I can hear you asking "who?!" already. He's a mover and shaker in the XML and web services world, whom I met for the first time at the WebBuilder conference last year. He was really interesting but, most important of all, a nice guy. At that conference I met a surprising number of people who weren't nice, but James stood out as more fun than a barrel of whippets.
He spoke at WebBuilder on web services, pointing out how an old economist had pointed out the benefits to industry of lowering the barriers to describing, discovering, and using resources. These days "resources" are web services--information offered through HTTP and XML based RPC protocols like XML-RPC and SOAP. The description, discovering, and exploitation of those resources is now done via SOAP, UDDI, WSDL, and all the other four-letter words being bandied around by the web services folks.
Anyway, long story short ... James was really interesting, and when a bunch of us had dinner that night he turned out to be a friendly genuine guy off-stage. He's Australian, a Python programmer, and he has a strong love of open source software.
"Does this paean have a point?" I hear you asking. Yup. James will be at the Open Source Convention, talking about Web Services (among other things). If you ask nicely, he may even talk about the old economist and you'll be able to say "oh, THAT'S what Nat was on about."
Just don't ask for his opinion of New Zealanders ... :-)
--Nat
