Glyn

Glyn Normington

Hello! Since I'd like to know a bit more about other people involved with Apache, it's only fair that I introduce myself.

I live in Winchester (about 50 miles west of London), England. I'm married, with three children. I love reading and walking and am involved in various ways in a local church. I really enjoy my work but limit it to 37 hours a week so that I have some hope of being a good husband and father. Also, I find that over-working stunts my creativity, but maybe that's just me.

I grew up in West Yorkshire and somehow got interested in mathematics. I particularly remember one lesson in junior school when the teacher hinted that there were (complex) numbers at "right angles" to the numbers I was used to -- what a wonderful way to whet a child's appetite for maths! I fondly remember reading books on algebra and calculus and dragging my parents along to the local library to find out what on earth a logarithm was. As a teenager I spent several summer holidays programming on a DEC System 10 at Leeds University, but was worried that programming seemed dangerously addictive. (An Algol-60 pretty-printer there was known as "SOAP".) I did various computing-related courses in the final year of my mathematics degree course at University College, Oxford, and then decided to leave academia and enter the real world as a programmer at the IBM development lab. in Hursley, a pleasant 15 minute drive from Winchester through the Hampshire countryside. I've worked there ever since, but have probably still to encounter the real world. ;-)

I spent my first few years in Hursley coding algorithms for graphics workstations and promoting the use of formal methods (remember the maths degree!). After an interesting couple of years working on the OS/2 Presentation Manager and observing the politics of working jointly with Microsoft, I moved to the world of mainframes and the CICS Transaction Processing monitor. After a few years learning the internals of this wonderful, mature product, I led the restructure of several central components and also introduced literate programming into the area. I later led a team which implemented the restructured two phase commit manager and grew fond of CRC cards.  During those years in CICS, I learned a great deal about software design from (the now late) Peter Lupton. I then took a break from mainframes for a few years and wrote C++ on AIX and Windows NT (SOM 3, Component Broker) before returning to CICS to lead the design and implementation of the support for Enterprise JavaBeans. After that I looked at how to support SOAP in CICS, which is how I got involved with Apache.

I initially looked at Axis as a way of learning about SOAP and understanding the properties of the handler architecture since this was similar to a design I had been mulling over for some time. I started to write the Axis architecture guide and submitted a few patches before becoming a committer. After that I helped with a couple of structural improvements, but failed to gain any real support for a proper refactoring of Axis into modular subsystems. I think open source is great in general, but I'm disappointed that Axis turned out to be so code- and function-centric. My experience in CICS showed me how good structure is probably more important in the longer term as functional completeness. This isn't meant as a criticism of the other committers, however - I really enjoyed working with them and have learned a lot from their enthusiasm and style of working. It's perhaps more of a reflection of how people, like me, with an interest in architecture and design may find it difficult to engage in (existing) open source projects.

More recently, I have worked on IBM's implementations of Java and a standard for Java program modularity which is targetted for inclusion in release 4 of the OSGi specification and version 3.1 of Eclipse.

You can email me at glyn@apache.org.

(Last update : 26 January 2005)