ApacheCon EU 2008 impressions

This week ApacheCon EU 2008 is being held in Amsterdam. Unfortunately I could not visit the entire conference but GX was there on Tuesday and I managed to visit the conference on Wednesday evening and Thursday. A few highlights.

On Tuesday the international JCR community gathered right next to the ApacheCon. Martijn Hendriks, our JCR expert and committer to the Jackrabbit project, could not make it but Hallo Khaznadar was there to meet the JCR community and share experiences. Very interesting is the new incubator project called Apache Sling that combines JCR and OSGi (sounds familiar?) to build a web application framework based solely on REST principles.

On Wednesday evening I joined this Birds Of a Feather (BOF) hosted by Uri Boness from JTeam. JSA you say? No there is no such thing as a standard search api in Java. This was exactly the reason for Uri to use this opportunity to start a discussion on this topic.  To explore the need and requirements for a possible unified search API the discussion moved from ‘enterprise search’ requirements like transaction support on the real time indexes, to domain specific requirements such as more extensive support for semantics like entity extraction and synonyms or even ontology’s.

To no ones surprise we did not come up with the final API just yet... However,  what became clear is that search is coming to age. and there may be need for some sort of standardization. With users as well as committers to the Lucene and Solr projects in the room it turned out to be great topic for a BOF session and we would have talked even longer if the hotel manager had not kicked us out of the conference room at 11:30 PM :)

ServiceMix 4.0 on OSGi!

On Thursday morning, after some coffee, I joined the talk on ServiceMix 4.0. Although this may come as no surprise to people who visited JavaPolis 2007 or follow the mailing lists it is always good to see a working demo! Guillaume Nodet of the ServiceMix team presented the upcoming 4.0 release of this open source ESB implementation that is now build on top of the OSGi runtime (using Felix) providing capabilities that allow developers and administrators to configure, deploy, manage components and configurations at runtime.

REST vs WS-* | the battle

The absolute 'moment supreme' was when in the afternoon there where two session back to back on REST, SOAP and WS-*.

First Roy Fielding (Day), the guy who wrote the book on REST.. or should I say the WEB?, presented an overview on his dissertation on REST (the architecture) while displaying an obvious dislike for anything that smells lies RPC, SOAP or whatever. A good talk about the ideas and concepts that drove the development of the web as we know it.

Next up was Paul Fremantle (WSO2) and this it where it got even more interesting, not in the least because Roy Fielding was still in the room. Paul talked about myths and facts surrounding the REST vs WS-* debate making an reasonable argument that REST is a good pattern in some cases, but that it is not a silver bullet. In his opinion SOAP and  WS-* are receiving some unjust bad press lately. A good talk and with some great arguments and real world examples. However, Roy Fielding obviously had to disagree on several points and  this led to some interesting discussions between these two experts in the field, battling it out on the conference floor. Great arguments both ways, but I have to call it a draw ;)

OK, so the final highlight obviously was the JTeam canal cruise ;) After the conference we all jumped on a boat and cruised the canals of Amsterdam while talking code and drinking beer. That's the life and a good way to end a day at ApacheCon,  a great conference for those interested in the latest the developments in open source and meeting the people who make it happen.

ps. If you are quick enough you can still make it to the raffle!