Today and yesterday I attended Apachecon europe 2007, in Amsterdam. Previous conferences of such type I attended included : Be's European developers conference, Geektea's at beeurope's headquaters and a few FOSDEM (2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007). I wanted to go to Apachecon for two reasons, the first and foremost is the fact that many of my collegues are apache members, or affiliated with some kind of Apache project. Coming from the client side of things (Camino, mozilla), I wanted to see how things where organized on the other end of the web software land. I've never been to mozilla held conferences so I can't really compare. The entrance price tag to the Amsterdam conference was an issue for me - 500 € per day is a bit excessive from my used perspectives of Free conferences.
The first day I arrived early, which was good because it gave me the opportunity to get my T-shirt, and then connect to the Wifi network and start reading my emails and finish releasing our beta for friends release. I then attended a few tracks :
Lucene
Explained what it is, gave a few examples on how to use it and who uses it (technorati wikipedia).
Presentation is available here.
Lucene Advanced
Gave a few hints on getting better results and performance out of Lucene's indexes. And out to configure it. Specifically to have a look into contrib/benchmark. Better indexes can be built with the stopword option : it removes a word from having weight in the index process so if all the document you index talk about say HTML - it might be a good idea to use the stopword onHTML.
Semantic web without calling it semantic
A Nice presentation about what actually RDF is, what it should be used for, and some of the tools, available to manipulate RDF (things like ANT. Then I followed a presentation on ivy which is a dependency manager that work pretty well with ANT. Key thing to remember from this is that ANT+ivy should be compared to Maven 2, and not maven against ivy alone.
Then back to do or try to do some work - now that we are live we still need to test a few things.
Then Came the presentation on hadoop - which is used at Yahoo!, but not on production systems.
I have issues with the fact that hdfs master nodes do not do any kind of fail over - so if you are not careful and that node crashes, you've lost your file system. The presentation was oriented more torwards the map/reduce computations than on the hdfs - which I would have interest in.
But the Question and Answer part of that talk was very very interesting.
The last thing I assisted was a presentation of Apache Directory Server, which is a "new" OpenLDAP implementation. This brings competition to current LDAP implementation and that is always a good thing. The presentation was done by the project leader so it was fresh and up to date.
Lightning talks is a thing not to miss. And I had the pleasure to see a living legend : Wilfredo Sanchez.
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