Hello from OSCON 2005!

It only seems appropriate that my first blog entry is at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, a place where it seems everyone blogs.

I came here because I've just recently gotten involved in the Apache Derby open source project, and want to learn as much as I can about the open source culture, community and tools. Derby has just had a couple good milestones – just last week we graduated from incubation (somebody here called it “probation”) and is now officially part of the DB project, and just today we did our 10.1 release with a lot of great new features and bugfixes.

I am sure you may ask why Sun is getting involved in Derby. Well, here's my take on it – it's great to have a 100% Java, easy-to-use, embeddable database for Java developers. It makes it really easy to do iterative development, unit testing, and so on. It's also great because you can embed it in your application VM, making it essentially invisible to the end user. So, it only makes sense that if we want to promote Java development, we should have a database like this. I also think Derby is a great database for software research and higher education – it has all the key components of a relational database system, it's open source, well-structured and well-commented, easy to download, install and distribute – perfect to put in the lab and hand off to students.

Anyway, whatever the reasons, I am having a great time working on this product, getting exposed to the open source community, and working with a great set of engineers. Who am I to complain? :)

I can't help but notice that, although there is a Java track here, Java is not the language du jour, and is actually treated with a bit of disdain. Most of these folks are very much working with scripting languages like PHP and Perl and Python. A new one on the block is Ruby, created by Yukihiro Matsumoto with the intent to “maximize the joy of programming.” Surprised me, because I enjoy programming very much in Java, but I guess that's not true for everyone. It appears to have a lot of the qualities of Java, along with the scripting-language/LISP feature of dynamic typing, which allows you to very quickly write and test what you're doing without a compilation step. Looks interesting, I'll have to investigate further.

I went to a very interesting session this afternoon by one of the best speakers I've heard in a long time, Robert Lefkowitz, entitled Open Data: How the RDBMS Is The Key That Unlocks Proprietary Applications. I came late and by the time I got there he had finished his main topic and was launching into a fascinating idea. His contention was that for many systems and applications, what is locks you into a vendor is the data and how it is stored in the database – the schema -- not the source code. You can't migrate from Vendor A to Vendor B if this migration involves reworking all your data into a new schema – you're locked in. His proposal was that just as SourceForge and java.net are gathering places for building communities around useful source code, we need a “schema forge” to build communities around useful schemas. You would have a project to define the schema for healthcare, or calendaring, or event management. This would allow open source projects and even proprietary vendors within a given domain to standardize on a single schema, delivering on the promise of flexibility and averting vendor lockin. This is done already, within services organizations and other closed groups such as governments, scientific domains, etc. The idea is to apply the open source model to this. I find this fascinating and think it's a wonderful idea; I would love to see it come to fruition.

I was invited to Sun's hospitality suite this evening. Not until I arrived did I discover it was for Open Solaris. I was surrounded by kernel hackers! At one point I watched lighthearted verbal attacks and parries between folks from FreeBSD, Linux and Open Solaris. I know I studied operating systems in college, but these guys were talking in Greek as far as I could tell. Bryan Cantrill was there, one of the inventors of Dtrace. He shook hands, and immediately sat down with one of his buddies on the couch, popped open his laptop, and started working through code with him. Wow.

Overall a very interesting and enlightening conference.