Maven meetup report

A few days late, here's a quick report on what I managed to do this Monday here at the ApacheCon EU. As mentioned earlier, I arrived at the conference hotel on Monday evening and headed straight for the Maven meetup.

Maven meetup

The meetup was already in progress when I arrived, but I managed to catch a part of a presentation about the Eclipse integration that just keeps getting better. Nowadays it's so easy to import and manage Maven projects in Eclipse, that I get really annoyed every time I need to do manually set things up for projects with Ant builds.

Other interesting topics covered were Maven archetypes and the release plugin. I've for a long time been thinking about doing some archetypes to help setting up new JCR client applications. We should probably also do something similar for setting up new Sling bundles.

The release plugin demo was interesting, though I'm not so sure if I agree with all the conventions and assumptions that the plugin makes. On a related note, we should configure the GPG plugin for the Maven build in Jackrabbit.

We talked a bit about Maven 2.1.0 and the upcoming 3.0 release.  I'm already pretty happy with the recent Maven 2.0.x releases, so we'll probably take a while before upgrading, but it's good to hear that things are progressing on multiple fronts. We also briefly touched on the differences between the Maven and OSGi dependency models and the ways to better bridge the two worlds.

In summary the meetup was really interesting and served well in giving me a better idea of what's up in the Maven land. Thanks for everyone involved!

Chops, ribs and beer

After the meetup a few of us headed out to Amsterdam city center for some food and drinks. Monday evening wasn't perhaps the best time to go out as we needed to wander around looking for places that would be open long enough. Anyway, we found some "interesting" places to visit before returning to the hotel in the early hours. Good times.

ApacheCon plans

It's ApacheCon time again. I'll be flying to Amsterdam later today, and will probably be pretty busy for the entire week. Some highlights:

Monday

• Maven meetup. I'll probably arrive at the conference hotel just in time for the Maven meetup, where I'm hoping to catch up with the latest news from the Maven land.

Tuesday

• Git hacking. During the Hackathon on Tuesday I hope to get together with Grzegorz and anyone else interested in setting up git.apache.org.


• Commons Compress. There's some useful code in the Commons Compress component that I hope to use in Apache Tika. If I have time during the Hackathon I want to help push the component towards its first release.


• CMIS / Chemistry update. I've been meaning to check out the CMIS code that Florent Guillaume has been working on recently. I'd love to get the effort better integrated into Jackrabbit.


• Commons XML. I've been gathering some JAXP utility code to a new XML library in the Commons sandbox. I hope to spend some time pushing more code there and perhaps discussing the concept with some interested people.


• Juuso lab. I have lots of new ideas about RDF processing and Prolog. Hoping to turn those into working code.


• Lucene meetup. Catching up with the latest in Lucene and telling people about Tika and the Lucene integration we have in Jackrabbit. Unfortunately I only have one hour to spend here before the JCR meetup starts.


• JCR meetup. Starting at 8pm, the JCR meetup is one of the key highlights of the conference for me. We'll be covering stuff related to the Jackrabbit and Sling projects. You're welcome to join us (sign up here) if you're interested in the latest news from the content repository world.

Wednesday

• Content Storage with Apache Jackrabbit. I'll be presenting at 16:30.


• Rapid JCR applications development with Sling. Bertrand's presentation at 17:30.


• JCR with Apache Jackrabbit and Apache Sling. BOF session at 21:30.

And lots of other stuff, too much to keep track of...