It’s over 🙁 We spent 15 beautiful days on the islands (Oahu, Kaui, Big Island, and Maui) and it really was a remarkable vacation. There’s a lot to see and each island is different. But…sigh…that’s over now.
Yesterday night we started our long trip back home and now arrived at LAX. Later today we’ll fly from here to Frankfurt and than back to good old Paderborn.

ApacheCon is over – as you can read everywhere it was – as always – a great conference. Congratulations to everyone involved! For some reason or the other I couldn’t enjoy it this time as much as the last times, but that’s how things are sometimes.
In addition my wife and I have a very tight schedule, so we left New Orleans friday afternoon to enjoy the full weekend in Disneyland in sunny LA. Unfortunately our flight out of New Orleans was delayed by two hours so we arrived at LAX around midnight. Picking up the rental car, driving to Anaheim, and checking in took some time, so we managed to get to bed around 2 in the morning 🙁 But we also managed to be early in the park today nevertheless 🙂
The wheather here is way too hot for me – and someone told me in New Orleans that it would be freezing cold in LA (thanks Ralph). But I guess it’s better to have high temperatures than rain, so we’re happy.
I’ll be working out of our New Port Beach office from monday to wednesday, before our real vacation starts on thursday where we will be traveling even further to the west…

Hurray, I’m finished with my Richards talk about OSGi and Apache Felix. I’m very happy and proud to step in for Richard who originally submitted this talk and got accepted but wasn’t able to attend.
I think, in the end it went very well, there were several intesting questions and it seems that the interest in OSGi is really high – I submitted a practical talk for ApacheCon EU next year. Let’s see if I get selected!
Reflecting the talk, I have the feeling that people might got my comments about Spring DM wrong. Just to clarify, I love Spring and it does a great job (there are some things I would like to have different, but I guess that’s always the case). Spring DM is a great thing and they’re doing a great job; I really like it especially the testing stuff. But compared to declarative services it is more a heavy weight solution – heavy weight is not bad by itself, so there is nothing wrong here. In the past years I never had the use case for this, I’m really happy with the simplicity of declarative services and the Apache Felix SCR plugin. That’s all 🙂

I’m really wondering what happened to the great news section on the site where you could immediately read about new releases. And the new download “process” is really really annoying. It requires way too many clicks to get what you want 🙁

So go grab them at our booth here at the ApacheCon in New Orleans as long as they’re hot…

This is day one of the conference part of the ApacheCon US in New Orleans. As always it’s a very busy conference full of stuff to hear or talk about. Today is the Fast Feather Track which kicked of very well attended, although it’s not that easy to find (it’s next to napoleon A2 for all those still wandering around….) I really like this concept as it contains a wild collection of sometimes unrelated topics. It comes with the advantage of learning about stuff you might have never looked at by yourself.
Unfortunately the second part of the Fast Feather Track is not attended very well. And I’m wondering why this is the case 🙁 The talks are really interesting. And I’m pretty sure that the poor attendence is not correlated to the topics. I guess it’s more that people did not really realize that there is a FFT and perhaps they wanted to attend longer sessions.
The final talk for today about QPid will start at 17:30 – so don’t miss the last part of the FFT!
Finally a big thanks to all speakers of the FFT. I really hope you didn’t get too annoyed about the poor attendence. You did a great job!