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.

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.