EuroOSCON

I had the pleasure of heading to Amsterdam this week for Euro OSCON - the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. It was a mixed bag of good and not so good sessions and speakers. Not dwelling on the mediocre side of things, the highlights of the conference for me were:

- a very engaging and entertaining talk from Robert Lefkowitz (aka r0ml) making parallels from the Renaissance period to issues we're seeing today.

- an interesting session from Dane Sundstrom on Apache Geronimo - something I knew very little about until last week. Some of the features like hot deployment/undeployment, partial shutdown capabilities, support for multiple concurrent versions of components/applications make it an attractive alternative to other J2EE servers. The highlighted components that make up Geronimo are Tomcat, Jetty, OpenEJB, Axis, and XFire. They're also working on making use of the Eclipse OSGi runtime.

- an equally interesting session from Dirk Bäumer on Eclipse that provided some insight into the development process and how milestones are consistently met.

- John Viega highlighting the fallacies contained in the much recommended security tombstone - Applied Cryptography. I may have to check out the recommended Secure Programming Cookbook (it's no surprise that John is one of the authors).