Registration for DrupalCon Paris opened this weekend, and already several sponsors have claimed coveted top sponsorship spots for the September 1-5, 2009.
Whether or not Sun will sponsor for the 5th time in a row is something I'll be checking into over the coming weeks.
Although the agenda and session schedule for DrupalCon Paris has not yet been posted, there is already some interesting content planned for the event, including full day immersion style training in Commercial Training tracks.
Whether or not Sun sponsors this DrupalCon, I plan to make this one my 5th in a row.
Organizers of DrupalCon DC, in the lead up to the event, asked Sun and the other event sponsors a few questions about their relationship with Drupal. The first question was:
How does Sun work with Drupal?
I provided this answer:
There are too many ways in which Sun works with Drupal to list them all
here, but some of the highlights are:
Plus many organizations run Drupal on Sun technology
Employees at Sun have been using Drupal internally for lots of
things, including:
as representative AMP stack environment and workload for lots
of benchmarking and performance testing
to demonstrate certain technologies, both in Sun internal
training, and with Sun's customers, e.g., using the Webstack
pre-built bundle of AMP and other open source packages for OpenSolaris,
Virtualization with Solaris zones, MySQL installation and tuning, and
PHP code analysis with DTrace.
* Entry corrected to say Sun
has contributed more FLOSS code than any other single
institution, not Sun has contributed more code to the Linux kernel than any other single institution (although I think I did read that somewhere, it's not substantiated in this paper). Thanks to Matt for point that out - it's major difference.
Back now from DrupalCon, I'm parsing all that happened last week in Boston. For me it was a whirlwind, interrupted by a plethora of hassles, including a nasty head cold, keyboard and trackpad on my MBP crapping out, a crashed demo, and several hours separated from my Treo while it rode around in the back of a Boston cab. All that negative energy converging on me was more than offset by the positive vibe at the four day conference. The kindness of the cabbie who drove crosstown to return my phone helped too.
One of the highlights for sure was spending time with a new Sun colleague, Brian Aker from MySQL. We had breakfast at Henrietta's near Harvard Square before his keynote on Wednesday. I asked him about the merger with Sun, what's next for MySQL, and how he'd like to see our field organizations work together. He said the merger has been pretty well received and there was a general appreciation at MySQL for Sun's commitment to open source (something I hope will rub off on Brian's Slashdot amigo Chris Dibona, who conspicuously left Sun off of his Tuesday keynote list of companies that "get" open source). There is a tradition of collaboration between Sun and MySQL too, which Brian indicated ought to help smooth the integration. Lot's of his work is going into memcached these days, particularly in the libmemcached client. He cleared up a misconception for me regarding Innodb: since Innodb is GPL'd, the risk of Oracle smothering it is nil - the community is driving it, and it's not the dead end many had feared. What's next? Don't expect to see MySQL 5.1 until 2009; do expect a maturing and further specializing application of the MySQL engines MyISAM, Innodb, BDB, and Archive; and plan for an adoption ramp for DRBD. Brian had some great advice for Sun's field engineers: get familiar with MySQL technology by taking advantage of the many training resource available at MySQL.com. MySQL University is a great place to start, (be sure to catch Brian's talk on EC2 March 29). I also caught some good audio one-on-one with Brian after his keynote which I will post separately, along with his advice on scaling up your database.
RDF and Semantic Web were topics of much conversation and at least one BoF session. With the addition of RDF modules in Drupal 6, developers can mashup data from multiple sites in very interesting ways. If Web3.0 is massively distributed data mining, indexing, and mashing it all up, then Drupal is positioned to be the portal for this convergence, as Dries Buytaert resolutely declared in his Monday keynote
I gave a talk on running Drupal on Sun, with some help from Chris Cheetham from Project Caroline,
at the end of the day on Wednesday (slides at right). As luck would have it, my demo
froze up, but I did manage to show Drupal running in a Solaris Zone,
and DTrace to count function calls from Drupal. Chris's demo of Drupal
deployment to Project Caroline went much smoother.
There was a lot of support for the next DrupalCon to be held in Hungary this fall. It will be hard to top the Boston event, but I know this community will do their best to have the best one yet.
