THROUGH THE AGES, middleware has had few associations
with popular music, drugs or any other hedonistic
behaviour.

Of course, one can never be too sure of
what goes on behind the scenes of a WebSphere
development project or BEA team meeting, but sex,
drugs and rock ‘n’ roll are outside bets as core
activities, when compared to the enterprise service
bus, J2EE, service-oriented architecture and
application server.

However, middleware has had at least one joker in the
pack in recent years. Step forward Marc Fleury, former
boss of open-source firm JBoss, until he sold the
outfit to Red Hat and left the company.

Always a character, Fleury's excellent bog here, relates an amusing episode recently when the man
himself, an aficionado of “techno” music, was mistaken
for a drugs dealer by a fellow “raver”, as I believe
they are known, at a party.

“See I like to dance old style to underground music,
with this bumpy and high energy style,” he relates,
mystifyingly. “Bottom line is that people come to me
assuming I got E with me. As it turned out I did have
candy on me, I mean REAL mint candy that I had taken
from the restaurant we went to. I reached it into my
pocket and gave it to the guy. He was gushing with
gratitude until he popped it in his mouth and told me
in a disappointing tone ‘but this IS candy’, at that
point I realised what he was after.”

You don’t get this with Michael Capellas. µ