ApacheCon North America is only a few weeks away and will be happening May 16-18, 2017, in Miami. It’s particularly exciting this year because ApacheCon is going to be a little different. For one thing, there is a series of mini-conferences running in and around ApacheCon that you will not want to miss.
We spoke with Mark Thomas, Apache Tomcat committer and Senior Principal Software Engineer at Pivotal, about one of these mini-conferences, TomcatCon, to get a feel for what participants can expect from this event. TomcatCon offers a range of presentations to help users expand their Tomcat knowledge in areas such as networking, security, performance, and deployment, and it provides users and developers with the opportunity to discuss the current Tomcat roadmap and help inform future development. Here’s what Mark said about the conference.
Linux.com: What is TomcatCon? What was the idea behind it?
Mark: The idea was to provide a small conference running alongside ApacheCon that was dedicated to all things Tomcat.
Linux.com: Do you need to have Tomcat experience to attend?
Mark: No, absolutely not. We’re offering talks ranging from the basics for absolute beginners, to topics of interest to experts. We’ve tried to cover the full range of Tomcat users out there. It’s for people who are developing with Tomcat all way to system administrators who are managing hundreds or thousands of Tomcats instances in their organizations.
Linux.com: Speaking of the schedule, what’s on it? Are there any highlights or any interesting things that people should come to?
Mark: We built the talk topics by first asking the Tomcat community what sort of things they wanted to hear about. Some of the topics we were expecting, such as security, which is always a popular topic. We’ve got several sessions on numerous aspects in security.
Networking is another topic that’s very popular. For example, how do you configure Tomcat, when you’ve got more than one? You need load balancing. You’re doing the best proxying, possibly even clustering. Lots of questions around that, lots of interest. So, we’ve got a number of talks in that area too.
We’ve got a little bit on performance and monitoring — something more popular than it’s been in the past — and on the cloud. How do you use Tomcat in the cloud? We’ve got a couple of sessions on that as well.
Linux.com: You’re actually running a few presentations yourself. It looks like quite a busy time at the conference for you. Tell us about what you’re doing there.
Mark: Yes, I am. I’m doing an introductory session in the beginning and the wrap up session at the end. And, I’ve got a couple of technical sessions in the middle. We’ve tried to get a wide spread of Tomcat speakers, including a number of speakers from other Apache products and also from outside Apache. For example, we’ve got somebody from Spring coming to talk to us about using Spring with Tomcat.
Linux.com: What are the specific dates for TomcatCon?
Mark: TomcatCon runs alongside ApacheCon, so it’s three days, exactly the same time. It starts May the 16th and finishes May the 18th.
Linux.com: Are there any additional costs for attending TomcatCon?
Mark: Not at all. If you have a ticket for ApacheCon then that gets you access to TomcatCon and vice versa. So, it’s actually a mini-conference alongside it, but you are free to dip into the two as you wish.
Linux.com: It sounds like it’s quite an interesting new format. I hope that it’s successful. Good luck with TomcatCon, and thanks very much for speaking to me.
Mark: You’re very welcome. Thanks very much, and I will see you there.
Learn first-hand from the largest collection of global Apache communities at ApacheCon 2017 May 16-18 in Miami, Florida. ApacheCon features 120+ sessions including five sub-conferences: Apache: IoT, Apache Traffic Server Control Summit, CloudStack Collaboration Conference, FlexJS Summit and TomcatCon. Secure your spot now! Linux.com readers get $30 off their pass to ApacheCon. Select “attendee” and enter code LINUXRD5. Register now >>
