The ApacheCon Europe has landed and the first day is already behind us. This morning I arrived at the conference location in Amsterdam for a full day of sessions. Monday and Tuesday were mainly filled with meetups, hackathons and training sessions, which I was unable to attend, but today was reserved for some interesting talks.

Looking back at today I had a mixed agenda with technical and business tracks. This morning I started off with “The Business of Open Source - Power, Prestige, and Propulsion” hosted by
Sally Khudairi. It was great to see other companies talk about how they experience working with open source and how their customers experience their first steps with open source.
Working for a company that runs on open source, I was familiar with most remarks and comments, but it was nice to hear how other companies of different size and different market had experienced this.

Next up was Gianugo Rabellino with “Your Open Source strategy sucks!”. I met Gianugo a couple of years ago and when I’m at conference I always try to attend his presentations. They are solid and straight forward and give you a nice insight on the subject that he’s talking about. It was another good one Gianugo!

After lunch I went for my first technical talk of the day about “Apache Felix - A Standard Plugin Model” by Richard Hall. A had heard about the Felix project before and that it involved OSGI, but it was a refreshing view and a great eye opener on the subject. I really like what it’s capable of and I’m curious too see if I can somehow use this in the near future.

Back to the business room for Arjés talk on “Open Source Business in Europe”. Even though I work with Arjé, I’ve been outside of our office for the past couple of weeks, so it was good too see him in action again. He gave us a nice insight in how Europeans work with open source and how this has evolved over the past couple of years. Thanks Arjé!

I ended the day with two technical sessions. “Advanced JavaServer Faces - Using cool JSF Technologies” by Matthias Wessendorf and “Building scalable AJAX Push applications using Comet” by Jeanfrancois Arcand. The first talk attracted my attention, because I recently had to do some maintenance on a Myfaces project and after learning the basics, this talk gave me a nice impression on what I will be able to do more with MyFaces, then what I’ve seen so far.

The last session of the day was a bit hard to choose, because I also wanted to attend Jeremy Quinn (‘sorry I did not attend your talk Jeremy’) “Break my site”, but I had never really had to get the change to see what Comet was. Last year, the Comet talk was at the same time as ours (Jasha and mine) about Cocoon, so I went for the Comet one this time. It was an interesting subject, and it was great to hear about this way of development. I was unaware that this was already possible.

Looking back it was great again to see all my friends of all the different Apache projects and meet new people along the way. The social part is one of the great thing about the ASF.
For those that were not able to attend today, be sure that you visit tomorrow or Friday for some more interesting talks. See you there!

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