Dennis Sosnoski

Who is Dennis Sosnoski?

I'm a Java™ and XML developer working primarily with Web services and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) issues. Through my company, I provide a range of training, mentoring, and consulting services to clients around the world. I also participate in a number of open source projects (including JiBX XML data binding and Apache Axis2 Web services) write articles, and give presentations for conferences and organizations worldwide. You can see some of my upcoming and recent activities highlighted below.

SOA/Axis2 Training Courses

The Axis2 training course has been a continuing favorite with clients, and is now being offered as anything from a two-day quick introduction to a five-day intensive workshop that gets development teams fully qualified on all major aspects of Axis2 web services. I'm now scheduling my next training trip to the United States for April, 2009. If your organization is planning projects based on Axis2 you'll find the training makes a huge difference in developer productivity. My SOA training for developers is also a very popular option, with several client companies combining the SOA and Axis2 training sessions to provide developers with both an understanding of SOA concepts and applied experience in implementing web services intended for SOA usage. Naturally, I'm also able to provide in-depth coverage of both JiBX and alternative data binding frameworks, either as part of these classes or as independent events. Contact me to find out more about the course and to check scheduling for your organization.

Want a sample? The latest article in my IBM® developerWorks® Java Web Services series used material taken directly from the Axis2 training class: Axis2 Data Binding. Some sample code from the class is discussed in the article, and available for download from the Resources section at the end (though you'll need to modify the code slightly to work with the current Axis2 release, since Axis2 continues to be a moving target).

Articles

The IBM developerWorks tutorials on JiBX 1.2 are now live: JiBX 1.2, Part 1: Java code to XML schema and JiBX 1.2, Part 2: XML schema to Java code. JiBX 1.2 offers some exciting innovations, especially in the area of code generation from schema (ever try to work with the classes generated from a set of 240 schemas, when you only need to support one particular document? JiBX 1.2 can help!) and these tutorials provide an in-depth introduction to these new features.

My latest InfoQ article is Schema for Web Services - Part I: Basic Datatypes. This is the first in a multipart series covering many of the practical issues involved in using XML Schema with web services. It's based on my years of work in helping clients come up with solid web service designs, and hopefully will help people avoid many of the common problems in this area.

I'm working on the next article in the InfoQ series, and also on resuming my earlier "Web Services in Java" series for IBM developerWorks as a column with a monthly publication schedule. First up will be coverage of Axis2 WS-Security.

Projects

JiBX 1.2 is finally available for download! Getting this out the door was a real struggle, but I think the results are worth the effort. I'll be issuing a 1.2.1 update by the end of March with documentation improvements, some bug fixes (mostly for old bugs left over from the 1.1.X series, but also hopefully for any issues people find with the new 1.2 features), and a few more features that didn't quite make the cut for 1.2. I'll also add links to the Sponsors page, for the organizations which paid for some of the 1.2 work. Interested in seeing some new features for your own needs, or want to help move the JiBX 2.0 work into production? Email me to find out how your organization can become a sponsor.

Last year I had the opportunity to develop an open source tool for the New Zealand Ministry of Education, now available on Sourceforge as the WS-Security Wrapper project. This tool acts as an intermediary for linking simple XML-based applications to web services using WS-Security. The particular implementation used for the Ministry of Education project connects to services running the non-standard WSE 2.0 .NET implementation of WS-Security, but it can easily be modified to work with other platforms as well. The latest version (2.0) offers both added features and security option configuration support, and will be available for download from the Sourceforge site soon.

Presentations

My most recent public presentation was a JiBX and JiBX/WS talk to the Auckland Java Users Group on February 12, 2009: The World's Fastest Web Services. You can download the slides here. Ubergeek Peter Harrison taped the presentation, and then condensed it down to a 10-minute YouTube version including some of the demos and a discussion of benchmark tests comparing JiBX/WS performance with Axis2 and RMI, both when running locally and when running over the Internet.

About this site

The links in the column to the left lead to other pages within the "about me" part of the site, while the links in the header row below the page title and logo lead to other portions of the site.