Kimbro Staken

Projects:

• MCPing service for Grid7 LLC: MCPing is an online service that is an important piece of infrastructure enabling the concept of Microcontent publishing and the development of edge aggregators that consume microcontent. It serves as a notification service to notify edge aggregators of the availability of new microcontent on the network. MCPing is a Ruby on Rails project and will go into production in Apr. 2006.
• Development infrastructure setup for Grid7 LLC: Deployed the development infrastructure for the Grid7 Labs project incubator. This involved the deployment of Subversion, Trac, the Wildfire Jabber server, Apache 2.2, OpenSSL, MySQL and a Ruby on Rails FastCGI environment.
• Structured Blogging project under contract to Broadband Mechanics LLC: Working with Broadband Mechanics I designed and implemented the microcontent description format that is used by the Wordpress and Movable Type Structured Blogging plugins. The microcontent description format is an XML based user interface specification language. Interpreters for the format were written in PHP and Perl. The Structured Blogging Initiative and the plugins for Wordpress and Movable Type were publicly released in December 2005.
• Software Architect for Best Western Property Data System project under contract to Software Architects Inc.: Software Architects was developing a business process management system for Best Western International to manage the profile and rate information for all 4000+ Best Western properties. The information collected is used to feed Best Western's reservation system, create the properties profile page on bestwestern.com, to produce the printed Best Western travel guides and to feed information into the four major GDS systems used by travel agents worldwide. I joined the 20 person team as a senior resource to provide Java development skill and shortly after arriving took over as Software Architect for the project. The project was about 90% functionally complete at the time I took over, but was suffering from severe performance and stability problems. My task was to lead the team to complete development, redesign elements of the system to solve the performance and stability problems, oversee the production deployment of the system and hand it off to an offshore team for production support. The project was put in production in August 2005 and successfully handed off in September 2005. The project was a J2EE system using the Day Communique content management system, Oracle databases and external XML web services.
• Syncato Project: Syncato is a Microcontent management system. This means it's a tool for the creation and management of small fragments of XML data that represent structured information on the network. Syncato introduced a number of innovations, including the extension of the URL space to encompass XPath addressability of content items, the use of XML structures and XPath in place of traditional object models, the open content model for data storage and the general concept of microcontent publishing. The repository is a fully transactional system and implements a REST style API for the stored content. Syncato is implemented in Python and uses the Sleepycat Berkeley DB XML database. Syncato was a winner in the 2003 Sleepycat Berkeley DB XML innovation awards.
• Introduction to Berkeley DB XML Manual for Sleepycat Software Inc.: I was commissioned to write a friendly introduction to the Sleepycat Berkeley DB XML native XML database. The document provides a walk through of the system using the DB XML shell and progressively more complicated XQuery examples. The document was shipped as part of the Berkeley DB XML 2.0 release.
• LDAP Domain Expert for Mainnerve LLC: I was brought in as an LDAP domain expert and architect to assist Mainnerve with a security project for a major corporation. My task was to provide a design and implementation for a unified authentication system to centralize administration of all UNIX accounts within the organization. A unique design constraint was that LDAP was to be used for all account management, but system logins had to function even if the LDAP system was unavailable. The system involved replicated iPlanet Directory Server instances that integrated with the existing DHL LDAP infrastructure. The administration software that was developed was implemented in Perl.
• Java Development Support for Knowwatt: Knowwatt is a startup company providing power management services to enterprise customers. They were having severe stability and performance problems with their current system. I provided development support to resolve their problems and to prepare them for the next phase of development. Their platform was J2EE running in Tomcat with MySQL as a database.
• XML to relational database integration recommendation for Frontbase Inc.: Frontbase is a provider of enterprise relational database servers to the Mac OS X market and needed assistance in formulating a strategy for XML support in their product. My task was to evaluate all current techniques for managing XML data within a relational database and to provide an overview of the state of the art and recommendation for future development. An extensive review of research literature was undertaken and significant time was spent evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the XML management techniques used in existing products from competing vendors. Products evaluated included: Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase ASE, Informix, IBM DB2, Software AG Tamino, Excelon, XYZFind, X-Hive, TextML Server and Ipedo.
• Co-founder / Management Commitee Member / XML:DB API Specification Lead: The XML:DB Initiative was founded to develop standards for interoperability between XML database management systems. Efforts were concentrated in three areas, the development of an XML update language, XUpdate, the development of a vendor neutral API for accessing XML databases, the XML:DB API and the development of a query language that includes DML facilities, SixDML. All technologies were provided as a specification and an accompanying reference implementation. I was involved in all projects and in oversight of the organization with primary responsibility for the XML:DB API specification and reference implementation.
• XML database software development for Apache Xindice: Xindice is a database system for managing XML data. It is an Apache Software Foundation (ASF) project and was founded with source code donated when the dbXML Group ceased operations. I managed the donation of the source code from the dbXML Group, participated in and coordinated the development and release of Xindice 1.0 and the initial design and development of Xindice 1.1. I also served on the ASF XML project management committee to provide oversight for the ASF XML projects. Xindice is implemented in Java and runs within the context of a Java servlet engine. Development work made extensive use of Java and various XML technologies. Xindice is used in many projects around the world including the UDDI repository that ships as part of the Sun Web Services Developer Pack.