April, 2009
Interview with Esmond Pitt FACS, Developer
- Sun Forums member since November 5, 1997
- Elected a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society in 2002 in recognition of having 'made a distinguished contribution to the Australian IT industry'
- Known on Sun Forums as: ejp
- Sun Forums Posts: 22k+
Q. Esmond, how long have you been in IT?
A. I wrote my first computer program in 1971 at university, part of a Bachelor of Arts degree with majors in Mathematics and Philosophy. WATFOR Fortran IV on an IBM 7044, batch, punched cards, all that. I entered the IT industry, i.e. started getting paid, in 1975, and landed my first real job as a trainee systems programmer in 1976, working on a proprietary program generator system.
Q. Describe some major projects?
A. Well the MIS Program Generator was an RPG lookalike which could generate online programs for PDP-11 minicomputers running the RSTS/E operating system, target language Basic-Plus. In the 1980s I designed and built a Cobol-74 compiler which was the first 32-bit Cobol available on Unix and subsequently became property of the Ryan-McFarland Corp after some takeovers and reversals. After that I became a C++ and networking specialist: I implemented an RMI-like thing in C++ for Honeywell-Bull, and another project-specific compiler for NCR with C++ as its target language. I also did a lot of work with GUIs at that period, using OSF/Motif, OS/2 Presentation Manager, and the Windows API, mostly as a consultant to IBM GSA Australia.
Q. How did you get interested in Java?
A. In the middle 1990s I became aware of something new happening. In 1997 I was lucky enough to land a position on a 4-year medical informatics project based on Java and an OODB. We started at Java 1.1.2 and by the time we'd released a few versions we were up to Java 1.3.
Q. What areas of Java have you specialized in?
A. On that project I did the OODB part using the Poet database, and some imaging: transforms and convolutions, and some general GUI programming (using AWT at that stage). I subsequently designed an RMI-based system for distributing updates to the informatics database. This led me to become rather expert in RMI, which in turn led to my first book 'java.rmi - Remote Method Invocation in Java' which I co-authored with my colleague Kathleen McNiff, and it also led to my RMI Proxy product. After that I broadened out to all forms of networking in Java, which led to my 2nd book 'Fundamental Networking in Java', and to a sub-specialization in SSL and security generally. Since then I've added JNDI, JMS, J2EE, RMI/IIOP, a bit of CORBA, Hibernate, JSF, all that jazz; also JavaCC, JAIN-SIP, and a few other things out of left field. So I've had a pretty good look at a lot of interesting pieces of the puzzle.
Q. How long have you been on the Java Forums?
A. Since late 1997, which must make me just about the Oldest Member, and I became a Community Moderator in 2008. I see the Java Forums as a critical Java programming resource, and the place where the best answers are or should be found, so I spend probably a bit too much time on them! It's interesting to see what people's early struggles with Java and programming are like, as mine were so long ago that I've forgotten, and it's nice to provide a few right answers here and there.
Q. Are you involved in any open-source projects? And what is your view of open-source?
A. In the 1980s I published an extensible-hashing version of hsearch(3), which is now embedded in some form in the Unix dbm library. I'm involved in the SourceForge Jpcap project, and in the JavaCC/Visual Basic Parser subproject. I have also been asked to join the Apache River incubation project which is the continuation of Jini 2.1. I'm very excited by this opportunity to contribute to an important piece of work. Open-source is really the only sane way to develop large-scale software, simply because of peer review, the basis of scientific method. End of story! Nothing else can come anywhere near it.
Q. What do you do in your spare time?
A: I am a competition tennis player; a choral singer, formerly with what is now the Melbourne Symphony Chorus; I am also a director of the Melbourne Opera company; and I do a little light electronics on the side.
Q. What next?
A. Good question. There's always something new in IT! Probably why I'm still doing it.
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