- Tim Bray
Infobox Person
name = Tim Bray
image_size = thumb
birth_date = Birth date and age|1955|06|21
birth_place =
occupation =
residence =Vancouver ,British Columbia ,Canada
nationality =
website = http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/Timothy William Bray is a Canadian software developer and entrepreneur. He co-founded
Open Text Corporation andAntarctica Systems . Currently, Tim is the Director of Web Technologies atSun Microsystems .Early life
Tim was born on
June 21 ,1955 inAlberta ,Canada . He grew up inBeirut ,Lebanon and graduated in 1981 with aBachelor of Science (double major in Mathematics and Computer Science) from theUniversity of Guelph inGuelph, Ontario . Tim described his switch of focus from Math to Computer Science this way: "In math I’d worked like a dog for my Cs, but in CS I worked much less for As — and learned that you got paid well for doing it." [ [http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/bray/ Tim Bray: Search and Deploy] - Apple.com article on Tim Bray]Fresh out of university, Tim joined
Digital Equipment Corporation inToronto as a software specialist. In 1983, Tim left DEC forMicrotel Pacific Research . He joined the NewOxford English Dictionary project at theUniversity of Waterloo in 1987 as its manager. It was during this time Tim worked withSGML , a technology that would later become central to bothOpen Text Corporation and his XML and Atom standardization work.Entrepreneurship
Waterloo Maple
Tim Bray served as the part-time CEO of
Waterloo Maple Inc. during 1989-1990. Waterloo Maple is the developer of the popular Maple mathematical software.Open Text Corporation
Bray left the new OED project in 1989 to co-found
Open Text Corporation with two colleagues. Open Text was the commercialization vehicle for the high-performance search engine employed in the new OED project.Tim recalled that “in 1994 I heard a conference speaker say that search engines would be big on the Internet, and in five seconds all the pieces just fell into place in my head. I realized that we could build such a thing with our technology.” [ [http://www.apple.com/pro/science/bray/index2.html] Dead link|date=March 2008] Thus in 1995, Open Text released the
Open Text Index , one of the first popular commercial websearch engine s. Open Text Corporation is now publicly traded on the Nasdaq under the symbol OTEX. From 1991 until 1996, Tim held the position of "Senior Vice President - Technology".Textuality
Tim Bray, along with Lauren Wood, ran Textuality, a successful consulting practice in the field of web and publishing technology. He was contracted by Netscape in 1999 in part to create a new version, with
Ramanathan V. Guha , ofMeta Content Framework called Resource Description Framework (RDF), that used the XML language.Antarctica Systems
In 1999 he founded Antarctica Systems, a Vancouver, Canada-based company that specializes in visualization-based business analytics.
tandardization efforts
XML
As an Invited Expert at the
World Wide Web Consortium between 1996 and 1999, Bray co-edited theXML andXML namespace specifications. Halfway through the project Bray accepted a consulting engagement withNetscape , provoking vociferous protests from Netscape competitorMicrosoft (who had supported the initial moves to bringSGML to the web.) Bray was temporarily asked to resign the editorship. This led to intense dispute in the Working Group, eventually solved by the appointment of Microsoft's Jean Paoli as third co-editor.In 2001, Tim Bray wrote an article called [http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/03/14/taxi.html "Taxi to the Future"] for Xml.com which proposed a means to improve web client user experience and web server system performance via a "Transform-Aggregate-send XML-Interact" architecture -- this proposed system is very similar to recently popularized Ajax paradigm. [ [http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/02/14/AJAX-Performance ongoing · The Real AJAX Upside ] ]
W3C TAG
Between 2001 and 2004 he served as a
Tim Berners-Lee appointee on theW3C Technical Architecture Group. [ [http://www.w3.org/2001/tag W3C Technical Architecture Group] ]Atom
Until October 2007, Tim was co-chairing, with [http://lookit.typepad.com Paul Hoffman] , the Atom-focused [http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/OLD/atompub-charter.html Atompub Working Group] of the
Internet Engineering Task Force . Atom is a web syndication format developed to address perceived deficiencies with the RSS 2.0 format.oftware tools
Bray has written many software applications, including [http://www.textuality.com/bonnie/ Bonnie] , a
Unix file system benchmarking tool, [http://www.textuality.com/Lark/ Lark] , the firstXML Processor, and APE the [http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/08/11/Meet-the-Ape Atom Protocol Exerciser] .ee also
*
Atom (standard)
*Internet Engineering Task Force
*RDDL
*Sun Microsystems
*Open Text Corporation
*World Wide Web Consortium
*XML References and notes
External links
* [http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ ongoing] - Tim Bray's
weblog Tim Bray's non-commercial software:
* [http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/misc/Software ongoing - Software] - Summary Page on Tim Bray'sweblog
* [http://www.textuality.com Textuality]
* [http://www.textuality.com/Lark/ Lark] - the first XML Processor
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.