ApacheCon Asia kicks off with hackathon

[Alpine]

Abominable YATI treads floors

HERE'S a brief run down of the first ApacheCon held in Asia.


The conference started off with the usual pre-conference hackathon. The hackathon was briefly interrupted with news of YATI - yet another terrorist incident. Fortunately for the conference, the incident seemed to be targeted towards the government, and thankfully the government showed no interest in the hackathon!

Traditionally a hackathon aims to have a release of some new software, this being an inaugral event for Asia, there were fewer members of projects available to make this a reality, although a lot of progress was made on the Apache Bean Scripting Framework (BSF), which now at version 3 (just!), supports JSR-223 as per the Java6 spec.

The second day of the conference was devoted to the keynote from long- time Apache member Ken Coar, and the sessions, ranging from 'Identity 2.0' (we're going to have to get away from this x2.0, it's starting to feel very old now), through AJAX with MyFaces and PHP, to Object Relational Mapping. Later, the second ApacheCon tradition, the 'lightning talks' was faithfully upheld, to the amusement of the attendees.

The third day was again devoted to the sessions. This time they ranged from AXIS2 (Web Services for the win!), BSF and ooRexx, to Apache Geronimo/IBM WebSphere Community Edition - choose your poison.

The tutorials took place on the Thursday and included a much more in- depth look at JSF and MyFaces, an introduction to one of the Java based challengers to the Ruby on Rails marketing juggernaut - Groovy & Grails because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

The first Asian edition of ApacheCon was a success, bringing together many delegates from outside Asia, as well as hundreds of Sri Lankan and Asian software developers. The conference was so over-subscribed by students that the organisers had to finally close student registrations. For Apache and Open Source in general, it was good to see so many younger developers interested in learning about the Apache development model and the Apache products. For many Asia is seen as dominated commercial software, but this conference showed that Asians are using and are interested in the open source model too.

The INQuirer