Apache ActiveMQ and ServiceMix at Øredev Conference

This week I am at the Øredev Conference in Malmö, Sweden speaking about ActiveMQ and ServiceMix. The weather here has been quite cold, rainy and windy, but the conference has been great. I've met lots of great people here, many of whom are very passionate about the Scrum development process. Unfortunately I haven't slept much since I've been here (sometimes that happens when I travel internationally) but I have gotten a lot of work completed.

One unique feature of this conference is the keynote talk each morning to start off the day and each one has been very good in topic and delivered by some very entertaining speakers including Ted Neward, James Bach and Robert C. Martin. Another unique offering here has been a track dedicated to development processes, and, as I mentioned, very slanted toward Scrum. I wish I saw this level of passion for the development process at more companies where I've consulted! I've also noticed that every talk has been captured on video (using Macs ;-) ), so I wonder if it will be offered up on the website - hmmmm - I need to ask Michael Tiberg about that.

Some Choice Quotes
Wednesday morning that Ted was speaking, he asked if anyone in the crowd writes perfect concurrent code. As one guy in the nearly 1000 person crowed raised his hand, Ted pointed in his direction and said, 'Aaaahhh, I think we need some mental health professionals over there.'



Today, Bob Martin asked, 'How many people have looked at code and thought, oh I must fix this code, but then you decide not to do it? Because if you fix the code you might break it and if you break it, you own it - ha, ha.'

New CEO Joins Sonatype

Recently Sonatype hired a new CEO to take the helm. Mark de Visser has a lot of experience working with open source companies as he has held key positions at Zend, Agitar and Red Hat. As noted previously by Matt Asay, Mark joined the team in early October, but it's only recently become fairly recognized.

I had the pleasure of spending some time with Mark back in October and I was impressed with Mark's analytical sense even the first time I met him. I think he's a good fit for the Sonatype crew. He's got a lot of knowledge of the open source world how to do the right kind of marketing in it. This is very important for any startup who is focused on building quality commercial products around open source and Mark's experience in this area is immediately useful.

Sonatype has done a great job with its products so far and they're getting great adoption. Now Mark can help them really get the right marketing message out there and spread further awareness of the company and all that it offers.

Purchased Songs Disappear From iPhone

Just recently I finally broke down and got an iPhone. My old Sony Ericcson T610 was konking out so it was time to buy a new phone anyway. So far I've been very happy with it, even the service from at&t has not been too bad. Being that my old phone was nearly eight years old, having a phone with newer, more easily accessible features is a nice change.

A couple weeks ago I purchased the new album from Ryan Adams and the Cardinals from iTunes on my iPhone. After listening to it for a week or so I sync'd my iPhone with my MacBook Pro only to realize that the entire album disappeared from both the iPhone and iTunes. Upon trying to download it again on my iPhone, I received an error stating that I had already downloaded it, am I sure I want to purchase it again? So I started Googling the problem and much to my amazement this seems to be a fairly widespread issue with the iPhone. I found many folks in the same predicament with no solution whatsoever. The only option is file an issue with Apple about it by selecting the purchase in my iTunes account and clicking a button named Report a Problem.

So far I have received nothing from Apple about the problem I reported and, sadly, I don't expect anything. My solution was to purchase the album a second time and make sure it was backed up by iTunes so I won't lose it again (hopefully).

Has anyone else experienced this and had the situation remedied by Apple in some way?

ActiveMQ, Camel and ServiceMix at ApacheCon US 2008

I just returned late last night from New Orleans after speaking at the ApacheCon US 2008 conference. I had a great time seeing old friends, attending the conference and exploring the French Quarter with Guillaume, John, Shawna and Jack. Lot's of history throughout the area and the people of New Orleans were very pleasant. I've been to many cities where folks are very nonplussed by your presence, but that's not the case in New Orleans. Everyone was very friendly, forthcoming with information and helpful.

I was at ApacheCon to speak about Apache ServiceMix. Then last weekend I was contacted by my friend Aaron Mulder who informed me that his whole family was ill and he wasn&apost going to make it to the conference so he wondered if I could deliver his talk about Apache ActiveMQ at the conference. So I spent some time putting together the slides and prepared for this talk.

