I wanted to post these two keynotes from OSCON 2011. They really bring out the spirit of exploration, adventure, care, and doing things bigger than oneself, doing things that go beyond the cat picture of the day. These presentations, well, I’ll let them speak for themselves. Absolutely great!
Today and yesterday I specifically aimed to meet and interview a number of sponsors and companies attending OSCON. My big quest I’d assigned myself was to determine who was doing what, where, when, and why in the Open Source Community. Of course I wasn’t going to get to every company, but I was going to try. Here’s what I got accomplished:
The big news from the HP Crew, in addition to the other zillion open source efforts they have going on, is that they’ve signed on as a partner with OpenStack! So more great news for that effort and bringing a standardized software stack to cloud computing! Getting HP signed on is one more big step toward this goal.
Even though I’ve mentioned HP first, I’m actually going to have a follow up dedicated entirely to HPs efforts in open source software. Stay tuned for that this weekend!
Heroku was there handing out the swag, which won them the much coveted space on my laptop! I spoke with the team there, and there are rumblings of some great things, additional tooling stacks, and other ideas. Keep an eye on Heroku, not to much to mention right now but they have some awesome things coming in the near future.
Hanging Out With the OSFA Crew (I'm the 2nd one from the right, ok, I'm actually the one on the right ;))
After speaking with HP I was introduced to the Open Source for America attendees. The Open Source for America, or OSFA, is setup to advocate, educate, and encourage open source software use within Government. They have the very important goal of educating political leaders and decisions makers that open source, not closed source, is much more aligned to providing their mission of liberty, freedom, and return for the citizens of the United States. The ideas, free market of software, and parallels of knowledge transfer within this software industry more closely meet the values that are intended within most civil representative Governments, which I agree totally, in this groups efforts!
Simon Phipps
While talking to the OSFA Team I was also introduced to Simon Phipps, who writes for Computer World UK, tweets as @webmink, blogs as webmink, works as CSO (Chief Strategy Officer) at ForgeRock, for full creds check out his LinkedIn Profile, and as he identifies himself, “Software freedom activist, transparency activist, blogger, photographer, writer”. I only spoke to Simon for a few minutes, but we covered some good ground, and must say Simon is one interesting character and a good person to know!
ForgeRock, being a company I’ll admit I knew nothing about until Simon told me about them, is doing some absolutely great work. Their lines include:
OpenAM – OpenAM is the market leading open source Authentication, Authorization, Entitlement and Federation product. ForgeRock provides the community with a new home for Sun Microsystems’ OpenSSO product.
OpenDJ – OpenDJ is a new LDAPv3 compliant directory service, developed for the Java platform, providing a high performance, highly available and secure store for the identities managed by enterprises.
OpenIDM – OpenIDM is an open standards based Identity Management, Provisioning and Compliance solution.
Stay tuned for further write ups regarding these companies and other related information to OSCON 2011.
It is day 3 of OSCON data & java, and the kick off to the main keynotes and core conference. There are a repeating topics throughout the conference:
The Web, It’s Still HUGE! Imagine that!
HTML 5, CSS3, JavaScript/jQuery/Node.js – This is starting to look like it will be the development stack of the web. If you use ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Java, or some other web stack these core technologies are here to augment or even in some cases completely replace traditional web stacks.
Node.js can replace web servers in some situations when core APIs or other fundamental simple services are needed. In addition to that the Node server will eventually, I have no doubt, be able to completely replace traditional web servers like Apache, Tomcat, or IIS for almost any web site. In addition to web sites though, Node provides a very valuable engine to develop and test hard core JavaScript, building reusable libraries, and other server oriented needs. The other huge boost for Node.js is the ability for a dev shop to be able to centralize development around a single language. Something that Java and .NET have tried in the past, yet failed to ever achieve. The big irony is JavaScript never started out with this intent, but here it is!
In addition to Node.js making inroads to the server environments worldwide, JavaScript in general is starting to be used for all sorts of tools, stacks, and frameworks outside of just the browser. It can be used to submit a request against Hadoop, it can create a way to access and manipulate CouchDb, MongoDb, and other databases. Javascript is becoming the one language to rule them all (please excuse my Tolkenism 😉 )
Cloud Computing or More Realistically, “Distributed, Geographically Dispersed, Highly Available, Highly Available, Resilient, Compute and Storage Segmented Functionality, and not to forget, Business Agility Oriented Utility Computing“.
