Introducing Alan Karp. Architect of HP E-Speak & E-Services

[Mark S. Miller]

I'd like to introduce everyone to our newest e-lang list member, HP's Chief 
Scientist of E-Speak Operations, Alan Karp.

Alan is the architect of HP's E-Speak system ( http://e-services.hp.com/ & 
http://www.e-speak.net/ ).  E-Speak, like ELib, is a foundation for 
distributed systems of persistent communicating services.  What is not 
obvious from these web sites is that all inter-service communications and 
security is based on cryptographic capabilities!  From talking to Alan, it 
seems their notion of capabilities is very similar to our inter-Vat 
capabilities.

When I explain to Alan our thinking, I'm repeatedly pleased by the frequency 
with which I hear "Yup, we figured that out as well".  This is unique in my 
experience among people that weren't schooled in KeyKOS/EROS or 
Vulcan/Joule/E.  Alan came to capabilities by independently reinventing 
them.  Curiously, at first he didn't think that what he'd invented was 
capabilities, as his invented primitive bundled together base capability 
properties with rights amplification.

The current version of E-Services, 3.01, has moved to using SPKI as its 
cryptographic capability system.  It seems they also independently realized 
that SPKI is approximately a capability system.

E-Speak & E have many of the same architectural premises, but have been 
developed with very different engineering emphases.  This makes it likely 
that they have complementary strengths and weaknesses.  E-Speak is now 
open-sourced under LGPL & GPL, so there may be many opportunities for 
cooperation between the projects.

In addition to the similarities, in one crucial way E-Speak goes well beyond 
the engineering of any of the capability systems in our tradition: It 
incorporates, as part of its communications infrastructure, a 
description-matching search system for resource discovery -- matching a 
description of services desired with the description of services offered.  
Though Jini has made such abilities well known, no one else has figured out 
how to do this without violating security properties.  I don't yet fully 
understand how E-Speak pulls this off, but I'm eager to find out.

Alan, welcome!


         Cheers,
         --MarkM