Introduction to Apache Synapse @ Apache Asia 2009

Yesterday (3rd December 2009) I conducted a technical presentation titled “Introduction to Apache Synapse” at the Apache Asia Roadshow 2009 held at Colombo, Sri Lanka. For everyone’s benefit I have published the presentation slides on SlideShare. The presentation went well, and so far I have received pretty good feedback from the participants. There were a few very interesting questions from the audience at the end of the session too.

In this presentation I have addressed the areas like problems of enterprise integration, ESB pattern, key features of Synapse, Synapse architecture and the configuration model. I hope you will find it interesting and useful.

Introduction to Apache Synapse

View more documents from Hiranya Jayathilaka.

ApacheCon EU 2009....Finishing Touches

The ApacheCon EU 2009 (Amsterdam, Netherlands) came to an end today evening. We had a BarCamp on 23rd followed by a Hackathon on 24th. The conference commenced on 25th and continued until today evening. We had two keynotes and around 64 technical presentations during the last three days. I was fortunate enough to take part in the following presentations.

• Embrace OSGi (by Carsten Ziegeler, member of ASF)
• Tales from OSGi trenches (by Bertrand Delacretaz, member of ASF)
• OSGi as a framework for building a product line (by Ruwan Linton and Afkham Azeez, WSO2)
• HBasics: Hadoop's big database (by Michael Stack, Microsoft)
• Apache license as a business model (by Paul Fremantle, WSO2)
• Clustered Web services for high availability and scalability (by Ruwan Linton, WSO2)
• EDA with Apache Synapse (by Paul Fremantle, WSO2)
• Performance tuning Apache Tomcat (by Filip Hanik, SpringSource)
• How to become a project at ASF (by Martijn Dashorst)
• Introduction to NIO 2.0 (by Jeanfrancois Arcand)
• Using MINA 2.0 (by Emmanuel Lecharmy, IKTEK)
• Becoming a Tomcat super user (by mark Thomas, SpringSource)
• High availability != High cost (by Norman Maurer, HEAG MediaNet)
• Apache POI (by Nick Burch, Torchbox)
• Enterprise build & test in the cloud (Carlos Sanchez, G2iX)
• Shindig for blogs and wikis (Dave Johnson, VP Apache Roller)

I also got the opportunity to chair most of the above sessions thanks to the organizers and folks of the Apache TAC. Thanks guys! You rock!

Out of the two keynotes, I really enjoyed the keynote on 'open sourcing the analyst business' by James Governor. It was a real blast!

In addition to all the technical knowledge I gathered during the conference I also made quite a lot of new friends. I met some very interesting people working at various levels and projects of the ASF. All in all it was a very successful ApacheCon, not just to me but to everybody that participated. (I have a lot more to mention but unfortunately I have to cut it short. I have lot of packing left to do before I start the return journey tomorrow morning.)

Happy Birthday ASF

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) celebrates its 10th anniversary today. Having finished the regular activities of the ApacheCon scheduled for the day, all the committers, PMC members and members got together to celebrate this great occasion. Jim Jagielski, the chairman of the ASF board of directors cut the giant birth day cake. It was indeed a fun filled and proud moment for everyone at Apache. Another important event that took place during the reception was the key signining party where around 20 folks including myself, got the opportunity to get signed PGP keys from ASF.

All in all it was a great birth day party with loads of fun and excitement. Happy 10th anniversary ASF!!!

ApacheCon EU 2009 Begins

After a 3 hour flight from Sri Lanka to India followed by an 8 hour flight from India to Netherlands, I finally arrived at beautiful Amsterdam city, to take part in the ApacheCon Europe 2009. The event is now being held at the Movenpick hotel at the Amsterdam city center. The main attraction of the first day was BarCamp Apache where a number of developers, committers and open source geeks like me presented on a variety of topics. I myself conducted a presentation on Apache Synapse and how it can be used to scale up Web Services deployments. Among the other presentations I really liked the presentation by Ricardo Varela on software for mobile platforms and the presentation by Ross Gardler on teaching open source. Sri Lankan student community was credited for their achievements in the last Google Summer of Code during the presentation by Ross :)

All in all it was a really awesome BarCamp with lots of great talks, t-shirts, sweets and coffee. Let's see how the things turn out tomorrow.