SM: When you put your framework out there in the OpenSource domain you did it as an individual, correct? What went through your mind as you saw the adoption? RJ: I have always had a somewhat hardnosed attitude about it. When I was writing the book, I was doing it to help build my personal
SM: What kind of work did you do in your early IT career? RJ: I started off as a regular developer and rapidly moved into senior architect roles. I worked for a variety of companies in the London area, including the Pearson Group, who own the Financial Times.
Rod Johnson is an accomplished author (‘Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development’ and ‘J2EE without EJB’), a world authority on Java and J2EE, and an entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of SpringSource, which builds Java infrastructure software. Rod holds a BA with Honors in Computer Science, Mathematics and Musicology as well as a
SM: If I were planning a trip to Ireland, where would Cuil take me? TC: I would hope we would take you to the more interesting places and to the path less traveled. My parents run a bed and breakfast north of Dublin. Everyone lands at Dublin and goes south.
SM: That is your hypothesis, which is fine. I think there are vertical search cases which have broken out of the pack and been very successful. TC: I do think vertical search works. There is no question that in places people can manage to get themselves established as an idea.
SM: Is there really a high degree of mistrust in Europe? TC: In Ireland you do not give your credit card to a waiter at restaurant. The waiter will bring the machine to your table where you swipe it yourself and enter your PIN. There is a high degree of mistrust.
SM: Based on the way you are approaching the problem, it seems much easier to do relevance in a constrained domain than in an unconstrained domain. TC: Absolutely. Relevance is the idea of constraining things.
SM: How successful is your architecture when it comes to indexing? TC: We now index a lot more pages than other people. Microsoft and Yahoo! have fallen behind in terms of indexing and keeping up with Google. Google will get better with more competition.