Microsoft XML Expert Joins Open-Source Middleware Firm

Jonathan Marsh, a 10-year veteran of Microsoft, leaves the software giant to work on mashup technology at open-source middleware startup WSO2.

Startup WSO2 has announced that a former Microsoft technologist has joined the open-source middleware company.

Jonathan Marsh, a former technical diplomat at Microsoft, has joined the Colombo, Sri Lanka, company as director of mashup technologies.

At WSO2, Marsh will help set the overall technical direction of the companys open-source middleware platforms and lead development of the companys forthcoming server-side mashup platform for situational applications, business process management and monitoring, said Sanjiva Weerawarana, founder and chief executive of WSO2.

Marsh worked at Microsoft for 10 years, where he was technical diplomat for XML and Web services technologies. He also helped push the development of the APIs that upgraded XML processing in the browser.

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"Marsh is a 10-year veteran of Microsoft, so it will be really, really interesting to see how he adapts to a completely different kind of company," said Miko Matsumura, vice president of SOA (service-oriented architecture) marketing at WebMethods, in Fairfax, Va., who interacted with Marsh at various standards organizations.

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Marsh was a Microsoft representative at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and contributed to the development of such W3C specifications as XPath, XSLT, XML Base, xml:id, Xinclude and the XPointer Framework, according to WSO2 officials.

In addition, Marsh was recently reappointed as co-chair of the W3C Web Services Description Working Group, they said. Marsh will continue that role and maintain his involvement in various W3C working groups and in the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems (OASIS) technical committees.

"Jonathan brings a very strong client/UI aspect to the company," Weerawarana told eWEEK. "Hes the one who did the original XML and XSLT integration to IE [Internet Explorer] back many years ago" where he was working with renowned developer Adam Bosworth (now vice president of engineering at Google), Weerawarana said.

Indeed, Marsh "has a wealth of experience on doing stuff in whats now called the AJAX [Asynchronous JavaScript and XML] space."

Moreover, "With our strong skills on server-side Web services and Jonathans strong skills on client-side services, we expect to create a unique mashup platform that allows mashups to become mashed up themselves—a key flaw in todays mashups," Weerawarana said.

Marsh joins a WSO2 team made up of experts in the Web services, standards and open-source spaces—particularly as members of the Apache Software Foundation.

The companys founding leaders, Weerawarana and Paul Fremantle, started WSO2 after careers at IBM, and founder Davanum Srinivas joined the company from Computer Associates. In addition, WSO2s developers are contributors to many key Apache Web services projects, including Apache Axis2, Apache Sandesha, Apache Policy, Apache Axiom and Apache Synapse, WSO2 officials said.

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