And that's just a sample of the news emanating from Drupal in recent months. Clearly, this community is not waiting for the future to come to Drupal, they're creating it with Drupal.
I'd never seen the reference outside of Sun before today, but there it was, in the conference program for DrupalCon Boston :
*AMP
Describing the Site Building track at the conference, the program lists track topics, including, "Drupal and *AMP, a systems level view". The asterisk clearly denotes a substitution variable, which had previously been the constant "L", preceding the abbreviation for Apache-MySQL-PHP/Perl/Python. This is a clear tip of the hat to Solaris. The new acronym, presumably pronounced star amp, bestows equal opportunity status to Solaris and Linux within the Drupal community.
I expect there will be plenty of interest in Solaris and other Sun technologies at DrupalCon, which convenes March 3-6 at the Boston Convention & Expo Center - the news of Sun's intent to acquire MySQL did not go unnoticed, and high profile sites running on Solaris are turning up frequently. I guess that's why my Inbox has been overflowing with correspondence from the Drupal community.
Sun is a Gold sponsor of DrupalCon Boston. We'll be handing out Solaris Express DVD's and we're giving a Sun Fire T1000 server to the winner of the Drupal Showcase competition. I'll be a panelist in the Performance Tuning session, and I'll also be presenting some Solaris deployment techniques and best practices similar to what I presented at a DrupalCon last September in Barcelona. I'm hoping we'll also have a contingent from Project Caroline to let the community in on the next big thing in Web2.0 development platforms. As if all that from Sun wasn't enough, rumor has it, MySQL Director of Technology, Brian Aker is going to keynote the conference.
Day one of DrupalCon Barcelona 2007 is over, but my jet lag is not. I did manage to stay awake for the entire day, but only had time to attend two sessions:
OpenID: It's in core... now what? by James Ransom Walker.
James is clearly an OpenID advocate and says the risks associated with it are manageable, or at least acceptable. OpenID has been added to the Drupal 4.7, with updates for 5 and 6 coming soon (I'm not sure whether that's and Iraq pullout-style timetable, or a clever call for volunteers to lend a hand - James did say he could use some help). This much heralded addition to Drupal gives developers an "out of the box" provider and relying party status if they want it. It also comes with a new set of concerns for developers whose permutations are myriad: What is the trust model I want to deploy? What level of protection do my users need from my provider service? As a relying party, what level of authentication do I need from a provider? How do I choose to providers to accept? Do I care whether a user's ID is globally unique *forever*, or just for now? The OpenID spec. itself leaves the developer with all of these choices and more. OpenID's flexibility is both a virtue and a failing. Maybe someone in the OpenSSO
community can lend a hand to James and avert the sedimentation of a
partial solution to an omnipresent problem. OpenSSO is moving quickly
to support OpenID provider
implementations. It has support for the relevant federation standards,
and it even has a PHP Client SDK and a PHP library for SAML 2.0 Relying
Party. When it comes to Identity Management, I'm not convinced that
today's "good enough" won't be tomorrow's compliance regulation
headache or M&A due diligence hiccup. My vote is for an OpenSSO based identity module for Drupal 5 and 6 rather than an OpenID only module.
"Enterprise" Drupal by Ken Rickart. Ken works for Morris Communications, a very stodgy, family run corporation. Drupal adoption at Morris would seem a long shot for the traditionalist culture of this media giant. But with the aid of Ken's obvious leadership and technical skills, Drupal is shaking things up. If Ken's experience at Morris is any indication, I'd expect we'll hear about more tremors rippling through vaunted institutions and enduring companies triggered by Drupal's "time to market", low cost advantage. Ken talked about how he rapidly delivered some high value business services to internal users (contract renewal reports) and external media consumers (online editions of local newspapers) with Drupal, demonstrating just how true the "good enough" axiom can be for certain classes of problems, and why that mattered to the big cheese at Morris whose main functions are to manage the bottom line and shake hands with the pros at Augusta National).
I'd better get some sleep.
This blog copyright 2009 by downstream
d o w n s t r e a m
At the confluence of cloud computing, sustainability, and open source
Whether or not Sun will sponsor for the 5th time in a row is something I'll be checking into over the coming weeks.
