You may have noticed that in some of my previous posts I mentioned Jim Webber. Jim is one of my best friends. We did our PhDs together (stuck in the same office for 4 years) and then worked at the HP Arjuna Labs together. I left to do my military service (it’s still compulsory in Greece where I come from) while he carried on doing great stuff in the Web Services and Transactions space. He’s one of the primary authors of the WS-CAF suite of specifications.

Few months ago, Jim decided to leave Arjuna and travel to Australia with his partner Kathy. After 4 months of travelling through various countries, they finally arrived in Australia and settled in Sydney. It didn’t take long for Jim to forget where he comes from (evidence: Jim celebrating “Australia day” by waving the Australian flag 🙂

For the last couple of weeks Jim (Jim, you need a web page so I can refer to it) has been working with us in our “Search for White Dwarfs” Grid application. I am really pleased to work with Jim again. He has co-authored an excellent book on Web Services (“Developing Enterprise Web Services: An Architect’s Guide to Best Practices”) which I highly recommend, he has written many articles on Web Services related technologies (we wrote a couple together and we are working on more), and he has a remarkable understanding of the field. He’s going to be a great asset in our efforts.

Jim and I argue about technology-related things all the time but, still, we always seem to agree at the end. It’s great. We are thinking of starting a shared blog where we can write and argue about “techie stuff”. What do you think? Would you be interested?