I’m sitting outside now in sunny Amsterdam, after catching up some sleep, rethinking the ApacheCon Europe 2006 in Dublin. Arthur, Dennis and myself arrived on wednesday evening, so we had all thursday to attend sessions. Most of them were about AJAX, but there were some other interesting sessions that I really wanted to attend as well.

The day started late for me, because I had to attend some other business first, which I will tell you about in a couple weeks or so. In the morning I had planned to attend the “The WebWork and Struts merger” session and the “Introduction to Apache MyFaces”, but I was not able to join them due to the above. Arje did attend the session about Apache MyFaces and you can read-up on what happened during that session. The next session was “MyFaces and Ajax” which was more about AJAX, then it was about MyFaces. I was interested in the AJAX part anyway, but afterwards I can’t really think of what I was trying to get to know about this particular subject. It’s just another way of implementing AJAX within a framework. What I did find interesting was that you hear a lot of projects switching from Prototype to the Dojo toolkit libraries. What really is there to learn about AJAX? In most cases it’s just a couple of libraries for some fancy effects, XMLHTTPRequest handling or DOM processing. In the afternoon I attended a session about “Building Highly Available Apps” which I found the be very interesting. The session was about how to build end-to-end highly available multi-tier web applications using Sequoia (http://sequoia.continuent.org) with Apache HTTP web server, Tomcat, Geronimo and Derby. The main focus in the talk was about using Sequoia.
The great thing about Sequoia is, that you do not have to change your application in order to use it, but you will just have to change the way you application connects with JDBC or ODBC. It also features high availability through an advanced RAIDb technology. I really need to give this prodcut try!
The last real session that I attended in the afternoon was about Cocoon and REST by Gianugo Rabellino. Gianugo is always fun to listen to. He’s serious but has a nice way of presenting a certain subject. The talk was nothing new, but I never heard the term REST before. I learned REST (Representational State Transfer) is an architecture style of networked systems.
When all sessions ended, the Lighting Lottery Talks started. It was my first time, but it was very serious, but also very funny! Johan also did a small serious 5 minutes talk about SAnt (Shared Ant). One of the funniest session was: “What’s on Kens belt”. It was hilarious.

Well so far for my first ApacheCon EU experience. It was great and I hope to see everybody next year!