Big vendors such as IBM and Microsoft are building their Web services stacks right into their operating systems and middleware, but that still leaves room for an open source-powered alternative. WS02 aims to provide that choice, and its co-founder Paul Fremantle is a strong believer in both open source and open standards. His contributions to Apache's Axis 2 project and WS-Reliable eXchange make him a natural spokesman for this approach to Web services. In this conversation, Fremantle describes the WS02 open-source implementations of the Axis 2 Web services framework, as well as security and reliabile messaging components that help IT organizations stay agile and avoid vendor lock-in. Financial institutions use this technology to deal with escalating data "waterfalls", and Web sites are migrating from Axis 1 to Axis 2 for improved scalability. Fremantle also comments on Microsoft's recent Open Specification Promise, which affects open source implementations of some of the standards it's helped create.
Paul Fremantle is co-founder and vice president of technology at WSO2. Fremantle was a senior technical staff member at IBM for 9 years. At IBM, Paul created the Web Services Gateway, and led the team that developed and shipped it as part of WebSphere Application Server. He was part of the team that put the Service Integration Bus technology into WebSphere Application Server 6. He was also the key WebSphere technical sales lead for Europe, working closely with development to manage beta programmes, develop training materials, and enable first-of-a-kind J2EE projects. Fremantle co-created the Web Services Invocation Framework (WSIF) with WSO2 co-founder Sajiva Weerawarana while also co-leading JSR 110: Java APIs for WSDL, which produced WSDL4J. Fremantle is currently co-chair of the OASIS Web Services Reliable eXchange Technical Committee, which is charged with creating the industry standard for reliable message exchange over SOAP. Fremantle’s involvement in open source goes back to the original Apache SOAP project, where he donated code to enable access to Enterprise JavaBeans. He has also led IBM’s involvement in the Axis C/C++ project. Fremantle has published two books: Building Web Services in Java, 2nd Edition, and The XML Files. Before joining IBM, Fremantle was a consultant at ZS Associates, providing analytical sales forecasting consultancy to the pharmaceutical market. Fremantle has an M.A. in mathematics and philosophy and an M.Sc/ in computation, both from Oxford University.
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