What happens downstream?: Scott Mattoon's blog

The final two days of Drupalcon 2007 were competing with the phenomenal La Merce Festival for conference attendees' time and attention.  Had Sun not paid my airfare to be at the conference I'd have been at the festival catching as many of the 100+ bands playing in Ciutat Vella as I could. 

As such, on Day Three I dutifully presented a session entitled “Industrial Grade Deployment on SAMP” to many of the more prominent developers in the Drupal community.  The session followed an outline that I think helped establish Sun's relevance to the community:

1. How is Sun already connected to the Drupal community?
2. What has Sun been up to all these months/years since you last heard?
3. What are some Drupal specific Use Cases that are interesting on Sun technology?
4. How do you get started using Sun technology?

The slideshow embedded here answers in some depth each of these questions.  Lot's of other presentations from DrupalCon are posted over on Slideshare.net

---

Day Four was capped by some updates and insight from Dries, the father of Drupal and spiritual leader of the conference.  Dries Buytaert created Drupal at age 22.  Seven years later he continues to lead the Drupal community and actively contributes innovations to the platform.  He is a PhD student at University of Ghent where he has published several papers on Java performance, and has developed tools and frameworks for JIT compiler analysis and Java performance tuning.  The irony that Drupal is built on PHP is not lost on the Drupal community or Dries.

One of the most important updates presented by Dries was the 2007 developer survey results.  Sun's value to the community came into sharper focus when he flashed the answers to the question, "What are you good at and what skills do you want to invest in?"  Performance, Scalability, and High Availability were areas in which over 80% had little experience or wanted to learn.

Drupalcon was a great experience.  I'm looking forward to the next one, which is likely to be somewhere in North America this coming spring.

Sometimes the relevance of a technology only becomes apparent after examining it's origins.  For the uninitiated, I'll drop back a few sentences here to help understand Drupal's roots, before talking about some of the interesting things people are doing with it. 

Drupal was created by Dries Buytaert in 2001.  Drupal is licensed under the GPL and is written in  PHP.  It is typically deployed in a LAMP environment although a few prominent sites have deployed Drupal on Solaris.  Drupal 5 is the current release with Drupal 6 due out in fall of 2007.

The popularity of Drupal has been driven by a passionate group of developers who come from very diverse backgrounds and who have applied Drupal to an equally diverse range of needs. 

The early community of Drupal developers grew primarily through rapid adoption by Web 2.0 hobbyists, nonprofits, and political activist organizations.  Howard Dean's push for the U.S. Presidency in 2004, noted for leveraging online tools and communities, owes much of its success to the Drupal powered 'Deanspace'.  This highly visible use of Drupal drew much attention to the community and triggered a huge wave of Drupal adoption. 

One of the most interesting uses of Drupal that I've seen is that which was presented at DrupalCon by Ivan Labra from SPAWAR, the Space and Naval Warfare division of the U.S. DoD.  He is using it as a integration platform in support of SPAWAR's peace and stabilization efforts, in which basic integrated ICT capability must be deployed into austere and sometime unstable environments.  Known as Speed-to-Capability, this project defines a technical architecture and deployment strategy for quickly building communication and collaboration capacity FOSS components combining PBX (Asterisk), Instant Messaging/Chat (Jabber), email (Postfix) and software provisioning (HostMaster) capabilities on the Drupal framework.   In my role advising on technology capacity in the developing world, I hope to work with Ivan in the future to apply this important communication and collaboration capacity.

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.