Last week, I was in London for ApacheCon
2000. In a break from my usual
subjects, this will be a brief overview of the conference, touching
on the highlights and some of the things that were talked about there.

London

The Apache faithful gathered for its twice-yearly convention, ApacheCon, in London last week. In this column Rich Bowen shares his highlights of ApacheCon Europe 2000.

Combining a technical conference and a family vacation can be a dangerous
thing to do, since both of them require your full attention. So we went
to London a week earlier, so that we would have some time to see the
sights before the conference started. London is a pretty cool place, in
both senses of the term, and we had a good time looking around, but
often wished that we had dressed a little warmer. (Editor’s note: I was lucky enough to have dinner with Rich, his family, and Ken Coar at ApacheCon. His daughter is cuter than a button.)

ApacheCon

OK, enough about our vacation. ApacheCon started Monday morning, bright
and early, with a welcome by Ken Coar, the vice president of the Apache
Software Foundation, and another writer for ApacheToday.com. It was
still rather early, so we were still trying to get moving. There were
already some technical problems, with the network not quite functional
yet, and so Ken had to work around this and various other problems.

Lucent had signed on to provide wireless networking, but did not
actually end up doing so, so several folks brought their own personal
wireless networking equiment and set up a wireless network which
worked pretty well most of the time.

After Ken’s welcome, I attended the Apache Projects Overview, led
by Daniel Lopez Ridruejo, the author of Comanche, and a Covalent
Technologies employee. Daniel talked about the various projects under the
ASF umbrella, how they are organized, and, in particular, how the Apache Server
is organized, how it works, and how the development process operates.

In
the next hour, as much as I wanted to attend Ryan Bloom’s talk about Apache 2.0,
I had to attend the talk about Apache on Windows, because I was the speaker. I
talked about Apache 1.3 running on Windows, and tricks and tips of setting it up
and keeping it running.

Because there were so many sessions, and so
little time to cram them all in, lunch ran concurrently with some sessions, so
one had to either go without, or choose to skip some to go eat. This is a
problem with any conference, and the planning committee actually did a
fantastic job scheduling sessions so that you could, for the most part,
attend things that were along a certain area of interest.

After lunch, I went to Ryan’s talk about modules on Apache 2.0. 2.0
gives modules much more control over the order in which they are
called, and how they interoperate with other modules. Filters are a
new way for content to be modified while it is on the way out to the
client. Some very cool things are going into 2.0. In answer to the
question that was asked every 5 minutes (“When is 2.0 coming out?”),
Ryan said that we could expect a beta release soon. For some definition
of soon. As with any Open Source project, things are ready when they
are ready, which is when people have time and motivation to work on
it. If you need something sooner, download the code and start working.

At 3 p.m., I gave a introductory talk about the Apache Server, aimed at
beginners that were at the conference to figure out what this Apache
thing is all about. It was very well attended, and generated some
really good questions that I’ll need to roll back into the presentation
for the next time, and some which might turn into good articles! 🙂

Social Event at The Rock