Since I’m not able to attend the actual ApacheCon conference days I decided to join some of the pre-conference meetups.

On monday evening I joined Jasha and some other fellow Hippos to the Maven meetup, were I was hoping to hear some new and interesting stuff. Maven has been one of my default development tools for over more then 3 years.This was the first time I actually met other users and developers from the Maven community. I think there were around 40 people at the meetup and some interesting topics came along.

Carlos Sanchez talked about the effort they’re putting in the “Eclipse IAM” project over at the Eclipse foundation. I just recently started using the m2eclipse plugin in my Eclipse IDE, which seems to suite my needs, but the Eclipse IAM plugin looked really interesting. Towards the end of the Maven meetup Jasha and I left for a chat with Grzegorz Kossakowski. It was good seeing you again Grzegorz!

Tuesday evening was an evening packed with interesting meetups, but unfortunately they were all at the same time. In the end I went to the Lucene Meetup, where I stayed until 21.30. It was good to see so many people (60+) at the meetup and after an introduction round it was nice to found out that other open source content management vendors were also present at the meetup.

I was especially interested in the talks about Solr. Most of the attendees were Solr users as far as I could see. After some presentations the attendees started asking questions and talking about the number of documents in their Lucene/Solr indexes and I was a bit blown away by the amount of documents some of them had in their lucene index. It ranged from 300.000 to tens of millions, which is really a lot. For me, from a content management perspective, I really wondered what kind of content it was and I would love to see that amount of content in our CMS.

Well that was my ApacheCon for this year. I’m curious too see where the ApacheCon Europe will be held next year. Hope to see you all next year…