Internet guru relishes NZ connections

Internet architect Roy Fielding gets back to New Zealand less often than he would like, but his Kiwi connection lives on in his latest project.

The man who is often credited with developing the HTTP system -- the transport system on which the internet is based -- has a new project in mind and it's called Waka.

"The waka is the canoe, it's used to safely transport people over long distances and basically in World Wide Web protocol development, what you want to do is safely transport information across the world.

"That's why I chose the name, out of respect for my heritage as well as a convenient name."

Dr Fielding, whose father is a New Zealander, has spent many holidays around the Coromandel and his parents spent half their year here.

"I think I'm related to half the North Island," he says from his Californian office.

His father Gordon, a retired social sciences professor, is Ngati Huri from Tainui descent who studied in America.

The family moved back to New Zealand briefly in the 60s and h is two older siblings were born here.

Describing himself as "part Maori, Kiwi, Yank, Irish, Scot, Brit, and California beach bum," Dr Fielding got involved in the World Wide Web in the mid-90s.

As a student doing both politics and physics, he found a computer job to pay for college.

"It turns out computers is the one area where you can combine the knowledge of the sciences, the understanding of people and international skills you need and also a creative side."

Then as a grad student in 1993, he was one of about a small group of developers invited by Web creator Tim Berners-Lee to help improve its infrastructure.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP for short -- is the system for transmitting web messages but there was no agreement on the right set of protocols to work it.

"HTTP is the set of language rules used to communicate between a web browser and a website's server.

"Some people say I invented HTTP, which isn't true. Tim Berners-Lee came up with the original protocol. In 1993 there were a whole group of people, the original web developers, and we'd frequently throw back and forth changes...

"We'd talk about what's the best way to implement, what should we make common.

"Of course, after a year or so of that, the web became so popular that we couldn't make decisions that way any more. We had to provide a more formal decision in terms of this is going to be a standard."

Dr Fielding found a way to convince hundreds of competing companies to adopt one standard and implement some improvements.

The improvements were important since the web was going through exponential growth.

"Back in the late 1995-96 timeframe, many of the internet experts were predicting it would fail due to overuse. Growth in usage of the Web was so high, exponentially high, that it was quickly surpassing the capacity for the trans-Atlantic and the trans-Pacific links, the communication links."

To buy time, Dr Fielding created a way of making caches record web pages that others had accessed, and the web server was only asked to change the information if it was out of date.

This reduced bandwidth requirements for HTTP by about 30 per cent in the first year -- "just enough to give us time to improve fibre optics that are the basis of the internet...to keep up with the growth".

Asked how he views the pervasiveness of the internet now, he says it is "amazing, now I look back at it" but at the time it was just problem solving.

" I spent nine years as a grad student but I had so much fun along the way that it was worth it.

Like Berners-Lee, Dr Fielding eschewed the riches that others found during the dot-com boom, choosing to be "more of a scientist than an entrepreneur".

He lives in California as chief scientist for Day Software, a Swiss-based software solutions company, and champions "open source" software which is free to the public.

As well as authoring the HTTP standard, he then guided it into popular use through the Apache Group, a group of developers whose free server is the software which now runs most internet websites.

"Think of that as sort of the printing press of the modern age. It's what allows the information on web servers to be sent to the browsers on individual computers."

Apache's market dominance was important as it enabled Dr Fielding to ensure his standard was properly used and not hijacked by commercial interests for less noble reasons.

Seven years ago he co-founded and chaired the Apache Software Foundation, a charity which now offers more than 60 open source products and co-ordinates thousands of developers worldwide.

"All of these developers around the world collaborate on the open source software out of enlightened self-interest.

"They know by collaborating with other people they'll have a larger team, get more interesting ideas and the software will live longer because it's supported by more people."

Dr Fielding is modest about his contribution to technology, admitting he's not really known outside computer geek circles.

Working on the infrastructure of the web is "nowhere near as sexy as the browser developers".

However, in 2000 he was listed by one internet magazine as the leader of one of the top 10 software companies to watch, right next to Microsoft's Bill Gates and Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Top technology university MIT has also ranked him among the top 100 young innovators with the greatest potential to change the internet in the 21st century ("Gee, no pressure there," he quips).

But improvement is always on his mind.

His new project, Waka, is a potential replacement for HTTP . It is still "mostly in his head" at present, but he hopes the system will be available within a year and in use widely within three.

"It's designed to be more usable with mobile devices, its designed to be more flexible in sending multiple messages at once, and to have improved design for caching and keeping local copies of information."

Having tried to find the time for the project over the last six years, Dr Fielding hopes to open Waka up to collaboration soon.

It will be free for everyone to use under licence, but he will retain copyright.

Very little time then for his next trip to New Zealand, which is overdue after the last one was interrupted by September 11.

- NZPA