The current board of directors of the Apache Software Foundation has just been elected - congratulations to:

• Shane Curcuru
• Doug Cutting
• Bertrand Delacretaz
• Roy T. Fielding
• Jim Jagielski
• Sam Ruby
• Noirin Shirley
• Greg Stein
• Henri Yandell

Roy and Bertrand are colleagues of mine at Day Software.

To find out more about what the board actually does have a look at "How the ASF works".

The 2010 edition of the Google Summer of Code program (GSoC) is getting started, now's the time for students to apply! See the FAQ for the timeline.

The ASF is participating again, and the newly created Community Development group should help better coordinate things.

See http://community.apache.org/gsoc.html if you're interested in helping an ASF project as part of GSoC.

I have suggested two projects related to Apache Sling, there's a large list of projects to choose from at the ASF, and students are also welcome to suggest projects.

As usual, my recommendation to students is to get familiar with the ASF projects that you're interested in rather sooner than later.

My previous experiences with mentoring GSoC students have shown that being able to communicate effectively with our project's groups is a key success factor, so students who are already in touch with our communities get a better chance of being selected. That's as far as I'm concerned of course - other projects or organizations might have different criteria.

Could we have some students from Switzerland this time? I tried to motivate some when I was teaching at comem.ch before joining Day, but no one stepped in for GSoC. Where are those swiss genius student programmers?

Day's CMO Kevin Cochrane has been interviewed by Matthew Aslet of the 451 group about Day's open source strategy. I particularly liked:

While many other vendors have chosen to retain control over their open source projects for commercial reasons, Day opted to relinquish control with the aim of ubiquity.

Full interview here.

ApacheCon US 09 in Oakland and the NoSQL meetup are over. Find below the slides of the talks given by Day's engineers covering Apache projects Sling, Jackrabbit, Tika and POI as well as OSGi.

ApacheCon US 09 starts today in Oakland. A couple of Day's engineers will give talks, not just about the usual suspects Sling and Jackrabbit, but also Tika and POI (details below).

Also, Jukka Zitting has helped organize a NoSQL meetup in Oakland starting tonight where Bertrand Delacretaz will talk about JCR.

Bertrand Delacretaz: Life in Open Source communities: Open Source communities often seem to have their own unwritten rules of operation and communication, their own jargon and their own etiquette, which sometimes make them appear obscure and closed to outsiders. In this talk, we'll provide recommendations on how to get touch with, and how to join, Open Source communities. Based on ten years of experience in various Open Source projects, we will provide practical information on how to communicate effectively on mailing lists, how to formulate questions in an effective way, how to contribute in ways that add value to the project, and generally how to interact with Open Source communities in ways that are mutually beneficial. This talk will help Open Source beginners get closer to the communities that matter to them, and help more experienced community members understand how to welcome and guide newcomers.

Carsten Ziegeler: JCR in Action - Content-based Applications with Jackrabbit: The Java Content Repository API (JCR) is the ideal solution to store hierarchical structured content, and to develop content-oriented applications. This session provides a practical introduction to help you get started using JCR in your own application. To demonstrate the basic architecture of such applications, a sample content-based application will be developed during the session. Basic techniques will be explained, including navigation, searching, and observations, using the Apache Jackrabbit project.

Embrace OSGi - A Developer's Quickstart: In theory, the first choice for highly modular, dynamic, and extensible applications is OSGi technology. The theory sounds very tempting, but what about the real world? Starting with the basics of OSGi, this session is focused on practical examples, tools, and procedures for a rapid adoption of OSGi in your own projects. Learn how to avoid the typical traps and how to get the most out of OSGi

Felix Meschberger: Rapid JCR applications development with Sling: Apache Sling is an OSGi-based, scriptable applications layer, using REST principles, that runs on top of a JCR content repository. In this talk, we'll see how Sling enables rapid development of JCR-based content applications, by leveraging the JSR 223 scripting framework. We'll also look at the rich set of OSGi components provided by Sling. We will create a simple application from scratch in a few minutes, and explain a more complex multimedia application that does a lot with just a few lines of code. This talk will help you get started with Sling and understand how the different components fit together.

Jukka Zitting: MIME Magic with Apache Tika: Apache Tika aims to make it easier to extract metadata and structured text content from all kinds of files. Tika is a subproject of Apache Lucene, and leverages libraries like Apache POI and Apache PDFBox to provide a powerful yet simple interface for parsing dozens of document formats. This makes Tika an ideal companion for Apache Lucene, or for any search engine that needs to be able to index metadata and content from many different types of files. This presentation introduces Apache Tika and shows how it's being used in projects like Apache Solr and Apache Jackrabbit. You will learn how to integrate Tika with your application and how to configure and extend Tika to best suit your needs. The presentation also summarizes the key characteristics of the more widely used file formats and metadata standards, and shows how Tika can help deal with that complexity. The audience is expected to have basic understanding of Java programming and MIME media types.

Paolo Mottadelli: Apache POI recipes: The Apache POI project provides Open Source Java APIs for the manipulation of Microsoft Office format files. It was developed to provide OLE2 Compound Document format support. POI support for the new format was necessitated by the proliferation of new Office Open XML (OOXML) documents, due to its standardization. As a result, a common challenge emerged for projects that leverage POI to read and write Excel, Word, and PowerPoint documents: supporting the new format while maintaining backward compatibility with the earlier one. This session provides an overview of how the new POI architecture makes that challenge easier, using the common interfaces package and their double implementation. Participants will also learn about the main new features provided by POI towards support of the new OOXML format. To demonstrate POI's features, this session will also drive through a collection of practical recipes to solve the tough problems of integrating Office documents in your enterprise applications.