Reflections on ApacheCon Europe 2009

The story we wanted to tell at ApacheCon Europe was the 10th anniversary of the Apache Software Foundation. Last Wednesday night, we had a cake and celebration. Plans are in the works for a similar party in Oakland at ApacheCon US this November. But aside from the official line, I wanted to share some other thoughts now that I’m back mostly over my jetlag.

From what I heard, the conference this time around was excellent. Despite being there myself, I was only able to attend a few sessions. Ten years old means the Foundation is growing up and that means a few us spend out conference days in budget, press and planning meetings.

The two talks I did attend were about Apache Sling and Apache CouchDB. I’m very interested in these two projects. They’re much more similar than I think most people realize. CouchDB is getting more and more notice, but Sling is a hidden gem. By the end of the month, I hope to put together some articles comparing the two.

I also want to put a portion of my REST training online. Less than a week before the conference, I came up with a new RESTful example that I really like - Tic-Tac-Toe. So stay tuned for that one.

What’s Next For ApacheCon

A lot of discussion at ApacheCon was about the nature of the conference and how it should change. Last week’s ApacheCon was very much the same as it had been for years. Looking at attendence numbers, the economy, and general trends in events, there’s a feeling that we have to evolve before we go extinct.

The real tension with a conference like ApacheCon is that many committers want little more than a space with a good internet connection (good food and drink is appreciated too). The developers just want a place to meet up with fellow project members and hack. At the same time, we have sponsors and users who want a professional conference – somewhere they can come to learn, train and get their manager to pay the bill. That means it has to be worth it to the manager and a week long hackathon generally doesn’t cut it.

There’s been plenty of proposals on the table on how to find the balance. I believe it will take us a few experiments to get there. In fact, we’ve already been doing some of these experiments – the Fast Feather tracks, the BarCamp Apache, the evening Get Togethers. These are all baby steps to explore what works and what doesn’t.

At the planning meeting for ApacheCon US last weekend, we decided to try even more experiments this fall. We’re not yet quite ready to make all of them public, but you should see notices going out within the next few days. I’m excited to see what happens and I hope the larger Apache community, developers and users, are equally excited and interested to participate.