Company

greenbytes was founded in June 2000 as consulting and software development company with a heavy bias on the technologies driving the Net: XML, HTTP and databases.

During the last years we have been very active in various working groups in the "Applications Area" of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF): (→WebDAV )

• The WebDAV Working Group, which worked on several extensions to HTTP supporting distributed authoring of Web resources. We contributed to most of the specifications, and participated as authors on many of them. Nowadays, WebDAV clients are implemented in all modern operation systems, and few document management systems ship without WebDAV support.
• The Atom Working Group, which specified both a robust replacement for the ambiguously defined RSS format, and an HTTP based authoring protocol for feeds. In the meantime, both specifications are used in many unforeseen places, which usually is an indication of smart protocol design.
• The HTTPbis Working Group, which works on revising the HTTP specification. RFC 2616 (the latest specification of HTTP/1.1) was published in 1999, and since then, work on HTTP-based protocols such as WebDAV or AtomPub has revealed many areas where the original specification lacks precision, for instance by not taking read/write use cases or extension methods into account. Greenbytes supports this maintenance task heavily by contributing one of the new editors.

Our work in the Document Management space has also led us into other standardization efforts, such as the W3C HTML5 Working Group, the JSR-283 (Java Content Repository) Expert Group, and the OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) Technical Committee. If you're looking for experts in these areas, do not look further!

This expertise has been applied successfully into our customers' products and we took experience from those projects back into the standardization work. It is our belief that this way of working will generate the best standards and interoperable, excellent applications. (→customers )

As to our way of working, we hold some beliefs too about how software shall be build. Having worked in developer teams for decades, we have seen success and failures, small and big companies, chaotic and rigid methods. What counts at the end of the day is that you can make a release at any time and that all bugs once fixed stay fixed.