Those that follow these things will know by now that OSCON 2009 took place in San Jose, California rather than its traditional home of Portland, Oregon. Since this was my first year in attendance, I can not compare the two locations, but I can say that SJ was a welcome and consistently sunny break from the unreliable British Summer. Lokku was good enough to let me go for the entire conference (2 days of half day tutorials followed by 2.5 days of one hour sessions and exhibitions), and I’ve come back quite a bit wiser on the happenings in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community.
I took the opportunity of the tutorials to get my head around some new (to me) programming languages. SmallTalk is the original OO lingo with a legacy going back to the 1980s. It has never been in favor for commercial development despite having had features back then that many “modern” OO languages (e.g. Java) lack today. I was impressed by the Squeak development environment and its close interaction with the SmallTalk VM. Working with SmallTalk requires a big change in mindset, but I see how it is worth it for a certain family of applications. I get the impression that lots of current SmallTalk work is based on Seaside – a web frameframework that is the basis of the very cool DabbleDB online data navigator.
Erlang is another language with a long history that is back in the news of late. Originally developed by academics with an eye towards use in the telcoms industry, its easy parallelism and compact syntax seem to have attracted a new audience. Erlang and the Open Telecom Platform (OTP), make it easy to build applications comprised of many threads free communicating among eachother. It is another tool that changes your approach to coding. Erlang lacks some basic constructs that you find in almosst any “commercial” language. For example, the best way to do a while() loop is through tail recursion.
Databases are another hot topic in the FOSS world right now. MySQL got bought by Sun and Sun got bought by Oracle. Many businesses (like Lokku) rely on MySQL and there is a certain amount of uncertainty out there about its future. For whatever reasons, a number of MySQL forks have appeared. I attended a session on one of these forks called ‘Drizzle’. It is an effort to create a micro-kernel DB ready for scalable deployment in “The Cloud” (more on that later). Best guess is that they will have stable code with a deployed userbase about this time next year. Other groups are taking a different tack and eschewing SQL althogether in favour of databases focused on more particular uses. For example, CouchDB is a documented-oriented database from the Apache Software Foundation and Neo4J is a database optimized for searching graphs. Lots of movement and innovation in this area.
The various keynote talks were a mixed back of predictions and advocacy for various ideas and causes. Getting FOSS into government and government money to FOSS-based companies was a topic of much discussion. Along those lines, Sunlight Labs and others made their case for opening up government data. Seems that the new US administration is moving in a direction that pleases the e-telligensia. Our future also seems destined to bring us smaller devices offering ubiquitious services and more women working in IT in general and FOSS in particular.
The trip to San Jose was definitely worth it for more than just the sunshine and fish tacos. I could certainly see myselfor others from the Lokku team) returning to OSCON in the years ahead.
