Thursday, October 16, 2008

Start of the adventure

Hello,

after having read Blogs on the web for a while I am now down to writing my own. I thought it might be nice to introduce myself first before I get into the topic of Open Source adventures.

My name is Andreas Gies and I currently work as a Principal Architect for PROGRESS Software. As some of you may know, PROGRESS recently acquired IONA Technologies. With that acquisition a large portion of open source technologies came to the footsteps of PROGRESS Software and not surprisingly a section of our consulting force will concentrate on those technologies.

Before the acquisistion I was working mainly with the PROGRESS ESB and a specialist for large scale deployments. The tool of choice to manage project complexity for me was Maven and over the last 3 years I have spent a lot of time writing a suite of Maven plugins addressing various topics in that area: packaging applications fit for distributed deployments and deploying the applications to their distributed runtimes using a "Model driven deployment" approach.

As Maven has brought me to the side of Open Source and I knew all the IONA guys from my past (I was at IONA before joining PROGRESS) it was only natural to become a member of the team dedicated to the Open Source Technologies.

Given my background on ESB based architectures, middleware and deployment I will concentraIn my Blog foremost on Apache ServiceMix, ActiveMQ with it's most interesting Camel subproject and deployment strategies. The start will be slow as I need to get my head around those projects first and I hope readers new to those technologies will benefit from that. As ServiceMix and I get along better and better, may be we can address more advanced topics as well.