FOREST HILL, MD, March 30, 2015 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Apache™ Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today its ongoing role in driving innovation over the past 15 years.
Apache products power half the Internet, manage exabytes of data, execute teraflops of operations, store billions of objects in virtually every industry, enhance the lives of countless users and developers worldwide, and can be found in nearly every end-user computing device, from laptops to tablets to mobile phones. Mission-critical applications in financial services, aerospace, publishing, Big Data, Cloud computing, mobile, government, healthcare, research, infrastructure, development frameworks, foundational libraries, and many other categories, depend on Apache software.
The ASF will celebrate 15 years of community-led innovation at ApacheCon, its official conference, 13-17 April 2015 in Austin, Texas.
Joining ASF President Ross Gardler on the main stage will be ASF Founding President and Mithril Capital Management Managing Director Brian Behlendorf, Cloud Foundry Technology Chief of Staff Chip Childers, Red Hat University Outreach - Open Source & Standards Gina Likins, Pivotal Senior Director of Corporate Development and Strategy Mike Maxey, Microsoft Director of Program Management Jay Schmelzer, and Continuum Analytics Science Officer Andy Terrel.
Featured Sessions and Tracks
Now in its 16th year, ApacheCon will feature 120 in-depth sessions across sixteen tracks that include Big Data, Business, Cloud, Containers, Content, Integration, Mobile, OFBiz/Open Source ERP, Science, and Security.
Participants will gain first-hand insight into some of the most critical technology issues organizations face today and their solutions using major Open Source strategies and Apache products. They include: ActiveMQ™, Airavata™, Bigtop™, Cassandra™, CloudStack™, Commons™ Math, Cordova™, Crunch™, cTAKES™, CXF™, Directory™, Flink™, Flume™, Hadoop™, Hive™, httpd™, jclouds™, Kafka™, Karaf™, Lucene™, Mesos™, OFBiz™, Olingo™, OODT™, Qpid™, Solr™, Spark™, Storm™, Tika™, Tomcat™, UIMA™, and more.
The popular Servers track will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Apache HTTP Web Server with a panel featuring ASF founding members Ken Coar, Roy Fielding, Jim Jagielski, Randy Terbush, and Dirk-Willem van Gulik, who will share their inspiring story and historic vision behind the world's most popular Web server.
With 27 new projects in the Apache Incubator over the past year, innovation is at the heart of the ASF. Incubating projects such as Brooklyn, Calcite, Ignite, Kylin, Lens, MRQL, NiFi, Sentry, Slider, TinkerPop, and Zeppelin will showcase their respective technologies, as well as the process for projects and codebases wishing to become part of the ASF's efforts. ApacheCon attendees will also have the opportunity to meet members of the Apache Incubator Project Management Committee and learn about newly incubating projects such as Corinthia, REEF, and Groovy.
New to ApacheCon's Community track this year are sessions dedicated to education and mentoring, including Google Summer of Code (where the ASF has been a mentoring organization for 11 consecutive years), teaching computer science to high school students, and applying the meritocratic "Apache Way" to the first robotics competition for kids.
Sessions will be led by experts from top organizations including 1Tech Ltd, AntWebsystems, AppDirect, Brainfood, Cerner Corporation, Chef Software, Class Software, Cloudant, Cloudera, CloudSigma, Cloudsoft, Comcast, Comprehend Systems, Confluent, Data Artisans, Data Mine Lab, datawire.io, eBay, EMC, Google, GridGain, HP, Hortonworks, HotWax Media, IBM, Inmobi, Integrin Enterprise Solutions, Intel, Internet Technology Solutions, LinkedIn, LucidWorks, Mesosphere, Meteorite Consulting, Microsoft, The MITRE Corporation, NASA, Network Geographics, NFLabs, Ontopic, Onyara, Paulin Solutions, PayPal, Pivotal, Quanticate, Rackspace, RedHat, Rustici Software, SAP, Scaling Data, Schuberg Philis, Shippable, SolidFire, Symas Corporation, Talend, TEALS, Total Child Health, Twitter, University of Southern California, University of Texas/Arlington, Wired Informatics, and Yahoo!.
With extensive networking opportunities, interactive bonus events (BarCampApache, Birds of a Feather, Lightning Talks, PGP Key Signing, and Women of ASF Luncheon), exciting evening activities, and co-located events focused on specific Apache projects (CloudStack Days, Ignite Training Session, Spark Forum, and Traffic Server Summit), ApacheCon provides attendees the opportunity to delve into new technologies and meet the diverse community behind the software that nearly 3 billion people rely on every day.
