Today, I (as Release Manager for the project) released the latest, and what is expected to be the last, alpha version of the NextGen release of Apache httpd.

This is pretty exciting news because for now on we'll be focusing on pushing out beta releases in anticipation of a quick trip to 2.4.0-GA.

Certainly, Apache httpd 2.4.0 has been a long time coming, but it will be well worth the wait. The new features, especially related to MPMS, Authn/Authz and the Proxy module, will continue to be the reference standards for web servers. I'm really excited by all the mod_proxy improvements because that's an area which I, and others, have been giving special attention to. You combine that with the various async changes, the Event and (for the time-being still experimental) Simple MPMs and you have a killer server.

So download and try it out and give us your feedback.

Cheers!

Yes, the rumors are true. As anyone who follows me on twitter knows following my tweet, I will be leaving VMware.

The experience has been incredible, and being with VMware was the end of a journey started about 10 years ago when I first joined Covalent. Following some "interesting" events within that company, Covalent emerged as a premier FOSS-related business and as CTO I was able to continue working with Mark and Ryan to grow the company. We were so successful that SpringSource took notice of our products, or business plan and our customer base and decided they wanted in, and so they bought the company. At SpringSource I was, in addition to other tasks, the tech lead and developer for a project that became one of the most significant (if not the most significant) products for the company. And after around 2 years, SpringSource was so successful that VMware took notice and bought us.

Now after a year, it is time to move on.

I'm ready for new challenges and new opportunities. I'm looking for a place that can benefit from my talents, experience and expertise as much as Covalent/SpringSource/VMware has.

I'm ready to make a difference and an impact... Know of any places that might be interested? Let me know.

Thanks.

The ASF uses an ssh-based voting tool, mostly developed by Roy, to handle the new member and new director voting process. New members are elected in using a simple yes/no/abstain whereas directors are voted in using the STV system. The tool is great, but it had the requirement of actually having to ssh into a specific machine to cast your votes.

Well, after some discussions on the members mailing list, our illustrious SysAdmin Joe (with some patches from others) created this exceptional GUI front-end for the tool, which makes casting votes even easier. Hopefully, with this front-end, the voter tool will be used for a bunch of other things...

As far as setting up the voter tool, well, I just use a bunch of scripts I hacked together years ago... Not fully automated, but good enough.

In addition to the stuff I do for $WORK and the ASF, there are also some coding side-projects that I like spending some time (and my limited talents) on. One of these is a PHP-based webmail system called Telaen. It started off when I wanted a nice webmail system to use with jaguNET and found Uebimiau. But the code in Uebimiau was a mess and seemed to be abandon-ware, so I hacked away at it and provided the so-called jimjag patches which many users found useful. After awhile though, it just seemed better to fork it and so a few of us created Telaen.

Anyway, as it always is when you do stuff on the side, Real Life has this nasty habit of intervening, causing development on Telaen to slow down. Well, I've since rebooted the project (who needs sleep??) and have a beta of the latest version (Telaen 1.3.0) available... Check it out.

A number of very cool conferences are coming up, 2 of which I'll be attending and speaking at.

The 1st is SpringOne, which is kinda unique this year in which they have a SysAdmin/WebOps related track.

The 2nd is ApacheCon US which promises to be one of the most excellent ApacheCons in the last ten years. I'm doing a 2 day training (with Rich Bowen), which is our world-famous Apache HTTPD Nuts to Bolts guide. I'm also doing a session on the Apache API, with a focus on module development. And, of course, the State Of The Feather and Sponsorship talks.

What's also nice is that Eileen will be coming out for ACUS09 as well, and we're planning on staying in CA for an extra few days and enjoying wine country.

In a little less than 2 months, my younger brother, Michael, will be 44 years old. That, in and of itself is enough to make you feel old. But that's not the watershed issue with this.

It's just than that means that for almost 34 years, Michael has been in and out of institutions, hospitals, group homes and our homes.

You see, Michael is Matthew

Despite this surgery, and a host of others, as well as numerous medications, most of them experimental, Michael is still held hostage by his own brain.

And so in July, when we celebrate with him his birthday, and he blows out his candles, he'll not be the only one making a wish. If only it was that easy.

Very cool beans. PlanetApache is now updated with a whole new look, feel and infrastructure. It uses the amazingly cool Venus codebase written in Python.

The new site has loads of improvements and, as part of the people.apache.org family, should have a much better uptime.

We are getting closer and closer to ApacheCon EU 2009, which is scheduled for 23-27 March 2009, Mövenpick Hotel, Amsterdam.

This year I have a number of sessions I'm presenting. In addition to the Opening Plenary and the "Chew and Chat" talk about ASF Sponsorship, I'm also doing a session on Advanced Topics in Apache HTTP Server 2.2. This will mostly be a detailed overview of the cool useful features in Apache 2.2, with a look and how they are likely to be enhanced in Apache 2.4.