Long enough title? There are numerous open source cloud platforms and infrastructure offerings available. At OSCON there was discussion and multiple session about OpenStack, the Open Cloud Initiative, Stratos, and other open software solutions for cloud computing. This is great news for developer working with cloud computing technologies, especially for ongoing efforts and pushes to gain adoption of cloud computing within Enterprise.
Companies will continue to push their own proprietary capabilities and features, but it would behoove the industry to standardize on an open platform such as OpenStack. Currently most major cloud/utility computing providers such as Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure lock a company into their specific APIs, SDKs, and custom way of doing things. A development team that is savvy can prevent that, but if the core feature sets around comput, storage, and otherwise were standardized this lock in issue could be resolved.
Half Way Mark, Check
So far the conference has provided lots of insight into the open source community. Announcements have been made that keep the open source community moving forward into the future. With that, some of the things to look forward to:
I’ll have some in depth coverage of products, product releases, and services for some of the top open source companies.
I will hopefully win a Github T-shirt, to go along with my score of t-shirts for Heroku and others that I’ve received!
I’ll dig into some of the bleeding edge technologies around cloud computing including the likes of DotCloud!
So stay tuned, I’ll be back with the action packed details shortly. Cheers!
I arrived, just after the keynote, because I was being lame on this Monday. Sounds like it was a great keynote with some great people speaking.
The first thing I did was get my directions straight for where all the rooms and expo area is. Once I did that I headed to Playful Explorations of Public and Personal Data that Andrew Turner was giving. His presentation showed some great information and data for or from GeoIQ, Geocommons, and others. The areas in which data can be used to overlay crime, friendly or unfriendly areas based on that, where there are dogs, coffee shops, and what can be derived.
I did notice though that a lot of the data is at a very high level. Leaders can make decisions on this kind of data, but it is dangerous making decision based on one or two of these data points. Leaders need to truly understand events and triggers at a macro level also. At the end of the session Andrew actually hit on the note that users of this data must be careful in what they correlate.
by adronbh If you’re at #oscon / #oscond head NOW to C123 to see @gleicon‘s talk on “Architectural Anti-Patterns for Data Handling”. There’s lulz + win
Presented by Tom Hughes-Croucher (Joyent). Learn how to build scalable Internet applications with Node.js, the event-driven server-side JavaScript framework. You’ll see how Node.js solves many scaling and speed problems that weigh down other web application frameworks.
This is the first session I lined up for myself. I’ve been on a Node.js kick lately and have still found myself not having much time to work with the technology. However, having a clearcut session dedicated to the topic, and tomorrow is Node.js day, I’m pretty stoked to really get to using the technology hard core!
Tom did a good job with this session, with a bit of lively retort thrown in here and there. The session covered installation, the basic apps that are displayed on the Node.js Site, and then into additional exercises that got us all running the bits like pros (ok, like total newbs I’m sure). The session was a decent pace, it gave me time to work through the exercises and also wrap up coverage of the 1st day of the conference. However, I’m still going to have to sit down and go through the exercises again and actually determine what Node is actually doing. There are some interesting going ons behind the scenes that I know I’ve missed, but sure will pick them up ASAP with a quick review. 🙂
Day Number One Summary
This is my first full size OSS Conference I’ve attended. I did attend OS Bridge, which was similar, but this one has a large price tag to it. So expectations are different. Overall I’ve been very happy so far. The Swag is awesome, the sessions have been good, and the Node.js Intro was very informative and taught me a few things I didn’t know. The one thing I regrest, is that I can’t attend more of the sessions. This however tends to be the problem with any conference that is worth the time! I’m looking forward to day two, for now, I’m off to socialize and try to do a few non-computer related things.
Keeping Up With the Conference
To keep up with today’s events, and ongoing events during the Conference follow/search the Twitter feed with the #oscon for the main conference, #osconj for the Java Track, and #oscond for the Big Data Track!
OSCON, one of the most exciting and largest Open Source Software Conferences, is kicking off this Monday. If you’re into closed source, open source, or software creation, design, coding, or otherwise you should be paying attention! I’ll have coverage, interviews, and more here so stay tuned!
…or check out the Node.js Day! Anyway you look at it, the conference is going to be jam packed with great info, work, learning, and more. Check back soon, I’m sure I’ll have more tasty tech bits each and every day!
Today and yesterday I specifically aimed to meet and interview a number of sponsors and companies attending OSCON. My big quest I’d assigned myself was to determine who was doing what, where, when, and why in the Open Source Community. Of course I wasn’t going to get to every company, but I was going to try. Here’s what I got accomplished:
ForgeRock
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