Paul Downey

Experience | Education | Contact

Experience

BT, London

Chief Web Services Architect, April 2006 to Present

My current role is to lead BT's thinking around the use and exposure of Web technologies for services. My publicly visible activities include:

• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
  • Chair XML Schema Patterns for Databinding Working Group,
  • Participant Web Services Addressing Working Group, Editor Web Services Addressing Test Suite
  • Participant Web Services Description Working Group, Editor XML Schema Patterns for Common Data Structures
  • Co-Chair Workshop on XML Schema 1.0 User Experiences, Author XML Schema and Web Services,
  • Presenter Workshop on Web of Services for Enterprise Computing, Author Web Services and Services on the Web
  • Presenter Workshop on Constraints and Capabilities for Web Services, Author Publishing Web Service Policies
  • Member 2005 Technical Plenary Planning Committee, Organiser Versioning and Extensibility, Moderator Lightning Talks
  • Moderator 2006 Technical Plenary Lightning Talks
• Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I)
  • Member Basic Profile Working Group
  • Member Requirements Gathering Working Group
  • Member XML Schema Workplan Working Group
• Other:
  • Presenter QCon, Is the Web Good Enough for Web Services?
  • Presenter XML 2006, XML Schema Patterns for Databinding
  • Presenter WWW 2006, WS-Addressing Testing and XML Schema Patterns for Databinding
  • Presenter XMLOpen 2004, Versioning XML and Open Source Tools

Web Services Consultant, January 2001 to March 2006

Acting for BT Group CTO, I provided applications integration consultancy in the Web and XML technology area:

• Defining BT policy for publishing and consuming Web services.
• Authoring XML formats, Schemas, XSL and CSS style sheets.
• Leading the development of the BT Interoperability TestBench, which practically tests a WSDL defined Web service against a large variety of SOAP toolkits.
• Providing technical guidance, template programs and coding patterns for a wide range of Web service platforms and programming languages including: C# and Visual Basic for Microsoft .NET and WSE extensions; in Java for BEA Weblogic Workshop and Server, IBM Websphere, Apache SOAP and Axis, Cape Clear, Systinet WASP, Sun JWSDP and Web Methods GLUE toolkits; Perl and Python scripting and in C++ for Rogue Wave LEIF and gSOAP.
• Developing the tools used to generate WSDL and XML mappings for BT's key OSS mainframe systems.
• Automatically generating a Web service façade to legacy services described in DCE IDL.

Senior Technical Specialist, August 1995 to December 2000

I provided file transfer and messaging consultancy to a larger number of internal projects as well as developing a number of key middleware components used within BT production systems:

• The Open Systems versions of 'BDS' - BT's standard file transfer management product. A survey in 2001 showed BDS transferred 90 gigabytes of billing data each night across 80 interfaces.
• A standard library to manipulate BT billing data in a variety of binary, text and XML formats.
• A non-validating XML 1.1 conformant parser in C including support for XPath 1.0.
• The BT standard thread-safe end-to-end logging API for C/C++ and Visual BASIC.
• A high performance listener for BT's TCP/IP to SNA messaging gateway.
• A HTTP management, high level API, security exits and a rules language processor used to support BT's IBM MQSeries messaging infrastructure.
• A packet level capture utility for Sun Solaris to audit telnet access to BT hosted systems.
• The base libraries, build and source code control environment used to develop all of the above and a number of other BT middleware products for 15 varieties of Unix, Windows, VMS and VME in C/C++, Perl and Tcl/Tk.

Freelance Developer, London, Madrid, Brussels, Stockholm

Assorted Roles, January 1989 to July 1995

During this period I acted freelance, specialising in the development of communications protocols and drivers in C and for a wide variety of Unix systems. I worked on a large number of projects for a variety of different companies, including:

• Uniplex (Hemel Hempstead) for whom I built a Web interface for their configuration management software,
• BancTec (Stockholm), where I architected a message queuing system which scanned and processed 5 million documents a day,
• SWIFT (Brussels) where I implemented RSA key exchange routines and control functions for SMART card readers,
• ICL (Madrid) where I acted as technical lead for a telephone billing mediation system as well as developing ACL control commands for their SVR4 B1+ secure Unix.
• NCR (London) where I provided telephone support for their Unix products,
• Thorn EMI Micrologic (Bedford), here I developed device drivers for Unix, MASCOT and FLEXOS based POS systems,
• Grant Thornton (London), I added native language support to an accounting package,
• Hugin Sweda (Uxbridge), where I developed device drivers for a Sports Centre EPOS product.

DataLogic (Raytheon), London and Amsterdam

Principal Programmer, July 1986 to December 1988

Recruited as a graduate, I developed embedded systems software for dealing room systems using a variety of Unix systems, Intel MDS, MASCOT, C and 8086 assembler.

ICI, Cheshire

Industrial Placement Student, July 1984 to October 1985

Here I developed a variety of expert systems in APL and Prolog, some of which were used in production. These included: a planning system for pressure vessel manufacture, a fault finder for a cleansing plant, a cookbook for plastic telephone cables and a personality test used during graduate recruitment. It was great fun!

Education

University of Bradford, England

BSc Hons, Computing and Data Processing (1986)

Courses: Concurrent Systems, Telecoms, Formal Methods, Data Base Management Systems and Computer Architecture. Final year team project "A British Rail Timetable Enquiry System" in CDC Cyber Pascal.

Contact

Email: paul.downey@whatfettle.com
Blog: http://blog.whatfettle.com/
Mobile: +44.(0)7918.880.881
Nationality: UK Citizen