Fast Feather Track

The ASF is now over 10 years old, with more than fifty top-level projects and dozens of other active projects – so many that we couldn’t cover them all in a 10-day conference! And additionally, there are new ideas and potential new projects being hatched in the Incubator and Labs every day.

With this in mind, we bring you the Fast Feather Talks. An extra session track has been added to the conference. Join us in an intimate setting to hear 10 to 15 minute updates on some of your favorite (or soon-to-be favorite!) projects within the ASF community. Stay for a few talks, or stay all afternoon and get caught up on the exciting, cutting-edge world of ASF projects!

WEDNESDAY | 5 November 

14:00 - All About NMaven: .NET support for Apache Maven with Brett Porter

• What it is
• How it works
• .NET challenges
• Latest News - What's next
• Where Help is Wanted

• Brett Porter is a Member of the Apache Software Foundation, serving on various project management committees since joining Apache Maven in 2003. He lives in Sydney, Australia and by day works as the Director for Product Development at Exist Global. He is the co-author of the book "Better Builds with Maven".

14:15 - Intro to Apache Continuum with Wendy Smoak

Apache Continuum is an enterprise-ready continuous integration server with features such as automated builds, release management, role-based security, and integration with popular build tools and source control management systems. Whether you have a centralized build team or want to put control of releases in the hands of developers, Continuum can help you improve quality and maintain a consistent build environment.

• Wendy Smoak is a member of The Apache Software Foundation and a committer on several projects, where she focuses on user support, documentation and infrastructure. She is a consultant with Exist Global, where her work centers around enterprise adoption of Apache Maven and related technologies.

14:30 - Fancy Fancy Indexing with Konstantin Koll

This talk is related to the Apache HTTPD, and its directory indexing. Currently, indexing can be operated in a standard and a "fancy" mode. This talk introduces "fancy fancy indexing", which is currently implemented in a proprietary webserver application and offers a modern CSS based user interface along with smooth integration of relational content. The author aims to gather interest and support for implementing "fancy fancy indexing" as an Apache HTTPD module.

• Konstantin Koll is enrolled at the University of Dortmund, Germany, as a PhD student. His research interest is in the are of file system. He is also the lead developer of the alternative PC operating system "DESKWORK", which serves as testbed for the technologies presented in his talk.

15:00 - Apache Archiva with Maria Odea Ching

Apache Archiva is an open source build artifact repository manager which addresses different artifact repository problems such as bloating repository size, corrupted metadata, download problems and access controls. This session will be an introduction of the Apache Archiva project. It would start with a short overview about repositories and the problems encountered in using them, and how Archiva addresses these problems. Then, Archiva's features and capabilities will be briefly discussed. This would cover repository management, proxying, artifact deployment, security, and reporting.

• Maria Odea Ching has been a committer at the Apache Software Foundation since 2006. She is currently serving as chair of the Apache Archiva project management committee and is also involved in the Apache Continuum and Apache Maven projects. She is a Software Engineer at Exist Global, Inc.

15:15 - Buildr with Alex Boisvert

Buildr is a build system for Java, Scala, Groovy, Ruby and soon C/C++ applications. This talk is a short introduction to Buildr with lots of practical examples. Learn how Buildr can help make your build scripts shorter, faster and more reliable. Who knows, it may even make writing build scripts fun again!

• Alex Boisvert is an avid user and contributor to open-source projects. He is the author of the open-source JDBM persistence engine and committer to the Apache Ode, Apache ServiceMix and Apache Buildr projects.

15:30 - Abdera, a Java atomPub implementation with David Calavera

Abdera is a Apache implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol (RFC 5023). In this session will cover the main characteristics of this project and and we'll see how to build a simple AtomPub server.

• David Calavera is a software architect in 11870.com. David is a member of the spanish ruby community and co-founder of the Spanish Ruby Users Group. He has contributed to many open source projects like Hudson or Netbeans and is commiter of Apache Abdera project as well.

16:30 - Apache Droid - an intelligent standalone robot framework with Thorsten Scherler

Droids makes it very easy to extend existing robots or write a new one from scratch. The talk will introduce the different components of droids and how to use them in a robot. We will explain this with the HelloCrawler as example. Droids is a labs projects which will go to the incubator within the next weeks. Droids uses/will use a width range of lucene projects within the different components (Parser based on tika, Handler for solr, ...).

• Thorsten Scherler is an independent senior developer and consultant for JEE applications. He is for more than five years actively participating in several open source projects. Thorsten is a member in several Apache communities and project management committees like Cocoon, Forrest, Lenya and Droids.

16:45 - What's cooking in PDFBox? with Jukka Zitting

PDFBox is an established and widely used Java library for working with PDF documents. The project entered the Apache Incubation in early 2008 and is currently working on its first Apache release. This resentation gives an overview of the PDF format and the features of PDFBox. Current incubation status and related issues are also outlined.

• Jukka Zitting has worked with open source content management for over ten years and has been focusing on content repositories and related technologies after joining the Apache Jackrabbit project three years ago. Jukka is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and serves currently as the chair of the Apache Jackrabbit PMC.

17:00 - Catacomb WebDAV Server with Markus Litz

Catacomb is a WebDAV repository module for use with the Apache WebDAV module, mod_dav. It replaces the module mod_dav_fs and stores resources and their properties in a relational database. The primary advantage of this approach is the searching capabilities of the database are used to implement the DASL protocol. Additionally, the database allows straightforward implementation of the versioning capabilities of the DeltaV protocol. We will present the current state of development of the catacomb WebDAV server. We also explain the use of catacomb for storing scientific data in the german aerospace center. Finally there will be an outlook of future WebDAV protocol extensions in catacomb and how they will be realized.

• Markus Litz works at the German aerospace center in the department of simulation and software technologies (http:/www.dlr.de/sc) with the focus on building up automated process chains for the virtual aircraft predesign. He also is one of the core developer of the catacomb WebDAV-server and contributer to other webdav related projects like Prestan, DAVTool, DAVInspector and Litmus.

17:30 - Apache Qpid Overview with Lahiru Gunathilake

Qpid provides a multiple language implementation of the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol AMQP specification and related technologies.

Qpid is a messaging implementation built on AMQP that allows one to implement just about any distributed or business application. Client APIs include C++, Java, Ruby, Python and C# for .NET. In addition a JMS API is provided for Java making typical JMS use cases easy. Qpid provides transaction management, queuing, distribution, security, management and heterogeneous multi-platform support. This presentation will be a brief introduction to Apache Qpid.

• Lahiru Gunathilake is an Undergraduate at the University of Moratuwa (Sri Lanka) majoring in Computer Science and Engineering. Currently he is in his final semester of his final year. He is an Apache Committer who's having karma for WS-all and Apache Qpid. He did his Google Summer of Code project with Apache Qpid and developed a Management console for Qpid Java broker.