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I'm still enjoying ApacheCon 2004 and meeting lots and lots of interesting people. I ran into Bruce Synder on Monday morning and we had breakfast together just before the Will Wheaton keynote. The first talk I attended was Bruce's 2nd annual state of Geronimo talk. Geronimo is Apache's J2EE server implementation which will eventually provide a J2EE certified app server alternative for those not happy with JBoss or uncomfortable with JBoss's LGPL licensing.

After Bruce's talk I attended Matt Raible's talk on comparing Java web frameworks including JSF, Webwork, Tapestry, and Struts. Since I read Matt's blog religiously, I was familiar with many of his pros and cons, but it was really nice to have them all bundled up into a nice tidy package. I'm sure framework zealots would take issue with many of his cons, but overall I think he was pretty fair and balanced (except for the JSF cons of course ;-)

In the afternoon, I listened to talks on Configuration and Logging and on Clustered JDBC -- but my attention span started to get shorter and shorted as the afternoon wore on. I had no heard of Commons Configuration before. It looks interesting, but I don't understand why Configuration APIs (including the Java Preferences API) don't provide a metadata mechanism so you can get labels, pick-lists, and value ranges for each configuration parameter. If you want to build a configuration UI, you've got to have metadata.

Monday night, I went to dinner with Matt Raible and Jonathan Lehr and later, stayed out way too late with some of the Codehaus and Geronimo guys. I spent a good amount of time talking to Codehaus uber-despot Bob McWhirter who, I was happy to learn, lives a couple of hours away from me in Ashville, NC. I also had the pleasure of meeting and Cameron Purdy's brother John.

Tuesday, I made it to two talks. I went to a interesting talk on "dumb mistakes we made" during Feedster's first 18 months by Scott Johnson. In case you don't already know, Feedster.com is a search engine that indexes newsfeeds. Scott covered operational issues like systems admin, ISP issues, hiring, and all sorts of topics -- but never touched on the topic of the software that drives Feedster. So, after the talk I introduced myself and asked Scott some questions like which blog technologies he uses (newsfeed parsing and weblogs.com pings), what percentage of feeds in the wild are invalid (well over 10%), what he thinks about Atom.

I also attended the Solaris keynote. Andy Tucker described all of the cool new features of Solaris 10 including zones and of course dtrace. Andy also spent some time explaining how Solaris will be released as open source software under an OSI certified license and run as a true open source project -- in the wide open with Sun and non-Sun contributors.

Tuesday night, I got together for dinner with my Sun co-workers Danese Cooper, Phillip Russell, and Andy Tucker, as well as Bruno Souza, Ted Leung, Rich Teer, Jenny Teer, and Sean Ross. After that I stopped by the Haus party and ended up staying out too late again with some of the same characters from the previous night plus Matt Raible.