I was scheduled to deliver the two talks on Friday afternoon and I was prepared. Then only 20 minutes before I was to begin speaking, I got a call from my good friend Chris Custine. He was calling me to let me know that he was in the hospital in New Orleans with a herniated disk in his back (ouch!) and wondered if I could cover his talk as well. So I agreed to cover Chris' talk as well, but with a different topic - Apache Camel. Just before Chris' time slot, I explained to the attendees the situation and they were all gracious enough to let me speak about Camel.

In the end, everything went well. I just hope Chris will be OK. I even finally got to meet Joe and Roger from TTM Solutions. I only wish we'd met earlier in the week so we could have spent some more time together.

Update:
All three sets of slides have been posted to my SlideShare space.

New Release of Apache Camel Now Available

The newest release of Apache Camel is now available for download! Grab the binary release as a tarball or a zip now. It includes a big list of improvements and new features driven from the Camel community. This is a great testament to the continuing widespread adoption of Camel.

Just a few of my favorite items include:

• Camel's Maven archetypes


• clarification of the recursive property on the file component


• The use of exclusive locks for reading a file to prevent reading a file before it's fully written


• Some new options on the tracer


• The Eclipse Templates for Camel (nice work Jon)

There are many, many more items in the full list of improvements, take a peek.

A couple weeks ago I spoke about Camel at the Colorado Software Summit and received a lot of wonderful feedback. Folks at the conference really enjoyed the session, so much that three separate people began writing Camel routes after seeing my session and were really enjoying its simplicity.

Free Maven, m2eclipse, Nexus and Hudson Training Next Week!

If you want to brush up your skills with Maven, m2eclipse, Nexus and Hudson then you should get to this free training in New Orleans next week!

Brian Fox, Jason van Zyl and I will be in New Orleans for ApacheCon US 2008 next week and are offering a free one-day training in order to gather feedback on the course material. The course is intended for folks already familiar with Maven and will focus on using Maven proficiently with your team, working with Maven in Eclipse via m2eclipse, managing your artifacts with Nexus and automating your build and testing it with Hudson.

The training will be held at the Marriot on Tuesday November 4th from 9am to 4pm. To sign up for the course, please email us at training at sonatype dot com. Availability is on a first come, first served basis so we suggest you sign up quickly.

Everyone is welcome and make sure to bring your laptop!

Open Source is Free Software - What's Your Opinion as a User?

My friend Greg Wilkins recently wrote a thought-provoking post about free software and open source. I encourage you to go read it, but I also encourage you to think about what it means to YOU. My experience has taught me that it's too easy for those of us who are actually working on open source projects to have a clouded point of view so I'm always very interested in your opinion as a user of open source but not a developer of the open source you use.

Something I found compelling was an analogy posted in the comments by a reader. The following is the quote:

Taking without contributing at all is destructive. My local bank branch is 5 mins walk away. It has free coffee for customers. I am a customer. What happens if I no longer buy coffee at home but get all my coffee from the bank? What if I go a step further and sell the bank's coffee in my coffee shop? Most likely, this will mean no more free coffee in the bank, for anyone. By your logic I didn't do anything wrong. BUT I HAVE PRODUCED A BAD OUTCOME "Everything free" might be a noble aim but how can it work in practice? You fail to consider the practical implications of "take with no give."

While this analogy seems good, it kinda misses the mark slightly. The bank's business model is based on the financial services it provides. The coffee is just a small perk to keep you happy while you are there using the bank's financial services. So the analogy doesn't isn't 100% stable, though I still see the author's point. If you are a consumer of open source and you contribute back in absolutely no way, then the community is said to be at risk. Remember, contributing is as easy as participating in mailing list discussions and filing bugs. That's exactly how I tend to get started with any open source project because the bar for participation is usually pretty low.

Anyway, it's an interesting topic for sure as I've had many of these types of discussions over the years at software conferences, on consulting gigs and even inside the companies where I have worked. What's interesting is very wide range of the points in such a discussion. But I digress...