Really glad to see Peter Alsop join the blogging community at Sun. It’s great to see a new blog appear from the UK and Ireland technical team – especially when it’s someone I admire as much as Peter. His ‘blog is over at http://blogs.sun.com/psa/.

Peter’s a very talented fellow and a great orator – he’s immensely passionate about technology and it’s application in the real world and is one of the most enthusiastic speakers I know.

I first met Peter five or so years ago, when he was the team leader of the System Engineers in what we at Sun call the ‘Commercial’ industry. But I really remember him for his excitement over Java and the possibilities it brought to the UK development community.

Here’s a photo from a couple of years ago, when Peter had roped me into an event at his local university, Hertfordshire – the event was a J2EE (Sun) versus .Net (Microsoft) discussion – and was a friendly and convivial affair, despite the strongly worded title (not just because we had just signed our first interoperability agreement). A PDF formatted ‘flyer’ for the event is available: University hosts key web services debate.

From left to right – for Microsoft – Gavin King, Anthony Saxby and Mike Quirk; for Hertfordshire University – Jill Hewitt, Head of Computer Science, Dr Roger Oliver, Associate
Head of Computer Science and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Tim Wilson; and
for Sun Microsystems, Peter Alsop, Simon Cook and Wayne Horkan.

As I recall Peter did an overview both of Java and of the Java runtime environment model. Simon did details of the programming language (including syntax), available integrated development environment (IDE), J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition) capabilities and the Web and Bean containers it offered. I was dragged along to discuss J2EE implementation models, application ‘stripping’, and real-world case studies – mainly of the J2EE runtime environments (and supporting infrastructure) I had had a part in building.

I’m pleased to say that Peter has acted as a mentor and as a friend to me at Sun, especially over the last couple of years – lately he’s helped me to understand my sphere of influence, it’s limitations, and how it needs to grow to be as effective as I need it to be.

If you get the opportunity to see Peter present and speak at an event then do so – I recommend it wholeheartedly.

As to Peter’s ‘blog – well “Congratulations Peter !” – here’s to a long and fruitful ‘blogging career !