I spent last week at the ApacheCon US 2007 conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Here's a write up of some of my experiences there. The Hackathon The Hackathon is a two day event. For those who don't know what a hackathon is, I'll explain how it works. A room with about 20 large round tables, wireless internet and plenty of power strips is provided. Folks show up, plug-in, start working and chatting with each other about projects and other random topics. Sometimes they cluster by project, Struts guys around one table and Geronimo guys at the next, but usually there's a good mix at each table. Sometimes groups have specific goals like "ship version 2.0" in mind, but usually folks are just working, sharing knowledge and getting to know each other. At various times pizza, soda, breakfast pastries, beer, coffee and/or wine is carted into the room — so there's not much reason to leave except for things like fresh air, sunlight and sanity. I had a couple of interesting conversations at the Hackathon. I spent some time talking to Brian McAllister about his Shindig proposal, which I've already mentioned. I also spoke with David Jencks about getting better Role Based Access Control (RBAC) in Java EE to support social software like blogs, wikis and social network applications because static roles hard-coded into web.xml just won't do. Roller and the Roller/Struts2 BOF As usual, I attended ApacheCon to promote and represent Roller and I did so in my talk, at the Roller/Struts 2 BOF, at the Sun booth and wherever else I could. As I mentioned before, my talk on Roller and blogs as a web development platform went well. I had updated my talk to include an example of how to post to a blog using Abdera and I urged folks to stick around for Garrett Rooney's Abdera talk, which followed mine in the same room. The BOF session also went well. Matt Raible and Don Brown organized the session and all I had to do was show up and enjoy the good company and the Atlassian provided beer, wine and nibbles. About ten people showed up and we talked about a variety of topics including user management in Roller, the growing similarity of Struts 2, Spring MVC and other Java web frameworks and then my wife dragged me away from the fun. By the way, Don works for Atlassian on the new JIRA Studio suite, which, I believe, is going to give Collabnet, SourceForge Enterprise and even the likes of IBM Jazz and Microsoft Team System some serious competition. Roller the Java Content Repository (JCR) API The idea of using a content management system to store Roller content keeps on coming up. At ApacheCon EU earlier this year, I spent some time talking to Lars Trieloff (who now works for CMS vendor Day Software) about implementing the Roller back-end interfaces using the Java Content Repository (JCR) APIs instead of the Java Persistence API (JPA) that we use now. At...