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SQL can't cater to parallel apps: James Duncan

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: An avid photographer, a passionate open source and web technologist, and the founder of Apache Tomcat and Ant, James Duncan Davidson, during his second visit to India and the first to Bangalore, sat down for a brief interview for CIOL on the sidelines of the Spark IT 2011. Excerpts:

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CIOL: What made you to go for the names Apache 'Tomcat and Ant'?

James Duncan Davidson: While I was sitting in my office in Cupertino, to write Tomcat, I was staring at the empty screen and thinking what to name this project so as to save it in the directory.

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As I was thinking, I saw a few books kept on my shelf, which had animals on its cover.

That made me think that if someone actually wrote a book on the thing that I was working on, which animal would I want on its cover.

For some reason I landed on Tomcat. Tomcat is a small cat that is crappy and can defend for itself. Thus I named the directory as 'Tomcat' and entered my source code into that.

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Then came along Ant. The same thought process went in. I wanted an animal that builds things, since not many animals build. Whereas, ants build pretty big cities down the earth. Thus I created a directory and called it 'Ant'. That is how the names came into being.

CIOL: What is exciting to you about Indian software community?

James: Outsourcing has created a strong IT software industry here. The most interesting thing about Indian market is its huge resource pool. Every skill set that you need is right here. It will be interesting to watch how the Indian developer community takes its next step in terms of innovating.

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If at all anything is lacking in terms of innovation, it is not the technical talent, definitely. Developers need to start taking the initiative and not wait for financial, emotional or other kind of support. These will come along.

Today, with several infrastructure and power projects coming up, there are innumerable opportunities in wait for local software developers.

I'm also excited to see what will happen as local Internet access continues to increase its penetration level, both in terms of number of people as well as speed. Local software developers need to rise to cater to this market and provide applications that will give users the access to new services, essential to the local market.

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CIOL: What do you see as the one big thing that could be a turning point for the software industry?

James: One can say that the biggest trend today is cloud. However, it is just not the cloud. It is more than that. It is the amount of leverage of software that will be the differentiating point. And this will happen as better tool, better language, etc. come along.

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However, what will really change is the way software will get outsourced and how it will be leveraged. For the past one decade we have been talking about Web 2.0, and the likes of social web, such as Facebook and Twitter, which was more about people creating content, than pushing content.

So what will be the next stage of Web 2.0? If there is a Web 3.0, it is going to come from the same idea that we have run to a threshold where we will take the license of the last decade and build tools which will give much more leverage, and a part of that is cloud.

At the same time you have people who are looking at the storage space. SQL data storage was created to serve the needs of the problems of 30-40 years ago. Transactional integrity and ACID compliance are great when it comes to accounting applications; however, there are a lot of data storage and query needs for which the limitations of a SQL database start becoming problematic.

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As we learn how to craft applications that are truly parallel applications, most of the data that we're working with needs to be stored in ways that aren't like how we've done it in the past with SQL databases.

CIOL: What do you see as the weak areas which should be ramped up before these big things happen?

James: We need to figure out how to take advantage of all the parallelism that we have. We have multiple cores in a CPU; multiple CPUs in a machine. And, for web applications, multiple servers running our code. However, almost all of the languages and frameworks that we use to write software — both for the web and the desktop — are built for a single process world.

In the web space, we've been able to fake parallelism in the web server layer by pushing our concurrency problems into the database and wrapping things up with transactions. So you used to write everything based on the database and so got away with it. However, we are getting to the end of that now.

Once we do learn how to take advantage of parallelism, then, we're going to see some really neat things come along.

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