Episode 39: Interview Steve Vinoski

This episode is an interview with Steve Vinoski. Steve works as the
Chief Engineer for IONA. He's what you'd call a middleware guru, he
was for example deeply involved with CORBA. So, this interview
centers mainly around middleware. We begin by talking about his own
history wrt. middleare and ORBs and how ORBs evolved over time. We
then talked about whether coarse-grained, stateless components
might be a better abstraction for distributed systems than
"objects". We then covered the future of CORBA, it's use in ethe
embedded space as well as the practical relevance of the POSA
patterns when building ORBs. Then we switched topics and addressed
the role of web services as a "middleware middleware" and the
maturity of WS-* specifications. We then looked at what Steve is
working on these days, which is e.g. the Advanced Message Queueing
Protocol (AMQP) as well as dynamic languages. We concluded the
interwiew with his view on SOA.