About Me
My name is Bill Burke. I’ve been an open source developer for almost 25 years. I currently work at IBM/Red Hat as a Quarkus developer, an open source competitor to Spring Boot. Some of my recent endeavors include contributing to Quarkus Langchain4j (an LLM integration project). I’ve also lead small projects like Quarkus’s function integration (AWS Lambda, Azure Functions). I founded small open source projects like Quarkus Funqy (portable function API), Quarkus Playpen (live coding in Kubernetes), and QSON (uber fast and small Java json parser).
In the distant past, I was also founder of popular open source projects like Keycloak and Resteasy. I did a lot of work at the JCP including sitting on the Java EE 5, EJB 3.0, and JAX-RS JSR committees. I was Chief Architect of JBoss. At JBoss, over a 5 year span from 2001-2006, I saw us grow from a 2 to a 200 person company until we were acquired by Red Hat for $350 million. Living the start up journey was a big highlight of my career!
In the middle of my Red Hat employment (2018) I took a year off and worked at DraftKings as the founding Principle Engineer of their Online Casino. That was the closest I ever got to video game programming. :-). Alas, the job required commuting into Boston every day (1.5 hours each way) and I got burned out pretty quick. I got the opportunity to return to IBM/Red Hat and I’ve been here ever since.
I also wrote a bunch of books that you can see in my “Publishing” page.
Personally, I’m an avid New England Patriots football fan and have been a season ticket holder with my dad since 1993. (No you can’t have tickets). I also enjoy going to concerts and hiking with my partner, reffing soccer, watching my girls become young adults, playing D&D with my ex-World of Warcraft guildmates, and playing poker with the guys in the neighborhood.
Bill the Plumber 
Mar 07, 2011 @ 01:43:56
Hi Bill,
I’m really liking your recent work…is there anyone working on a avro provider for resteasy?
Thanks,
Mar 27, 2012 @ 21:12:11
Hi Bill,
I was wondering if you have any links you can share pointing to examples in Java that show a client using the REST interface to HornetQ. I’m building a system that requires me to exchange messages with Android clients. JBoss with HornetQ and its REST interface seems like a good fit but I’ve had difficulty finding example client code in Java.
Thanks,
Apr 17, 2012 @ 16:19:32
Look in the demo/exapmle directory, tehre’s a bunch
Sep 25, 2012 @ 09:02:19
Hello Bill,
i do not find any license information in the source code of scannotation. Without a license file it is not clear that the component is really under the Apache 2.0 license (wichi I found in the internet). Your response is appreciated.
Thanks
Oct 16, 2012 @ 14:45:36
ASL 2.0.
Oct 01, 2013 @ 00:54:59
Hey Bill,
I was reading an article regarding Erlang vs. Scala on which you commented regarding hitting the “sweet spot” of productivity. You wanted to know what “killer frameworks” would make you want to give either language a chance.
I picked up Erlang a little more than a year ago to build a real-time bidding platform for my company, and I think I’ve found the frameworks you’re looking for (for this language, anyway). Since your comments back in 2008, software has moved closer and closer towards RESTful service applications, and Erlang’s scalable concurrency model, fault-tolerance, and the frameworks to which I refer are incredibly useful for rapidly developing them.
The libraries are Ranch, a socket/protocol framework, and Cowboy, an HTTP server built on Ranch. Both are being actively developed by NineNines (http://ninenines.eu). Check them out.
As an aside, I’m also an avid (or rabid) Patriots fan. I don’t suppose you’re the Bill-christened season-ticket-holder from whom I’ve purchased Christmas-eve tickets from the past two years, are you?
Jun 13, 2014 @ 22:05:32
Hi Bill. We are using HornetQ REST 2.3.15.Final with JBoss 7.2.0 and we find that clustering doesn’t work. When we create a queue (either clustered or unclustered), the queue is only created on a single node, and is not available on another node. When calling a GET or a HEAD on the queue URL, it comes back with 404 error when requests are sent to the other node. Clustering works fine using the non-REST interface. Is there a way to make the hornet-q rest work with clustering, or is this simply not supported?
Review of RESTful Java with JAX-RS 2.0
Sep 30, 2014 @ 08:26:38