OpenCms Days 2009 (part 2)
This is the continued report from the OpenCms Days 2009. If you haven’t read the first part you might as well read it first.
The second day started with the keynote of Joel Tosi and I think this was one of the best talks of the conference (although his question totally took me by surprise since I had had no coffee yet).
Joel took a very critical view on enterprise software and support claims and explained some of the benefits they get from OpenCms at the CME.
I especially liked that he presented very concrete information of implementation and business (numbers & figures) and also think taking the seriousness out of some enterprise label was really good.I saw many people smiling knowingly throughout the whole presentation. You rarely have a talk which is informative and also entertaining.
After the keynote I watched a presentation by Pedro del Valle and Pedro Antón Alonso about the relaunch of spain.info and the creation of a tourist information portal for Spain (portals where all over the place at this conference). I personally didn’t expect to get very much out of this talk but I gladly admit that I could not have been more wrong.
The presented solution showed some integrations which I had already developed (like the Google maps integration) and I was relieved that they took a similar route on implementation. I liked their argument that it’s best to put the information where the consumer is. They e.g. plan to publish the videos out to a dedicated YouTube channel. This is something I always suggested to my customers but often had a hard time selling. Mention this project will hopefully convince other people to take this route.
There were a lot of questions afterwards and I think this was also one of the best talks of the conference.
After this talk I unfortunately started coding for the scripting integration on my laptop (sorry to all the speakers who saw this – This was not because I wasn’t interested but I somehow got into the flow and then wanted to push back my changes to sourceforge. You hopefully know this feeling and I hereby apologize). I might have missed some content in the following presentations.
Georgi Naplatanov presented the JPA driver for OpenCms and although there was confusion because of some figures, he has done a great job. There seemed to be some performance problems with JPA/OpenJPA and MySQL but Florian Hopf, Claus Priisholm and Dan Liliedahl all mentioned that these might be gone if one uses Hibernate instead of OpenJPA. I hope someone is trying this out.
There was also the question of using this driver to run OpenCms on Google App Engine. So if anyone of the asking people is reading this: Please have a look at my Blog post. I think having JPA at hand is a big win for OpenCms. Especially if you plan on writing modules which introduce new database tables. Doing so with the current drivers is especially hard since you have to target all supported databases manually. At least if you want to be portable.
In the third session Alejandro Alves showcased some modules the Spanish OpenCms community has developed. I was impressed by the sheer amount of the modules. Especially the forum seems big.
I like that he obviously used a real project for demoing the modules. This gave a good impression of the solutions other people develop with OpenCms. Often discussions tend to be very abstract and seeing some real world examples helps to get a feel for the solution. It occurred to me that there’s a lot of development going on in the Spanish world. I wish I would speak the language.
The last session of the conference I watched was done by Michael Emmerich about the Alkacon OAMP modules. I’ve not used the OAMP modules a lot so it was a really great opportunity to see everything in action and get some insider tips on how to customize them. Michael sure did a great job with this.
I was most impressed by the DocCenter module because this was something I had to develop for a customer before and spent a lot time doing so (If it had just been open sourced by then… – my solution was a lot worse).
There was a panel discussion at the end but I got sidetracked by trying to recover my sourceforge login. The questions were interesting but unfortunately it seemed that everyone (including myself) was already tired and so no real audience interaction came up.
Maybe I should have saved some questions for this event because I already asked all the panel members everything that interested me during the first two days and there seemed no point in doing so again.
It was interesting that the point of documentation (one of last years hot topics) didn’t came up very often. I think we can give credits to Dan who wrote a fantastic book about OpenCms 7 development and all the people who contributed to the wiki. I guess the documentation issue has been solved for the most part.
The lack of a large set of available modules was also mentioned but it seemed to me that there’s a lot in the pipeline and maybe just needs to be presented better. It also feels like the module space is a bit fragmented. Often companies put their modules out under their own namespace which makes it relatively unattractive for other companies to contribute. I think having something similar to the OAMP suite but on sourceforge or google code would help. Companies could still be mentioned as a sponsor and therefore get some publicity out of it.
What might also be nice would be a higher level template/content framework to help people getting up to speed more quickly. But this might be coming with the advanced direct edit functionality which is planned for version 8 and was explained in Alexanders keynote.
To sum up everything: I think the OpenCms Days 2009 were great! I had a lot of fun although I’m very exhausted by the time of writing this draft. I met a lot of extremely nice and fun people. Thank you all for the good time. I’m looking forward to seeing you again. I think I missed to say a proper goodbye to some of you. This was just because I got somehow lost on my way out and then everyone seemed to be gone already.
See you in 2010.
Tags: OpenCms, OpenCms-Days, Report