Apache Con US Wrap Up #
some weeks ago I attended ApacheConUS09 in Oakland/ California. In the mean time, videos of one of the sessions have
been published online:
You can find a wrap up of the most prominent topics at the conference at heise (unfortunately
Germany-only).
By far the largest topics at the conference:
- Lucene - there was a meetup with over 100
attendees as well as two main tracks with Lucene focussed talks. New features of Lucene 2.9.* were in the center of
interest: The new range search capabilities, segment search that improves caching, a new token stream api that makes
annotating terms more flexible as well as a lot of performance improvements. Shortly after the conference, Lucene 2.9.1
as well as Solr 1.4 was released so end-users switching to the new version now benefit from better performance and
several new features.
- Hadoop - large scale data processing currently is one of the biggest topics. Be it logfile
analysis, business intelligence or ad-hoc analysis of user data. Hadoop was covered by a user meetup as well as one
track on the first conference day. The track started with an introduction by Owen O’Malley and Doug Cutting. It
continued with talks on HBase, Hive, Pig and other projects from the Hadoop ecosystem.
But also projects like Apache Tomcat and Apache HTTPD were well covered within one to two sessions each.
Currently a hot topic within the foundation is the challenge of bringing the community together face-to-face. Apache projects have become so numerous that covering them all within 3+2 days of conference and trainings seems no longer feasable. One way to mitigate these problems might be to motivate people to do more local meetups potentially supported by ConCom as has already happened in the Lucene- and Hadoop-communities. A related topic is the task of community building and community growth within the ASF. Google Summer of Code has been a great way to integrate new people. However the model does not scale that well for the foundation. With ComDev a new project was founded with the goal to work on community development issues, talking to research, getting students into open source early on. The project is largely supported by Ross Gardler, who already has experience with teaching and promoting open source and free software in the research context being part of the open source watch project in the UK.
Apache Con US 09 brought together a large community of Apache software developers and users from all over the world who gathered in California, not only for the talks but also for face-to-face communication, coding together and exchanging ideas.
Update: Slides of my Mahout talk are now online.