ApacheCon US 2005

I got lucky and earned a scholarship from JCP to go to ApacheCon US 2005. The conference was really great and I can only encourage everybody who works in this field to attend it. The most impressive talks were for me (in order of appearnce not importnace):

Open Source for Business and Profit by Jim Driscoll
"If people never heard about your product you don’t have one" - the most important part of your Open Source Strategy is to get the word out, e.g. marketing. If your community only consists of yourself then you weren't successful.

Roller: An Open Source Blogging Platform by David Johnson
Roller is a great technology and you can find a PDF of the talk here.

Business Tips for the Open Source Consultant by Will Glass-Husain
Will talked about the importance to deliver high quality to have repeat business with the same customer and stressed the importance about keeping your sales funnel full. While working for one client you should have at least three new leads. He also emphasized the difference between consultant and contractor: The first one helps the business to make more revenue or save cost -- the later is managed bhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gify the first one to generate some code.

New (and old) Trends in Web Application Security Christian Wenz

Wenz showed a lot of (at least for me) surprising and unexpected exploits. If you ever find his presehttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifntation be sure to have a good look at it. XPath injection was pretty new to me.

Java-XML Binding Approaches at Apache by Thomas Dudziak

The essemce of this talk was to use per default XML-Java mappers and Apache seems t have some...

Struts 2006: An Embarrassment of Riches by Don Brown, Ted Husted,http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif Patrick Lightbody

As a Struts instructor for UCSD I was interested what they had to say. After the arrival of JSF I felt Struts was, well, somewhat dead. Anyway they now try to make two next generation Struts -- one based on Webworks which has all the features of "Ruby on Rails" and an another one based on JSF.

Shale: The Next Struts? by Craig McClanahan

For me Craig is the man -- I really believe in Shales and if I had the time I would really start rewriting all my old Struts applications. The most I like the Tapestry like marking of HTML designs, the full support of JSF, and some business logic (continuation, flow) -- a great concept.

HTTP Caching and Cache-busting for Content Publishers and Hacking Apache HTTP Server at Yahoo! by Michael Radwin

Both talks were fantastic. They showe what Yahoo! is doing to make their web page fast. Everine of his tips is probably worth trying. Bes sure to check out the presentation at http://public.yahoo.com/~radwin/.

Keynote by Jaron Lanier
I am skipping here some talks though very good somehow redundant to the ones I mentioned so far and close with Jaron. Given that I will be teaching a multicore programming class in January I was really eager to learn what he had to say about that: Jaron is envisioning that real time computing will get more and more important. In order to achieve that computers and networks have to become faster. Though multicore processors are the wrong paradigm (nobody knows how to program them!) they might be ablt o help. In order to make them work he is proposing to add some virtualization to them so you can have one processor for each task, e.g. in a game one processor for the enemy, one for the ocean, etc. -- this will allow us programmers to focus on the stuff we know and not worry about the multicores too much. Neat idea and I will b e sujre to introduce that in my class.