I just got back from CamelOne which was earlier this week in the beautiful city of Boston, MA. It was quite the experience; definitely one of the best technical conferences I've been to in a while. I did not experience any dull moments while there starting with my arrival on Monday evening. The Apache folks hosted a free meet-and-greet for anyone to come by and talk with some of the committers and share stories among themselves. I got to hangout and meet Claus Ibsen and Jon Anstey of Camel in Action fame, Rob Davies and Dejan Bosanac of ActiveMQ in Action fame, and completely badass software developers Hiram Chirino, and James Strachan. Great way to start the conference.
Just as I shared some of the speakers and sessions I was really interested in before the conference, I would like to share how it all went and the things I was most interested in. First, as I mentioned, there was never a dull moment. It was packed with a nice combination of networking with other attendees and soaking in as much from the sessions as I could. There were three sessions for a given time-slot which meant I could pick only one. This was difficult because there were many instances where I wanted to attend multiple sessions. Fortunately, they recorded all of the sessions and will post them to the CamelOne website once they've been processed so that I can watch the ones I missed. Which means you can also watch them. Here are the sessions I attended:
Day 1:
- Session 1: Apache CXF - Leveraging New Features - Dan Kulp, ASF
- Session 2: Building a Reliable Messaging System for an Unreliable World - Rob Terpilowski, Lynden
- Session 3: Replacing a Commercial Messaging System with ActiveMQ - Matt Pavlovich, Media Driver
- Session 4: Using Fuse MQ and Fuse Fabric to make large ActiveMQ Deployments Easier - Dejan Bosanac, FuseSource
- Session 5: Are your Apache Camel routes ready for Production? - David Valeri, FuseSource
- James Strachan: FuseIDE
Day 2
- Session 1: Deploying and Managing Open Source Integration Across the Enterprise - James Strachan, Stan Lewis, FuseSource
- Session 2: Develop Real-Time Applications using WebSockets and Apache Camel, ActiveMQ - Charles Moulliard, FuseSource
- Session 3: Tracking Real-Time Weather, Big Data, Camel - David Reiser, Ram Raju, Shane Kent, Dept of Transportation
- Session 4: Next Generation Open Source Messaging with Apollo - Hiram Chirino, FuseSource
- Session 5: User Roundtable: All things camel, servicemix and karaf - Jon Anstey, Claus Ibsen, FuseSource
- Customer Presentation: CERN
Three presentations stuck out for me. James Strachan's presentation of the FuseIDE was really cool. FuseIDE is a set of eclipse plugins that makes developing camel routes an easy drag and drop exercise, allows you to manage your container/ESB deployments, and allows you runtime introspection of your camel routes while deployed in a container. Really cool stuff. Definitely check out the video once it is published on the CamelOne website, or check out the current webinars on FuseIDE or the demo videos in the download section of the FuseSource website.
The second one that stood out was Hiram Chirino's presentation of next generation messaging with Apache Apollo. Apollo is currently a subproject of ActiveMQ that aims to deliver a very fast and reliable message broker built from the ground up on a highly concurrent dispatching model. Hiram has done some benchmarking with Apollo vs ActiveMQ, vs HornetQ, and RabbitMQ. The results show Apollo performing really really good against the other projects, in some cases even blowing them out of the water. See some of the results on his website.
The last presentation that stood out for me was given by Charles Moulliard on using a new HTML 5 technology, WebSockets. WebSockets is a standard HTML 5 technology that allows full-duplex communication between the browser and the server, thus allowing the server to "push" data to the browser. His demo showed how you can build web applications and use WebSocket technology as the transport between a basic web app client (HTML, CSS, JS) and a server-side implementation with Camel and ActiveMQ to push messages from the broker to the client in real-time. Think of a chat application or stock-quote feed that pushes real-time data to the browser window (whether browser, ipad, iphone, etc) in a standard way without having to poll the server. This technology will be very useful to anyone doing messaging with html-based clients.
All in all I am very grateful I was able to attend. The conference actually sold out and had significantly more attendees than last year. Looking forward to the following year of exciting work and contributing to Apache as well as the next CamelOne event!