I am sorry that it has taken me this long to send a message about ApacheCon. I got back from Las Vegas Tuesday night and have been swamped at work ever since. Haven't seen a message from Ceki yet, so I am guessing that he is recovering from his jet lag...:-)
First, the session on log4j 1.3 was well received. Ceki and I had a lot of ground to cover, and we pretty much took the entire 50 minutes. In retrospect, maybe we could have cut some of the topics, but it is hard since they are all important. The most valid feedback I heard was that there could have been more code examples. It was kind of hard for folks to get a feeling for what we were talking about sometimes, I think. Domains was of much interest. We will be fleshing that out in more detail (and examples:-) on this list in the coming days and weeks. Chainsaw v2 was very well received. I don't think my quick demo did it any real justice, but Bruce (I can't remember his last name) from the Geronimo project said that Chainsaw put him over the top. He was going to push for using log4j at work just for that alone. I think those were his exact words (Geronimo already uses log4j). We made sure to mention all the hard work and contributions everyone has put in to v1.3. We invited folks to join us on this list and in the sandbox. I had a very productive talk with members of the Geronimo group about why they want/use a TRACE level and possible uses they might have for either domains or a context selector. They are a great bunch of guys. I plan to join the geronimo dev list so we can continue to talk about it and get some synergy going there. Of course, I finally met Ceki, and that was great! We had a wonderful time hanging about the presentations and such. We even met Jim Moore! An unexpected and pleasant bonus! I am able to put faces to people now. I have to say that ApacheCon was one of the most productive conventions I have been to in a long, long while. The caliber of the presenters (even those log4j guys) and the caliber of the attendees is incredibly high. Plus you get to talk to the major movers and shakers of the various projects. Sun and the JCP was out in force around the con. Novell was a sponsor and showed off their current open source efforts. The best presentation I saw was one by a consultant (not an Apache committer or member) where he reviewed his company's use of Apache software (Tomcat, Xalan, Xerces, Log4j, bunch of other stuff), mostly Xalan, to create a complete solution for integrating 3-4 different enterprise applications for a Fortune 100 company. They beat out other companies vying for the same contract that were trying to get various commercial vendors together to come up with a solution. His company, using almost all Apache software (I think they used a commercial business logic engine), had a platform up within a week and had started major developement with the customer within a month. They won the contract and deployed the solution, beating out all the other competition. If you ever wonder if Apache stuff is production-grade, don't. There is real proof out there. Sam Ruby's presentation on SOAP/web services was really good. And I really dug the XML Beans presentation by David Bau. Tapestry looks very promising as well. I wish more of the log4j folks could have been there. We'll have to plan for it next year! If I think of something I have forgotten, I'll send another message. But it was a great time, and everyone should be very proud of their involvement and use of Apache software. It is a very exciting place to be. -Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
