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Dave Johnson on open web technologies, social software and software development

Trip report: NoSQL meetup at ApacheCon

(I just returned to work after vacation and a week of conferences in the SF bay area. Instead of posting my trip reports to the limited audience that reads my internal IBM blog, I'm going to post them here so that everybody can benefit from them.)

After arriving at ApacheCon on Monday night and eating way too much sushi with Cote, I realized that there was a NoSQL meetup in progress and free beer was involved. Needless to say, I was there.

At NoSQL Oakland, there were talks on CouchDB, Hadoop, JCR, Voldemort, PNUTS and Cassandra. I was surprised how many people were in attendance; the idea of "no SQL" is apparently very popular about the alpha-geek Apache crowd.

I arrived a little late and saw that the Hadoop talk was packed, as usual for Hadoop. J. Chris Anderson's CouchDB talk was also packed, but I managed to find a seat. Chris is a very entertaining speaker and I learned a lot about CouchDB. Some keys points that Chris made were that CouchDB is "of the web" -- you interact with it via a RESTful protocol and it accepts, returns and stores JSON formatted data. CouchDB is schema-less. CouchDB is "fast by default" due in part to it's append-only approach to data storage. It's written in Erlang and therefore perfect for use in small devices.

A core feature of CouchDB is replication and that's one of the reasons it is now included in Ubuntu Linux, keeping contact/address data in sync across desktop and mobile devices. Chris said that, in 50 years, all applications will replicate in CouchDB fashion. Chris also delved into the details of how CouchDB stores data, complete with detailed hand-drawn diagrams. Want to learn more:

See also:

I will be posting more about the ApacheCon and Enterprise 2.0 conferences, but not until tomorrow or later...
Dave Johnson in IBM · · Comments [0]
Tags: couchdb hadoop nosql

Trip report: Social Web Camp, Santa Clara, CA

(I just returned to work after vacation and a week of conferences in the SF bay area. Instead of posting my trip reports to the limited audience that reads my internal IBM blog, I'm going to post them here so that everybody can benefit from them.)

On Monday Nov. 2, I attended Social Web Camp at Sun's Santa Clara campus. There were about 40 people in attendance. The event was organized by Sun's Henry Story, an expert in semantic web technologies and inventor of the FOAF+SSL approach to implementing Social Networking features (relationship based privacy). Unfortunately, Henry was not able to attend the conference because he was detained by US immigration.

During the camp, I lead a session on OpenSocial using my "What's up with OpenSocial" slides from BarCampRDU. Surprisingly, very few people were familiar with OpenSocial, so this was an introductory level discussion.

I participated in a session on enterprise social networking and shared a little about we do with micro-blogging inside IBM, mentioning BlueTwit and the new features in Lotus Connections. A couple of folks from Boeing were present and described the home-grown social networking and micro-blogging system.

John Panzer of Google pitched his new Salmon protocol, a distributed commenting system that allows comments made on items in downstream systems (e.g. aggregators, social networks, FriendFeed, etc.) to find their way back upstream to the source item. The protocol is based, in part, on AtomPub. Comments are signed and posted back upstream. Seems like this could be useful in both Lotus Connections river of news feature, Jazz-based products and Roller; so I'll going to track this one closely. It might be fun to try to implement Salmon for Roller.

I missed a little of the conference because I had lunch with some of my former co-worker from Sun and I left a little early to return my vacation rental car and make my way to Oakland for ApacheCon US 2009. More about that later...

Dave Johnson in IBM · · Comments [0]
Tags: apacheroller atompub foaf opensocial salmon sun

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