Niklas | 
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05 3rd, 2008| 
Apr
10
Here’s something you don’t see every day.
This is likely the local proxy screwing up, still, makes for a good screenshot.
Apr
9
So, my first day at ApacheCon EU and my second day in Amsterdam. Last night was spent hunting down some amazingly good and hard-to-find Belgian beers. Turned out I stumbled on the perfect place for this very need.
Today started out at five o’clock, damn kids on establishing screwed up sleeping patterns. Anyways, that time of the day is good for writing code so I finished up some stuff for the demo I was going to do in my talk. Hotel breakfast was good, but it amazing how little you’re able to eat for €21. That game is skewed towards the dealer.
Next on the schedule, the key note which I didn’t listen to at all, even though I was in the room. Nerves beginning to make their moves.
After that was my talk. After the standardized initial technical screw-up (project cable not plugged in) it went okay. Not on my top 5 list but good enough not to kill myself off. Got some good questions and some interesting discussions during the rest of the day. Happy about that.
The rest of the day was spent at some of the sessions, Richard S Hall on Apache Felix and Erik Abele on load-balancing with Apache HTTPD fitted my current interests neatly. I continue to run into people I’ve only known from email conversations, which is pretty much my reason for going here in the first place.
Also, surprised at how fast I began missing the kids and wife. You spend every day with them and yet you can barely step on the plane before you realize you won’t be seeing them for a few days. Love is odd I guess.
Apr
1
Now how’s that a high buzzword density title. I’m no fan of BPM tools, especially as the tend to be at the top of the food-chain in what vendors offer these days. That’s just another way of saying that it’s an area that is not yet commodity. Which in turn is yet another way of saying that it’s a complex and uncharted area. Here be dragons.
Therefore it was kind of refreshing seeing this little French startup which aims at building a BPM engine with a SaaS deployment model. From the demo, it’s all pretty basic at the moment, but I find the idea intriguing. If you put your CRM stuff in Salesforce, why not let someone else take care of executing your processes? Using its partnership model and an ever growing ecosystem of open web-based applications, a product like this can offer integrations that every company would otherwise have to arrange on their own. And nobody wants to do integrations. Really.
Will this be the one to succeed in this area? No clue, but I believe this is an area to watch in the near future.
Mar
22
Last week, I was delighted to be invited by one of my clients to a dinner at Kock & vin (in Swedish). The name is a word play on “Coq au vin”, which would be typical for the humor around here. This was just three days after they were awarded the best wine restaurant in Sweden, and two days after they got their first start in Guide Michelin. Certainly a good week for them, and an excellent dinner for us. Inspired by Mårtens never ending stream of great dinners (in Swedish).
This was the menu I had, somewhat adapted from the regular menu due to me not eating meat or bird:
Deep fried oyster from Grebbestad, seared scallop, smoked egg with chlorophyll of spinach and parsley
2005 Sancerre Jean-Max Roger. Loire, France.
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Baked back of ling with horseraddish cream and cabbage with powder of rosted Arabica
2006 Couvent de Jacobin Blanc Louse Jadot. Bourgogne, France.
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Lukewarm langoustine with pure of white beans and soy beans
2005 Chenin Blanc. Bellingham, South Africa.
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Caviar of lumpsucker marinated with fennel grated pumpkin seeds and sour cream
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Pam fried hake with a sauce of brown butter and soya, poached egg yolk, cauliflower couscous and lemon marinated raw shrimps
2003 Les Traverse Paul Jabolet. France.
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Sorbet of seabuckthorn with presses carrots
2005 Pacherenc du Vic Bilh. Ch. dÃydie, France.
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Ice cream of coconut milk with passionfruit jam covered with warm manjari chocolate foam
2003 Casteñao Dulce. Yecia, Spain.
In every detail a great dinner, one of the very best I’ve had. Strongly recommended if you happen to pass by Göteborg.
Mar
18
Turned out I had to cancel my trip to QCon London due to a customer engagement. Too bad as the conference seems to have been as good as the previous QCons. Oh well, there will probably be more. For my colleges at the conference, their most discussed topic seems to have been the REST track, something that makes me very happy.
My colleague Johan blogged on the inevitable increase in complexity in technologies as they become established. While I agree that REST will likely also see this type of development, I have some hopes for it not being as bad as for the WS-* cycle. For one, I don’t see the curve that Johan shows as having a constant amplitude but rather having an asymptotic curve.
For example, I think WS-* got some things right where CORBA went wrong (text based protocol, (mis)use an established protocol). This type of curve will never actually reach the golden middle way, but at least we’re getting closer. Will we be hyping some new technology-de-jour beyond REST? Sure.
Also, some (like me) would claim that REST builds on a stronger foundation then CORBA and WS-* do, and therefore will have an easier time growing to fulfill a greater set of requirements. In addition, REST did not come out the enterprisey dungeons of IBM and friends but rather from a pragmatic community and one quite wise man. Hopefully, this community can continue to foster REST and limit the inevitable complexity. For example, I don’t see REST repeating mistakes as worship transport independence (while only embracing HTTP anyways), XML level encryption or distributed transactions.
Feb
21
Looks like I will be talking at ApacheCon EU in April. Originally, Peter Royal was supposed to give a talk on Apache MINA but had to cancel his appearance. Instead, I will try to fill his shoes. The topic is still the same, a high level overview of MINA 2.0 and a walk through on how to write a simple application using MINA. If you’ll be at ApacheCon and want to meet up for a beer or got some thoughts on what would be interesting to cover in the presentation, feel free to get in touch.
This will be my first ApacheCon, a conference I’ve been wanting to visit for some years now. Happy to be going. I hope to meet some of the Apache people one has gotten to know from the community.
