Tim Bray, co-author of XML and XML Namespaces, developer advocate of Android and critical of Enterprise System-building

"The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise."

When Tim Bray wrote those words on his blog in January this year he put his finger on a sore point for the developers of Enterprise Systems. How is it that development of Enterprise Systems tends to be slow, cumbersome and fails so many times, while the Net is full of successful and userfriendly systems?
The 55-year old canadian Tim Bray has been in the IT-industry for almost 30 years and has contributed in many ways to different technologies related to the net. He was co-author of the XML specification and the XML Namespace specification. He has experienced both development of Enterprise systems and web-development, so JAOO invited him to elaborate his thoughts about system development. Thoughts that Kresten Krab Thorup, CTO at Trifork and head of the JAOO programme committee characterises as:
"Tim Bray writes about the new breed of enterprise-scale systems. This is a wakeup call to CIOs and CTOs who think a J2EE-strategy or .NET strategy has a future. You're fooling yourself."

At that time, only one talk, "Doing it wrong" by Tim Bray was planned.
But then something happened.

Leaving Sun/Oracle for Google

On his blog 15th March, Tim Bray announced that he was starting to work for Google after almost 6 years at Sun, who was recently bought by Oracle..
"Google and I have been a plausible match for a long time. Web-centric, check. Search, check. Open-source, check. The list goes on."
He is now working as developer advocate focusing on the Android platform. A platform which is following ideals close to Tim Brays heart as opposed to the iPhone, which he admires from a technical and design point of view, but hates when it comes to the underlying business philosophy:

iPhone's Disney-fied walled garden 

"The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger. I hate it.I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom is not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient," he writes on his blog.
Well, Tim Bray does not shy away from controversy and does speak his mind when it comes to the future development of the mobile internet. During the talk "The mobile imperative" he will address programming models, user experience, platform fragmentation, and provide a snapshot of the mobile-market state of play in late 2010

Did you know that?
Tim Bray described his switch of focus from Maths to Computer Science this way: "In maths I’d worked like a dog for my Cs, but in CS I worked much less for As—and learned that you got paid well for doing it."

Links:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/01/02/Doing-It-Wrong
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2010/03/15/Joining-Google