[General] ApacheCon US 2006 Report

[Randy Letness]

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