Harold Carr has started a blog. He works for Sun, but lives in Salt Lake, so I've added him to the Utah Blogroll. I met Harold when I was planning on going to Middleware 2003 in Rio. Unfortunately, I was unable to go, but Harold was kind enough to bring me back a copy of the proceedings. He had a paper in the conference on an RPC architecture he developed called PEPt. PEPt stands for presentation, encoding, protocol, and transport. From the abstract:

PEPt is an architecture for implementing RPC systems. Although RPC systems seem quite varied they actually share the same fundamental building blocks: presentation, encoding, protocol and transport (PEPt). Presentation encompasses the data types and APIs available to the programmer. Encoding is the representation of those types on the wire. Protocol frames the encoded data to denote the boundaries and intent of the message. Transport moves the encoding + protocol from one location to another. The PEPt architecture enables a single programming model to adaptively change encodings, protocols and transports.

If you're interested in the implementation side of application servers and other middleware, Harld's blog should be an interesting read.