Blogging Roller

On Tuesday I attended talks on new trends in web security, Lenya and JackRabbit, iBatis, Apache XML-binding approaches, Struts and Struts Shale. I didn't learn a whole lot new, but it was good to get an update on these projects, status and plans for the future -- especially in the case of Struts, which seems to be forking into two incompatible frameworks (Struts TI and Struts Shale). Here's Ted Husted introducing Craig McClanahan's talk on Struts Shale.



After the early evening lightning talks, there was a screening of Michael Wechner's excellent documentary film FUD (Wyona Pictures), which included interviews with Brian Behlendorf, Danese Cooper, Ken Coar, Sam Ruby and others. Sam wasn't able to come to the conference, so it was nice to see/hear him up on the big screen. Here's Sam:

On Tuesday, I also talked to (JDO spec lead) Craig Russell, who's interested in helping to create a JDO backend (using JPOX) for Roller to replace Hibernate. Later, I talked to (Struts in Action author) Ted Husted, who's interested in doing the same thing with iBatis. And even later, at dinner, Ted Leung suggested the idea of a Roller persistence bake-off. We'd challenge the JDO, iBatis and even EJB3 proponents to create competing implementations of the Roller backend and then we'd choose the best one based on performance, generated SQL, developer ease-of-use and whatever other factors. The prize? An iPod? No, the prize would be the honor of being the official persistence framework of Roller

Tim Bray's slides for ApacheCon/US 2005 contained just five works: Derby, Threads, Beyond Java, Thanks. While the Derby slide was on the screen, Tim announced that Sun will be using and supporting Derby under the name Open Java DB and Francois Orsini gave demo of Derby embedded in Firefox and scripted by JavaScript, cool enough to excite even jaded Ted. While the word Threads was on the screen, Tim talked about Niagara and how CMT processors are going to be part of every webapp developer's future. For Beyond Java, Tim recommended the book of the same name, but took issue with some of the points (see his post on Beyond Java) and tried to stir some controversy by saying that threading features in Python and Ruby are "toys." Surprisingly, nobody took issue with this in the Q&A that followed the talk. On the Thanks slide, Tim took some time to thank Apache for 10 years of wonderful software and finally ended with a simple plea: don't screw up.

Here's Tim delivering the Tuesday keynote (apologies for the fuzzy photos).