Most exciting idea in ages: an ATOM/LDAP mashup

I met a young guy called Trey Drake at JavaOne. He has a really cool idea, and more importantly has built an implementation of it. We were sitting next to James Gosling so I said hey this guy is doing the coolest work at Sun Microsystems right now… I doubt James followed up, which is a shame, because Trey has created a very intriguing mashup – LDAP meets ATOM. WTF I hear you cry. Well why not? Don’t we want to associate content objects with identities? Don’t we want to bring full synchronisation, searchability and replication to ATOM stores? RESTful search using LDAP URIs? I should co-co.

Having been on the road constantly of late, I had not had a chance to blog it, but now it appears the idea is gaining traction among the RASTA crowd (REST AGILE SCRIPTING ATOM). I expect to see multiple implementations, and ATOM just gained a clear path into the enterprise: systems management, for example, is an obvious potential context. Sam Ruby, Bill deHora and James Snell. I am surprised no word from the Bray yet.

Funnily enough Trey is “just an evangelist”, rather than a product development guy, but I think Sun should fund the work to be productised sooner rather than later. Sun people like to quote Bill Joy that: “Innovation happens elsewhere.” It would be a shame, in my opinion, not to turn this invention into innovation at Sun, especially given Identity Management is a growth business with revenues rolling in.

oh yeah-Sun is a client.