General

ApacheCon 2008 - New Orleans
November 3, 2008 - November 7, 2008
Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street

What a great conference to attend:  Informative and entertaining.  Not many "geek" conferences are considered fun, but ApacheCon 2008 in New Orleans was a blast!  Mainly becasue on Nov. 6th at 7:30pm, HotWax Media and Brainfood.com put together a New Orleans Style funeral with marching brass band and marched down Canal Street with police escort. This funeral was to celerbate the death of commercial proprietary closed-source software.  A few people carried a fake casket behind a 8 member brass band leading about 200 conference attendees and some resturant/bar patrons to the Howling Wolf bar to watch the Rebirth Brass Band do their thing.  They're an amazing band, they coved many songs and I recommend checking them out if you get the chance.  It was a great experience; definately one I will never forget. 

The speakers at the conference were great.  All were prepared, no one was fumbling through their slides or notes; there were no audio/video troubles.  I was able to audio record some of the sessions and many of the presenters provided their presentation materials.  I am already looking forward to the ApacheCon2009 in Oakland, CA   Thanks to Charel Morris for the personal help in getting my conference pass.

 

HBase-Writer 0.18.2 has been released.  This release contains support for max content size, default max size is 20 MB.  Any content item crawled that is bigger than 20MB will be rejected by the writer.  This release also contains a bug fix;  If HBase throws an exception, the writer wasnt being added back to the Heritrix writerpool.  The writer is now being added back.  Thanks to Andrew Purtell at Apache for these patches. 


HBase-Writer is a processor plugin following the Heritrix2 processor API.  With HBase-Writer, you can have Heritrix2 crawl and save its results directly to a table in HBase.  The HBase-Writer plugin was based off the Heritrix-HDFS-Writer plugin.  Thanks to Questio for the support in releasing this project.

HBase-Writer 0.18.1 has been initially released.  This is a processor plugin following the Heritrix2 processor API.  With HBase-Writer, you can have Heritrix2 crawl and save its results directly to a table in HBase.  The HBase-Writer plugin was based off the Heritrix-HDFS-Writer plugin.  Thanks to Questio for the support in releasing this project.

HBase-Writer is designed to be extensible but as it is, it can be used as a powerful web crawling tool.

Mule vs. JXTA - A General Comparison

After reading the title of this article, you might be saying to yourself, "Mule is an ESB and JXTA is a P2P platform.  Apples vs. Oranges"  Yes, both technologies are quite different and intended to solve different issues, but both can be used to solve many of the same issues each other has been designed to take care of.  Network applications are all over it seems yet their use is still increasing in popularity.  This presentation aims to highlight the pros and cons of using JXTA or Mule and contrast them to determine what is the best solution for a distributed network application.  This article aims to highlight the differences and similarities and to gain a better understanding of both.  This article also aims to open a discussion about the idea of Mule (or any ESB) supporting a technology like JXTA to gain its advantages if they are deemed beneficial.