Steven Parkes Application 2009

My name is Steven Parkes and I'm applying for JSF membership.

History
I'm (currently) an independent developer working in reliable distributed concurrent computing. I've been doing concurrent programming based on the Actor model since grad school and released a concurrency library, Dramatis, for dynamic languages (currently Ruby and Python) last year.

I've started integrating XMPP into Dramatis for handling the distributed portion of the problem. This code isn't released yet, but I'm currently using StropheJS and ejabberd. I've submitted a couple of small patches to Jack on StopheJS. I have some patches for ejabberd that work around some latency issues that I'll be putting in my github repo.

I've started working on the server-side C and Ruby XMPP support, staring with looking at the many that are out there, generally trying to understand performance and latency. Prototype was developed with Blather (http://github.com/sprsquish/blather) but that may change.

I expect the next big release of Dramatis including XMPP support around Q1 2010.

Jabber/XMPP Projects

 * Dramatis (Actors over, among other things, XMPP). Current docs at http://dramatis.mischance.net/doc/. XMPP support not released yet.


 * Small contributions to StrophJS: http://github.com/smparkes/strophejs.


 * Small contributions to ejabberd. (Repo at http://github.com/smparkes/ejabberd but patches not cleaned up/pushed yet).

Jabber/XMPP - Why I like it
I use Jabber/XMPP for location-independent real-time interprocess communication. It's the only technology that has a sufficiently open yet secure authentication mechanism to make it feasible use in web-wide, real-time, ubiquitous (read: can work in the browser) communication.

The resource model is wonderful.

Why I'm applying
Well, I'm dependent on XMPP and it's community, so I want to see it do well; it's been a huge benefit to me. I'd like to give back. I'd like to think I contributed to the dicussion on the s2s auth/callback stuff at the meeting in San Jose at OSCON. In any case, it was fun.

Contact
xmpp: smparkes@smparkes.net

email: [mailto:smparkes@smparkes.net smparkes@smparkes.net]

Affiliation: individual (smparkes.net llc)