The event took place at the Millenium Hotel at Times Square and started with some sessions about the Yahoo! technologies. I was most impressed with the Yahoo Query Language (YQL) which enabled a SQL like way to talk to a wide variety of web services. Of course the recently released YUI toolkit looks also very promising. After lunch the hacking space in the 8th floor was opened. The whole space was decorated in Steam Punk fashion which is of courses appealing to us geeks. There was a gaming space (RockBand and Fussball), lots of sofas and a never ending amount of nice food and drinks (I’m talking real food, not just pizza ). They even had some german beer which made me almost feel at home.

The hacking started early and went on the whole night. I won’t go into detail about our project and all the other great hacks (You can look this up on the Yahoo! NYC Open Hack website) but I can assure you it is a lot of fun and you meet great people. There were Yahoo! engineers around to help you with almost every problem. I sure learned a lot during these two days. I wasn’t familiar with any of the Yahoo! technologies and think it’s a shame that people only seem to look at Google and forget that other companies have great stuff too.

On Saturday afternoon the hacks were presented and some prizes were given away. Although I think most of the people were in it for the fun. The ceremony although was great.

If you ever have the opportunity to attend such an event you should definately do it.

After two days of information overflow the OpenCms days 2009 are finally over. I think they were a success and personally got a lot value out of them.

We had a small get together on Sunday evening with a nice diner and some Kölsch. I think it’s always nice to meet some people before the conference so you can already connect to some people. We stayed out rather long and I was back at the hotel around 3:00 AM, but it was a lot of fun. I had many interesting talks and met a lot of very nice people. If you’re thinking of attending the OpenCms Days 2010, I would really recommend to come on sunday evening so you don’t miss this event.

The first day started with a short welcome and Alexander Kandziors keynote. I enjoyed the keynote a lot and I liked that Alex actually presented the new features and not only talked about them. I haven’t had time to play with the 7.5 version (which was released on the same day – I guess a case of conference driven development ) but it sure looks very promising. The announcement of the workflow functionality in version 8 caused some amusement and I think it has become a running gag over the years.
But to be fair: I can understand that Alkacon can’t develop the feature without proper sponsoring. It is a big project and therefore needs to be well funded. I personally don’t think it is really important feature-wise but more a point to survive checklist driven evaluation. Most of the people I talked to don’t seem to have real use cases for it.
The announcement of the scripting support surprised me a bit (positively) but I’m looking forward to working together with Alkacon. I had a short talk with Alex about it on the last day and I’m confident that we can get something done. The conference actually inspired me to commit some changes to my module but I will blog about these on another day.

My second session was about the new galleries and the advanced widget configuration. It was presented by Andreas Zahner and I think he did a great job of pointing out some lesser known features. I also liked that they are using JSON for the widget configuration and the demonstration of the decentralized categories caused a lot of people to grab their notebook and a pen. The new galleries looked very nice and I am very fond of the tab feature for the xmlcontent editor.

The next session was Andy Savin about the usage of OpenCms at the university of Bath. I enjoyed this session a lot even despite the fact that it was placed in the business track . Andy explained their migration path to OpenCms including the evaluation and presented some of the new features they developed. For example using macros in the HTML editor to automatically insert address information.
After the session I walked up to Andy and asked him if they use caching for the rendered content because I had done some similar functionality and couldn’t get caching to work. His denial really relieved me.
I also liked his argumentation that using a single (configurable) template is often better than many templates with small differences. I share this viewpoint and agree wholeheartedly.

After a short break Dan Liliedahl explained how they integrated Liferay and OpenCms. I was looking forward to this talk because I enjoyed Dan’s talk at the OpenCms Days 2008 a lot. I like his calm and professional style of presenting. You can tell that he has done a lot of presentations before. He showed how they developed a SOAP webservice to let Liferay access the OpenCms VFS via HTTP. He also presented how the content was prepared to be easily themed by liferays theming system.
It struck me that many people have developed some kind of remote access to the VFS (mostly via webservices) and that this would probably be something to develop a module for (which I think Dan wants to do). I think the webdav servlet could deliver something like a REST (which seems to be in everybodies mouth right now) based interface to the OpenCms VFS but it seemed to me that no one is really using the webdav feature. Also it would be nice to have some kind of a JSON interface to the content.
At lunch Dan explained this solution in more detail and now I’m looking forward to his module. It seems to be a trend to use OpenCms as a content repository nowadays. This was also reflected in a short poll Alex did to find out if OpenCms should either support JSR-170 or CMIS (which I had never heard of) in the future. It seems to me that CMIS is still in an early stage but already has a lot of important vendors in the process. The fact that it’s not tied to the Java language is also a nice bonus. This could allow good integration with other web frontends (for example PHP based ones). I think it is an option that should be seriously considered.

The last talk of the first day was about the IKS project of the European Union in which OpenCms/Alkacon participate. Andreas Gruber seemed very knowledgeable and explained the reasoning and structure of the IKS project and their concept of a complete stack for the semantic web.
Although I already had some experience with RDF/OWL and microformats I had a hard time following the first part because it was relatively abstract. I think this may well be because the project is still in the requirements gathering phase and therefore had no concrete components to showcase. The second part when he presented the microformats by example and got down to the technical stuff. I was finally able to get the whole picture.
One interesting thing he mentioned afterwards was the eventual development of components to process an existing corpus of content and annotating it automatically with semantic information (like finding addresses or names in plain text/html and marking them up). If the project is successful it will be very useful for content management and the semantic web movement in the long run. I still believe it’s hard to convince the casual content creator of the value of semantic web and helping him to do so correctly. But I think the project is looking into this direction also.

The conference dinner in the evening was a nice opportunity to talk to some people and find out that many people are facing the same problems as myself. This is something I really enjoyed throughout the whole conference. There was no marketing show going on and people seemed to be very honest about their development. I personally often get fooled by self confident blog posts or marketing based presentation and come to the believe that I’m the only one having problems understanding certain things or making mistakes. Hearing that others are struggling too is always very comforting. For me this meta-information is one of the most valuable things because it is helping me to understand where I’m standing professionally.