What is also really exciting is that I am also co-training with Rich Bowen in the Apache HTTP Server - Nuts to Bolts training class on Monday and Tuesday. The format will be similar to the training in NOLA last year, with the 1st day being a deep dive into the fundamentals of the web server, with myself, and on Tuesday Rich's famous "cookbook" examples of hints and guides on how to make Apache do everything, even give you a pony!

You should really, really attend. This conference promises to be one of our best, and I look forward to seeing you all there!

As most people who know me know, I am a big fan and user of scripting languages. There are just so many places where they not only make sense, but are the only logical solution to the problem. My recent preferences have been Python and Ruby and PHP and Perl, and they've been enough. At least, up until now.

At SpringSource, I and my team been working quite busily on software products, and one area which tied all the pieces together was a front-end installer and various post-installation scripts that provide additional capability. Now historically we would use Perl for these scripts, but an additional requirement was on the product: assume a bottom-line dependency of a Java JVM. This meant that Perl was out.

Now of course, I could still do this in Python or Ruby (the languages) but that the implementations would need to be the Java versions (Jython and JRuby, respectively). So I could still script in one of these languages, I would simply compile them and ship the class files for the scripts (jar-ed up, of course). So there was no real problem. I did some prelim testing and was somewhat disturbed to fine that Jython was somewhat old but happy to find that JRuby was quite up to date and, from my testing, very, very robust.

But SpringSource had recently acquired G2One, and so, in the logical interests of eating our own dogfood, decided to take a look at Groovy.

I'm glad I did.

My first mistake, unfortunately, was looking at it as a "version" of Ruby. Although there are numerous similarities, there are also enough differences that programming Groovy requires you to, at a very low level, keep your Java thinking-caps on. For example, you need to concern yourself more over actions that would cause an Exception in Groovy, whereas Ruby would just "do the right thing". In this way, I discovered my 2nd mistake: ignoring the fact that Groovy wants to maintain a Java-like consistency. In other words, I was looking at Groovy from the standpoint of a "traditional" script monkey, and not from that of a Java-monkey would wanted an extremely robust scripting language that removed like about 98% of the normal pain in programming in Java. When I got my head around that, then foo = new Fee() made more logical sense than foo = Fee.new() for example.

So I've added new language to my scripting belt. And, I'll be honest here, it's made me enjoy Java programming more than ever.

I've made my ApacheCon US 2008 slides available at:

• http://people.apache.org/~jim/presos/ACUS08/

There will also be available on Slideshare shortly as well.

On Sunday, I'll be leaving to attend ApacheCon US 2008, which is located in New Orleans. I'm really looking forward to the conference, which I'll also be presenting at as well. In fact, this is one of the busier ApacheCons, having 4 presentations (the State Of The Feather, Apache Nuts to Bolts (which I'm co-presenting with Bill Rowe and Rich Bowen), Sponsoring the ASF and Advanced Reverse Proxy in Apache 2.2). Plus, it looks like a lot of meetings, interviews and other brikabrak going on as well, so it promises to be a pretty full week.

As always, I'm also looking forward to seeing and spending time with so many friends, people who I don't get the opportunity to see nearly often enough. As much as I really enjoy the technical exchange, I also like the deep social aspects of ApacheCon as well. We know how to code, but we also know how to kick back and enjoy ourselves.

Are you going to ApacheCon? You should!

I was so busy traveling and pushing out 2.2.10 that I didn't even blog about it.

Well, better late than never: Apache HTTP Server 2.2.10 is released... enjoy.

If this election indicates anything, it's that people will vote for whoever they want to, no matter what and no matter how much rationalization is required.

Ignore inconvenient facts; explain away issues; describe as "immaterial" or "besides the point" anything that would indicate that your choice isn't the best one.

In other words, make your choice and then see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil...

So Wall Street will get a bailout of $700 Billion. It must be nice knowing that no matter how badly you screw up, you can count on your friends to completely cover you.

Of course, that is a simplification and the deal as currently defined will almost for sure not pass. The major sticking point seems to be that even though the companies are in woeful financial state, and the gov't need to step in with $700B of taxpayers money to shore things up, the executives of those companies will walk away with tens-of-millions (at least) of compensation and... wait for it... BONUSES! I have no idea in what Alice-In-Wonderland universe these things happen, when an executive expects and receives bonuses for basically being a greedy, selfish tool, but I obviously don't understand The Financial Market.

Of course, we are told, that the bailout can't add limits or restrictions for these types of things, because it would prevent executives from taking the bailouts to "save" their companies. If there is any clearer indication that the executives' priorities are screwed up, I don't know what it is. "Screw the company! I want what's coming to ME!"

And what is even worse is that the main people in the gov't behind this bailout have no idea why we feel that this is somehow wrong...

Lots of people like Spring. The only trouble is that a lot of people also don't like Java. They would love to be able to use Spring but don't want to make the leap from their favorite scripting language.

Well good news, especially for us Python fans. The latest version of Spring Python is now available. The real cool thing about this is that Spring Python is now an official Spring Extension with this latest release. Spring Extensions are a way of extending and enhancing Spring and Spring-related addons with the official help of SpringSource. It's sort of like a mini-Incubator for SpringSource.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to diving into Spring Python. Looks like fun!