ApacheCon EU Day 1

Travel

The flight to Amsterdam was uneventful, if wakeful. I had brought ear plugs, but not a sleep mask, and reading lights going on in nearby rows would disturb me. It wasn't a particularly turbulent flight, but it seemed that every time I'd almost get to sleep, we'd hit some rough air. So I landed in Amsterdam on Monday morning with very little sleep, and a full day ahead.

BarCamp

First up was BarCampApache Amsterdam 2009. This is an "unconference" which means there is no agenda until the attendees get together and create one. There were excellent talks on Mahout, Lucene phrase detection, open geo data, teaching OSS, a discussion about open source and open society, an introduction to git, a call for help with testing Tomcat, some reasons to contribute to the ESME incubator project, and an overview of Synapse.

Maven Meetup

After dinner we had a Maven Meetup with 30+ attendees. The general idea of a Meetup is a bit more formal than BarCamp, but since we hadn't gotten many session proposals beforehand, we simply brainstormed topics that people wanted to hear about or were prepared to present. Several people wanted to hear about Eclipse integration, so Carlos talked about the Eclipse IAM (Integration for Apache Maven) and M2Eclipse. Next we heard about archetypes for the Alfresco project, and in general how developing archetypes can ease packaging customizations for webapps. After running back to the room for my video connector (in a room full of MacBooks, no one had the one I needed!) I talked about the Release plugin and gave a quick demo of releasing a simple project. We talked about how to get artifacts into the central repository, and why cleaning it up by deleting things isn't a good idea for build reproducibility. Another topic we covered was what's coming in Maven 3.0, as well as some of the new features in 2.1 which is just out. Preventing re-deployment of released artifacts came up, and I mentioned that there are feature requests in both the Deploy Plugin and Archiva for this, while I believe Nexus already supports it.

We had a short break and never made it back to the remaining topics as people had formed into groups discussing various things. We wrapped up at 10pm, and after being awake for 30 hours, I was happy to get some sleep!

Thanks to the conference organizers for providing free space to both BarCamp and the various Meetups, which were open to everyone, not just registered conference attendees.