I'm spending the next three days in Orlando, Florida, attending
ApacheCon 2000.
The conference is being held at the Caribe Royale Resort Suites, which
despite a strong conference turnout, is mainly inhabited by lots of parents
and their young children, due to the proximity to Disney World. Orlando isn't
high on my list of places to visit, especially during the prime spring-break
travel season, but duty calls....
I missed the opening plenary session this morning, as my overnight travel
plans had to be rearranged due to weather delays in San Francisco (imagine
that!). But I heard from Ben Hyde, a member of the
Apache Software
Foundation, that I didn't miss much. Ken Coar, the conference
technical chair, went over the conference schedule and layout, then the ASF
members on the stage took questions from the floor. The questions were mostly
predictable ones, about the time frame and features for the upcoming Apache
2.0 release. According to what I was told, the ASF has committed to having
an alpha release out by the end of the conference (or next Monday at the
latest).
I met Ben Laurie, co-author of O'Reilly's
Apache: The Definitive
Guide, for the first time this morning. He'd already been asked once
when he was going to do a new edition of the book for Apache 2.0, and I
predict that it won't be the last time he hears that question over the next
three days. Now to answer the question: Ben will get started on a new edition
of the book as soon as he feels that 2.0 is stable enough for him to write
about, but we don't have any more definite information than that.
Walking back and forth from the conference center to my hotel room is
a real visual experience. All the rooms, or suites to be precise, are
in three towers that surround a courtyard with a huge crescent-shaped
pool, complete with a waterfall and a 75-foot water slide. Crossing
through the courtyard means seeing more exposed lily white body parts
than I'd care to mention, interspersed with a few people who resemble
cooked lobsters. Fortunately, the conference program is so packed
with activities that I don't think many attendees will have the time
to expose their delicate skin and risk sunburn.
There are several hundred people here for the conference. I bounced
around from session to session today, so I can't report on the details
of particular talks, but I can tell you what people were attending.
At the first round of sessions this morning, it was standing room only
for the first part of Stas Beckman's mod_perl tutorial. I don't know
why his talk was in such a tiny room, but at least they were able to
triple the room size for part two this afternoon. The session on
the Jakarta
Project was also overflowing. And I saw a good crowd at two talks on
the business aspects of Open Source: "What is Open Source" and "The Cathedral
Meets the Bazaar".
The conference even has a "night school" component, with sessions
running from 6 to 7:30 today. Many attendees seemed content to forego
having a full dinner and instead munch on some appetizers, in order to
attend these sessions. There appeared to be lots of interest in Ryan
Bloom's talk about migrating Apache 1.3 modules to Apache 2.0 and on
Michael Meyer's presentation on the work his company, Advance Bank,
has done to implement secure financial transactions with Open Source.
Perhaps part of the reason that people were willing to skip dinner is
that there was a poolside dessert party this evening. Some people
subscribe to the philosophy that "Life is uncertain; eat dessert
first," but I've always thought that "Just eat dessert" is a better
approach.
Now that I've come down from my sugar buzz, I think I'll call it
a night.
