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ApacheCon 2004

We learned about Perl, DAV, Web Services, PHP, and continuations.

Notes Overall Thoughts

There were four things that stood out for me. First, there is software out there right now that should be able to help us. Second, the Java community is diverse, energetic, and confusing. Third, our horizon technologies (DAV, LDAP Auth, etc.) are still a ways away. Last, acting as a Web Services for Remote Portlet compliant portlet provider will present policy/service problems, not technical ones

As for current software Catalyst should consider adopting, Patrick strongly recommends replacing CVS with Subversion. I learned about "memcached", a clustering tool that could help us in a big way with providing shared memory across our servers. We also learned about a mechanism for getting realtime, aggragated usage information from our hosts via the Spread multicast technology, which is a longer-range interest.

Java was clearly the most popular language at the conference, and it seems to be recieving the most attention in the webapps/framework development area. We gleaned some very interesteing ideas from them about continuing split or backed up sessions, unifying server and client side validation, and the association of object values with form widgets. Nevertheless, the sheer number and variety of frameworks available was dizzying, and some of them presented solutions that looked truly messy to us. I couldn't help but overheard comments such as "Java will pay the bills, but I'm really into Ruby right now."

We got the chance to take lots of optimisitc and exactly-what-we-need looks into the cutting edge DAV, LDAP, Apache 2.0, and so forth. Unfortunately, these looks usually included a prohibitive estimation on stable release dates.

Finally, because of the (excellently) netural formats used to transmit data between the players in a Portal system, we should have no trouble acting as a portlet provider. However, depending on the hoops we are required to jump through by the intermediate player (the producer) we could have interoperability issues. Because of the stringent restrictions on communication required to keep all the portlets playing nice, we also have concerns about the usefulness or possibiltiy of embedding a whole app in a portal, and suspect we should set our sights a little lower.