And who are you, exactly?

My name is Ade, and I work for IONA Technologies as a Principal Consultant in their Services Organisation. As part of my role I get to travel a lot, meet customers, and design and build software solutions using a pretty wide range of middleware technologies: Web Services, CORBA, J2EE, JMS, open-source, closed source - all the usual suspects are there. I love my job - it's a great way to meet people and learn a whole lot of stuff.

I've been blogging for a while on the IONA SOS blog (see sidebar for a link); I've also been getting lots of great opportunities to speak around Europe on SOA and on middleware.

In this blog I'm going to share my middleware experiences - from the sublime to the ridiculous - and talk about my perspectives on architecting and implementing distributed systems.

While I do have an academic background, it's not actually in distributed systems (although it was a whole lot of fun building a networked supercomputer out of the Maynooth software labs to run my Ph.D. experiments in genetic programming)... It turns out there's a lot your can do with 200 PCs and a shared file system ;)

Anyway - welcome. I hope you find the articles on this blog interesting and helpful.