I wasn't sure what to expect at ApacheCon US 2006, as it was my first
time attending. It started out with a wacky keynote by Cliff Stoll, who
looks and acts like a mad scientist, running around the conference room
frantically, drinking other people's drinks, and demanding chocolate
milk at least three times into his talk. Note to self: pick up and read
a copy of his book "The Cuckoo's Egg".
Then on to many wonderful technology sessions where the highlights(of
the ones I attended) included:
Maven - being new to Maven, I got to see some of the cool things we can
get out of using it, especially when we move from 1.0.x to 2.x
Derby - apparently a new version was released with new features and
performance improvements. I went to an entire session on how to tune
the Derby database, which was really interesting. Tuned right, Derby
performs better than MySQL and Postgres in some cases.
REST vs SOAP - this session was extremely relevant to us now because we
are in the process of deciding what type of architecture to use for
Chandler-Cosmo sharing. People shared their experiences using both, and
it turns out there isn't a strong preference, as it really depends on
many factors including the types of clients involved, how much control
you have over the clients, and the tools used.
Atom Publishing Protocol - this was great for me as I didn't know a lot
about Atom and the tools available to consume and publish Atom feeds.
We already support Atom in Cosmo for reading events, and adding support
for publishing events wouldn't be that difficult.
And then of course there was Brian's presentation on Cosmo. He did a
great job and had some great slides. After an overview, he dove into
the technical aspects of Cosmo including the technologies and
architecture used, which the people there really enjoyed. Brian also
did a cool demo where he imported the ApacheCon calendar into Chandler,
shared it to Cosmo and then proceeded to view/update the data using
Chandler, Cosmo, Sunbird, and FeedDemon, showing that a variety of
clients can collaborate using Cosmo.
All in all, it was a great conference. I learned a ton, met some
interesting people, and got to put a face to some of the names I've seen
in the open source world.
-Randy
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