ApacheCon Day 1 and 2 – Open Source, Apache and enthusiasm

The first Apache Asia Conference is currently being held in Colombo.
The first two days have been great, with lots of discussions and active
participation from the speakers and participants.

There was a car
bombing in Colombo yesterday but that doesn’t seem to have had any
impact on the enthusiasm of the participants. However the security
situation has perhaps led to this being a primarily Sri Lankan event with low participation from rest of Asia.

14th August – Hackathon: The
nature of open source development dictates that developers are spread
across nations and interact primarily over email. The Apachecon
Hackathon is their chance to meet up in person, discuss and design the
future of open source projects.

Teams from various Apache projects in the Java and web services space got together at the hackathon and discussed the future of their respective projects.

15th August – The
day began with welcome notes from the conference hosts and introduction
to the Free and Open Source movement in Sri Lanka. This was followed by
Ken Coar’s keynote. Ken talked about the structure and history of
Apache Software Foudation and answered queries about Apache licenses.

The
other sessions were on Apache MyFaces, ESB, Object Relational Mapping
Tools and of course Ajax. The day ended with BOFs on Apache Axis 2 and
Geronimo. Considering that a number of Axis 2 and Geronimo developers
are in Colombo, these discussions were quite lively.

The
Lightning Talks session that was conducted by Denise Cooper in the
evening was good fun. Speakers had to pick a topic and speak for
exactly 5 min.

It’s great to see such an international conference in the Indian sub continent and I look forward to the remaining days.

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