails.  It is insanely complex, baroque
and abstracted, and implementing it requires reading hundreds of pages of
poorly written, unstable specs and dealing with ferocious inter-vendor
politics.  Fortunately for the future, there is a rock-solid base of proven,
efficient, scalable, standardized technology: HTTP, XML and so on, and some
very clear guidance on how to do things: REST.  So, I expect WS-* to fall far
short of expectations, but Web Services, done more simply, to be the default
way of doing things in the future.

LJ: What is your take on the Java/OSS debate?

TB: I'm not 100% convinced that an OSS license for Java will bring that much
engineering benefit.  One of the biggest benefits of open source is that bugs
are caught and fixed more quickly.  But "Java" is defined as "a binary that
passes the TCK", and that's worked well; the Java community likes it, and
that's how it's going to stay.  So I'm not sure that it's reasonable to expect
the open-source "release early, release often" culture to come to Java.  On the
other hand, Java's licensing has been a cultural obstacle to a lot of people,
especially in the Linux space.  One result is that things like GNOME and KDE
are still substantially written in C++, blecch.  So I'm optimistic that a real
open-source license will eventually empower the developers of the non-Microsoft
desktop.

LJ: You are a big fan of Ruby and Ruby on Rails.  What is it about them that
interests you?

TB: In fact, I'm a fan of dynamic languages in general-my own Weblogging system
is written mostly in Perl.  To my eye, Ruby and Python stand out from the crowd
of such languages in that they seem useful for building large, ambitious
software projects as well as the quick one-offs that "scripting" languages have
traditionally been used for.  Speaking personally, I find Ruby a bit more
pleasing than Python, but the margin is at best 55/45; there are areas where
Python is more attractive. I don't think either is going to wipe out the other.
 Rails seems special; in its sweet spot, maintainable Web apps with a low
barrier to entry, it seems like it's set a new standard.

LJ: What is your take on the state of PHP?

TB: Aesthetically speaking, I don't like PHP.  I am told that its top-level
namespace has 5,000 functions, which is sort of mind-boggling.  On the other
hand, I've seen how it's empowered legions of people, many without a lot of
formal training, to get very usable Web apps on the air quickly.  And its
scaling story is impressive: anything that runs the infrastructure for Yahoo!
Finance deserves respect.  Still, whenever I'm asked to look at actual PHP
code, chances are it'll be an unmaintainable mess: spaghetti SQL wrapped in
spaghetti PHP wrapped in spaghetti HTML.  I think that what we'd like, ideally,
is something that has PHP's ease-of-use and scaling advantages, but is more
effective at separation of concerns and maintainability.  Something like Rails
or Django.  And, Java EE is moving in that direction fast with release 5.

LJ: The Weblog you mentioned above at www.tbray.org/ongoing [3]-what is your
mission with it?

TB: No mission whatsoever.  I like being able to talk to the world, and even
more, I like having the world talk back to me.  I'm naturally a fast writer
with lots of strong opinions, and it turns out that (for the last couple of
years anyhow) a lot of other people are interested in the same things I am.  It
also gives me a place to post my pictures and talk about politics and music and
books and so on.  I'll confess that there have been a few occasions when I've
deliberately tried to write something to appeal to a big audience or make an
impact, and it never works.  I totally can't predict which of my pieces will
get Slashdotted and which will sink without a trace.  So I just write about
what I care about.  Sometimes people ask me to write about something-sometimes
people at Sun, sometimes from elsewhere; sometimes I say yes, sometimes no,
based on whether it's interesting or not.

LJ: The potential for everyone to participate in the Internet experience seems
to be an important issue for you.  In fact, you've written that "The Net itself
is a contribution, by humanity to humanity, the engine of future contribution
and experience." What do you think it will take to make your vision of a truly
accessible and egalitarian Internet into reality?

TB: I'm 100% in favor of making the Net "accessible", but I don't think either
the Net or the world are particularly egalitarian.  The only equality you can
hope for, really, is equality of opportunity.  Take blogging for example.  Not
everyone likes writing, not everyone writes well and not everyone writes
quickly.  Having said all that, I think that a lot more people could be
participating than are right now, and the biggest barrier to entry is the lousy
quality of the tools.  I think that to improve the quality of the creative
experience, we need to get some standard protocols in place, which is why I'm
so enthused about the APP.

LJ: All right, since this is Linux Journal, we need to ask at least have one
pure Linux question before we close, okay? What is your favorite Linux
distribution?

TB: My favorite distro is Ubuntu, although the server/firewall box in my
basement is basic Debian, and I'm happy with that too.

LJ: Thank you for your great insights, Tim!

James Gray is Products Editor for Linux Journal.

Links
[1] http://blogs.sun.com
[2] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing
[3] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing

Source URL: http://interactive.linuxjournal.com/article/9247

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