Conference Overview

At the ASF, we are proud of our achievements and recognize that the global Apache community --both developers and users-- are responsible for the success and popularity of our products over the past 11 years. The theme of this year's ApacheCon is "Servers, The Cloud, and Innovation", featuring highly-relevant, professionally-directed presentations that demonstrate specific problems and real-world solutions based on the following topics:

TRAININGS:

ApacheCon offers half-, full-, and two-day training sessions on numerous Apache technologies that include Apache HTTP Server; Cassandra; Couch DB; Lucene; Maven; OSGi; Pivot; Solr; Tomcat; Web Services/Axis 2; and Wicket, as well as in-depth workshops on Legal Issues and Media Training.

CONFERENCE SESSIONS:

• Cassandra/NoSQL: Apache Cassandra is an advanced, second-generation "NoSQL" distributed data store that has a shared-nothing architecture. The Cassandra decentralized model provides massive scalability, and is highly available with no single point of failure even under the worst scenarios. Originally developed at Facebook and submitted to the ASF Incubator in 2009, the Project has graduated as a Top-Level Project in March 2010 and is deployed by dozens of high-profile users such as Cisco WebEx, Cloudkick, Digg, Facebook, Rackspace, Reddit, and Twitter. Learn more about distributed database management, non-relational data stores, structured storage at this track.

• Commons: Features various presentations on reusable, Open Source Java software at the ASF.

• Content Technologies: Content is at the heart of almost everything we do, and Apache is at the heart of much of the software that allows this. We have projects that provide content stores, and provide libraries for accessing content stores. We have frameworks that speed your development of content driven web applications, and frameworks and libraries for social applications and widgets. We have libraries and frameworks for reading, writing and transforming content, as well as metadata extraction. At every step for your content, Apache has something to help you develop your solution. This track will cover the range of Apache content related projects, from store/retrieval, through rendering and frameworks to file formats and transformers. For our newer and less well known projects, the tracks will tend towards introductions to new developers. For our more established projects, we'll generally focus on recipes, new features and advanced/power useage, to help and inform existing users.

• (Java) Enterprise Development: Did you know that most Enterprise Java solutions are built using Apache technologies? This track shows you how.

• Felix/OSGi: OSGi technology is the foremost solution for developing large, modular, dynamic software systems in Java. The Apache Felix project hosts state-of-the-art implementations of the OSGi specifications, including the framework and many services, as well other related tools. This track is dedicated to OSGi technology and the efforts around it at Apache. If you're looking for comprehensive information or practical tips on OSGi, this is the place to be! Get the details, from the engineers implementing the technology.

• Geronimo: Geronimo is a Java EE application server project at the Apache Software Foundation. One primary focus of the Geronimo project has been on flexible, lightweight server runtimes. In addition to the relatively static notion of server profiles (introduced in the Java EE 6 Specification), Geronimo users can generate Geronimo server runtimes with minimal functionality determined from the transitive dependencies of a set of user applications. In the Geronimo 3.0 release, the Geronimo kernel will be rebased on the OSGi core framework and utilizes OSGi Blueprint for Dependency Injection and service wiring. Along with Java EE 6 and EE 6 Web Profile support, Geronimo will also support OSGi EE services and an OSGi Application programming model being created in the Apache Aries project.

• Lucene, Mahout + friends/Search: Apache Lucene is a robust and powerful, open source, search toolkit that powers search and discovery in thousands of applications and websites ranging from very well known corporations to startups creating next generation intelligent applications. Whether it's embedding Lucene on a mobile app or harnessing the power and simplicity of Apache Solr's free-text search and faceting capabilities, or simply powering web-scale search via Apache Nutch, chances are Lucene has a solution to meet your needs. The Lucene Track will feature a full slate of training, talks and networking on the entire Lucene ecosystem. A wide range of discussions will cover both the technical and business details of Lucene. Networking events will help connect you with the creators of all of the Lucene projects as well as other members of the rapidly growing Lucene community.

• Hadoop + friends/Cloud Computing: Apache Hadoop is a framework for running applications on large clusters built of commodity hardware. A wide variety of companies and organizations use Hadoop to deliver petabyte scale computing and storage using off-the-shelf equipment. The Hadoop framework transparently provides applications both reliability and data motion. Hadoop implements a computational paradigm named Map/Reduce, where the application is divided into many small fragments of work, each of which may be executed or reexecuted on any node in the cluster. In addition, it provides a distributed file system (HDFS) that stores data on the compute nodes, providing very high aggregate bandwidth across the cluster. Both Map/Reduce and the distributed file system are designed so that node failures are automatically handled by the framework. With presentations delivered by leaders in the Hadoop Community, this track will help you get the most out of Hadoop installations and the Map-Reduce applications.

• HTTP Server: Fifteen years on, the ASF's first and flagship project remains the world's most popular Web server software, dominating 70% of market and powering more than 112 million Websites. The Apache HTTP Server plays a critical role Web infrastructure, and continues to develop new and exciting features. This track covers better ways to improve your Apache Server experience, from modules to security.

• Tomcat: The Apache Tomcat community celebrated their 10th anniversary with the much-anticipated launch of Tomcat 7. This track will give you all you need to know about the latest features, and help you to make the most of Tomcat - either standalone or together with a front-end server. We'll explain a little of our 10 year history, the versions we support, the project structure and how the development takes place. We will, of course, also present new innovations and what's next for the Tomcat community.

• Tuscany: Apache Tuscany is a lightweight and open-source infrastructure based on Service Component Architecture (SCA). SCA defines a simple to use, service-based model for construction of service components, assembly and deployment of composite applications in a distributed network. Tuscany integrates with the Apache platform and extends the SCA specification with support for Web 2.0 protocols (ATOM, JSON-RPC), data bindings (JAXB, Axiom, JSON etc), and integration of Web 2.0 toolkits like Dojo. With Apache Tuscany, you can create SCA components in Java, BPEL, or scripting languages and assemble SCA components with other components like EJBs, Spring beans and JEE Webapps. The ApacheCon Tuscany Track will cover SCA and related technologies. The topics will cover design and architecture of the OSGi based Tuscany SCA Runtime, various aspects of building applications with Service Component Architecture (SCA) and new trends such as SCA and Cloud Computing. These talks are intended for technology enthusiasts as well as for Developers and CTOs interested in learning more about SOA, SCA and how these technologies can help when implementing flexible enterprise solutions.

• In addition to the above technical tracks, the 10th Business & Community Track at ApacheCon will take place on Wednesday and Thursday, 3-4 November, with dedicated presentations by developers, business leaders, industry experts, academics, and enterprise employees. An array of presentations on Open Source business, marketing, licensing, community, and development issues are targeted for business professionals, and will prove helpful to developers, technologists, and hackers as well.