ApacheCon EU 2005 Project Notes
Axis2 looks very interesting. It is a serious re-working of Axis to function in a message/document passing system rather than binding to RPC. It looks to have much better support for XML binding and WSDL-first. The only XML binding systems in place (I believe) are raw Axiom and XMLBeans. Dims recently left a note for me saying he'd written added xpath support to Axiom via Jaxen (ah jaxen, sweet sweet jaxen). From an outside POV, Axis2 and XFire look more or less the same.
MySQL clustering looks pretty impressive. I really wanted to get a chance to talk with Jan, but it never happened =( I have a pretty low baseline appreciation for MySQL, but with InnoDB they have become much more worthy of consideration. GPL'ing the drivers is pretty questionable, but they own em, so hey. I need to find some high-memory machines and play with their cluster support some.
APR is amazing. Amongst everything else, it has a really nice memory management compromise with the pools.
Lucene4C is a bear to compile, unfortunately. The idiommatic C interface is a good thing (incomplete so far, though), but getting the beast to build is... not so fun.
Derby is rocking. This little DB ain't gonna be little for long. I pestered the Derby folks about all my sore points -- and they'd all been resolved! Heck, you don't even need the system property anymore, I am told, but can specify a full path in the jdbc url instead! Not sure how this will work with derby properties, but need to experiment. Embedding multiple instances in one VM is possible via classloader hackery -- but they are working to make this easy to do, or at least provide good examples.
OSGI is much more interesting than I previously thought. Sylvain gave me a good explanation of it, and I am impressed. Sylvain is a madman -- like all the Cocooners I guess, but possibly more so than others.
Finally, looks like the Subversion Classloader is going to happen. Awesome!