Mark Little, Chief Technologist of JBoss, Red Hat

Dr Mark Little is Engineering Director at Red Hat, where he is also the Technical Development Manager of the SOA Platform. Mark is also Director of Standards and Red Hat's representative on the Java Executive Committee.

He has over 20 years of experience working in the area of reliable distributed systems. While at Red Hat/JBoss Mark has been the lead of the JBoss ESB and JBoss Transactions products as well as working from the office of the CTO.

Prior to joining JBoss, he was Chief Architect and co-founder at Arjuna Technologies, a Hewlett-Packard spin-off company specialising in the area of transactions and messaging for J2EE and Web Services. There he lead the transactions teams and provided technical vision for their pioneering Web Services transactions work. While at HP Mark was a Distinguished Engineer, leading the development of the world's first Web Services transactions product.

He is co-author and contributor on several books, has numerous published papers and presented at a range of conferences for over 20 years. During this period he has also found time to chair standards groups in the OMG, JCP and OASIS and co-authored several of the WS-* series of specifications.

Presentation: "Transactions: Over Used or Just Misunderstood?"

Track: Solutions Track: Performance and Scalability

Time: Thursday 15:00 - 16:00

Location: Shelley Room

Abstract:

Transaction processing has been at the heart of computing systems for over 4 decades: they provide an easily understood fault tolerance mechanism that ensures data consistency in the presence of failures and concurrent access. Many of the things we do each day are driven by transaction systems, yet others are not when perhaps they should. Why is this? Transactions, and specifically the two-phase commit they typically use, have come in for a lot of bad press over the years, with people citing performance overhead as a sufficient justification for not using them. In this presentation we'll look at transactions and try to address some of the concerns, whilst at the same time indicating where they should not be used. We'll also look at how transactions are evolving into new forms to address changes in middleware, such as Web Services, REST and mobile infrastructures.