Building the Next Round of Useful Applications
Development at the ASF is perpetual: more than 300 code commits were made over the past 24 hours (source: http://status.apache.org/ ). 50% of the Top 10 Open Source downloads are Apache products, enabling developers, users, and companies to harness the power of community-led software to create innovative new solutions. Apache Project announcements around ApacheCon include:
• Apache Flink™ -the Open Source programming environment and distributed engine for unified batch and stream data analytics is working on Apache Flink v0.9-milestone1, a preview release that gives users access to several new features, including Flink's Table API that enables SQL-like logical queries on distributed datasets, a Machine Learning library on Flink, Gelly (Flink's new library and API for graph processing), a new mode on executing Flink programs on top of Apache Tez, a lot of improvements on running Flink on YARN, a new connector for consuming Apache Kafka event streams, and improvements to defining streaming windows. Even though this is a preview release, Flink 0.9-milestone1 closes more than 200 JIRA tickets.
• Apache Openmeetings™ -the Open Source video conferencing and collaboration platform provides instant messaging, white board, collaborative document editing and other groupware tools using API functions of the Red5 Streaming Server for Remoting and Streaming. OpenMeetings is used in many educational and commercial projects with many plugins for popular E-Learning platforms like Moodle or blog software Wordpress and Drupal. The project will be releasing Openmeetings v3.0.5, the result of 8 years of development, reflecting more than 192 changes and upgrades over the previous major release, including an improved installer, DB configuration process, and user experience.
• Apache Samza™ -an Open Source Big Data distributed stream processing framework used in business intelligence, financial services, healthcare, mobile applications, security, and software development, among other industries. The project is preparing to release Samza v0.9.0, its first release since graduating from the Apache Incubator in January 2015. Samza v0.9.0 reflects 94 changes and upgrades since last release; improvements include upgrading Kafka producer, adding streaming log appender, having more integration tests, and improving the overall performance.
• Apache SpamAssassin™ -the #1 Open Source anti-spam platform giving system administrators a filter to classify email and block "spam" (unsolicited bulk email). It uses a robust scoring framework and plug-ins to integrate a wide range of advanced heuristic and statistical analysis tests on email headers and body text. The project is preparing to release SpamAssassin v3.4.1, representing more than a year of development and nearly 500 tweaks, changes, upgrades and bug fixes over the previous release. Highlights include: improved automation to help combat spammers that are abusing new top level domains; tweaks to the SPF support to block more spoofed emails; increased character set normalization to make rules easier to develop and stop spammers from using alternate character sets to bypass tests; continued refinement to the native IPv6 support; and improved Bayesian classification with better debugging and attachment hashing.
• Apache VCL™ -an Open Source system used to dynamically provision and broker remote access to a dedicated compute environment in a self-service model; this compute environment can be as simple as a virtual machine running productivity software to a cluster of machines running data analysis. The project recently released Apache VCL v2.4.1, the result of 11 years of development, and reflects more than 700 changes and upgrades over the previous major release. Apache VCL v2.4.1 includes an installer, support for Network Address Translation, initial support for Openstack, and many general improvements. Apache VCL also provisions physical machines using xCAT and virtual machines on VMWare and KVM hypervisors using native commands. Future releases will include Docker, Hyper-V support, and other enhancements. Apache VCL has been successfully deployed in universities around the world as an Open Source Cloud platform.
Today, Apache software is so ubiquitous that the ASF has been hailed as one of the most successful influencers in Open Source. Its collaborative leadership, robust community, and meritocratic process serve as best practices widely embraced by organizations and individuals alike. Join us as we look ahead to the next 15 years of spearheading new projects that meet the growing demands of the marketplace and help users achieve their business goals.
To register for ApacheCon, visit http://apachecon.com/
About The Apache Software Foundation (ASF)
Established in 1999, the all-volunteer Foundation oversees more than 350 leading Open Source projects, including Apache HTTP Server --the world's most popular Web server software. Through the ASF's meritocratic process known as "The Apache Way," more than 500 individual Members and 4,500 Committers successfully collaborate to develop freely available enterprise-grade software, benefiting millions of users worldwide: thousands of software solutions are distributed under the Apache License; and the community actively participates in ASF mailing lists, mentoring initiatives, and ApacheCon, the Foundation's official user conference, trainings, and expo. The ASF is a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization, funded by individual donations and corporate sponsors including Budget Direct, Cerner, Citrix, Cloudera, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Hortonworks, HP, IBM, InMotion Hosting, iSigma, Matt Mullenweg, Microsoft, Pivotal, Produban, WANdisco, and Yahoo. For more information, visit http://www.apache.org/ or follow https://twitter.com/TheASF
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