Dev-Jam 2008 is officially underway. Monday morning I gave my “State of OpenNMS” speech, and then turned it over to Matt.

Since last year’s conference we’ve had ten releases of OpenNMS. This was mainly due to Ben’s repackaging of the application into the distro-specific bits (that rarely change) and the main Java code. Ben is an amazing packager (he is an admin with the fink project) and this took our release cycle from two days to about two hours. The best part is that anyone can build their own packages, since OpenNMS doesn’t require commercial packaging tools like Bitrock.

Speaking of releases, next week we hope to release 1.5.94 which will be the release candidate for 1.6.0. If all goes well, we should have a new stable by the end of August. We are then hoping to start work on 1.8 which will focus on capsd and notifications. The goal is a six month, focused release cycle.

We also took care of some overdue business by awarding two people their green polo shirts. Alejandro Galue joins us from Venezuela, and he has worked quite a bit on our thresholding system. Craig Gallen hails from the UK (although he is Irish) and has been instrumental in our work with NGOSS. He has also attended all four Dev-Jams. While they both were inducted into the OGP last year, I wasn’t able to get their polos made until now (I have to do some special stuff with Lands End to get the proper color green).

I then spent a lot of time chatting about the future direction of the application, as well as updating the team on some of the more private aspects of the project. While The OpenNMS Group provides financial support for OpenNMS, it is the OGP that is responsible for its governance, and even though we are open source that doesn’t mean we do everything publicly (grin). There are some amazing things on tap for the next year.

I then turned it over to Matt and we started setting up the projects to work on during the week. We’re using a format similar to barcamp, and we’re tracking it on the wiki. I’m focusing on writing the new OpenNMS book, which is also available on the wiki.

It looks like it is going to be a great week.

Well, technically it is day one, as we are quickly approaching 1am on Monday as I write this. I’m pretty tired, so this one will be short.

We just picked up Bill Ayres from Hartsfield. He brings our total to 16 for the entire week, although we have some people who are supposed to drop in for awhile.

I started off this morning at home. Alex and I took the Magic Bus (a 15 passenger van we’ve rented for the occasion) over to Dave’s where we picked up him and Ben, then up to Matt’s house before getting on the Interstate. Something like 8 short hours later we arrived a Georgia Tech.

After unloading, we proved that 15 people is about the maximum you can fit in a 15 passenger van as we headed out to The Vortex for dinner.

Alex has some pictures from the day up on his blog. In general expect some serious blog activity over the next week. Be sure to check out the Planet OpenNMS for an aggregation of most of them.

Well, I’m suffering through my usual post holiday depression. It’s not that the holiday is always that great, but in the run up to the actual time off I plan on doing a lot more than actually gets done, and then feel bad about it when the new year comes and I didn’t do much more than visit with friends, read, play with the Wii and drink scotch.

Note: I splurged on a 33 y.o. Glendronach during one of my layovers at Gatwick. It was mighty nice for a Speyside (I tend toward Highland) although I seriously blew my lunch money for, I dunno, a decade.

But one thing that can get me out of the doldrums is thinking about Dev-Jam, the OpenNMS annual developer’s conference. As much as the Internet can facilitate all sorts of remote collaboration, nothing beats spending some time face to face. This year it is a departure from our usual UMN haunt and we are heading for Atlanta.

There are several reasons for this. We have a lot of international contributors and thus Atlanta offers a good international airport (ATL). It is also close enough to the main office that we can drive down, saving on airfare. Plus, Atlanta can be a fun town.

It will be hot, however. Atlanta in the summer is like being on the inside of a napalmed watermelon (apologies to Tom Robbins).

So reserve the dates: 27 July to 1 August (once again between OSCON and LinuxWorld). We’ll post more info as we get closer.

While a lot of positive things happened today, the tragedy that hit Minneapolis pretty much overshadowed them.

At 6:05pm local time, the Interstate 35W/Broadway bridge collapsed into the Mississippi river. This was within a short walk of Dev-Jam, and the area behind our building became a staging area for the rescue effort.

Rescue workers gather downriver.

Cell phone service was non-existant as the locals called to insure that their loved ones were okay, and we listened to the sounds of sirens as the city mobilized to help the injured.

Injured transported on trucks.

So rather than focus on Dev-Jam, our thoughts go out to the people of our host city and we hope that the recovery is swift.

Sorry for the lack of updates. It’s been pretty crazy around here.

Monday Dev-Jam kicked off in earnest. Robert Hanson passed around the GWT kool-aid, and several coding efforts got underway to use GWT for charts and maps. fastjay and vwdude started implementing a RESTful architecture into OpenNMS so that data could be more easily shared between instances of the application.

On Tuesday I finally got to meet in person someone that I’ve known for several years via e-mail: Ethan Galstad. For those who don’t know, Ethan is the creator of Nagios, one of the first open source management tools and one of the most popular.

Me and Ethan Galstad

Note the shirts.

I was happy to discover that Ethan is as cool in person as he is in e-mail, which is not always the case. In the last couple of years the management space has really taken off, and it was nice to get his take on the emergence of a number of so-called “open source” management options. Both Nagios and OpenNMS have been around for over seven years, so we’ve experienced some of the same issues, although the fame of Nagios far eclipses that of OpenNMS. We’ve both had to deal with trademark issues, as well as how to maintain and encourage a growing community without succumbing to help vampires. We got to chat for about six hours, and the gang probably would have kept him there longer.

Ethan will be coming out to LinuxWorld and I think it would be cool if he happens to be visiting our booth in the .org Pavilion when someone asks the invariable question of “How is OpenNMS better than Nagios?” in a tone that implies we are somehow enemies. They are different tools focusing on different things: Nagios on monitoring in depth while OpenNMS has a broader agenda. It’s all about what works for you.

True open source is a meritocracy, not a marketing exercise. Respect in open source can’t be bought and must be earned, and at OpenNMS we hope to one day have earned the respect that Ethan enjoys. We plan to do that by staying true to the ideals of free software, and we hope by example to show that people can work on free software and make money at it, and not at the expense of the community.

Today is a travel day for most people, but that also means that we started to gain critical mass early on. Having everyone together does so much for productivity, and we managed to tag and release OpenNMS 1.3.6 (official announcement will come tomorrow).

A lot of progress was made toward getting rid of the dependency on Tomcat for the webUI and replacing it with jetty (although Tomcat can still be used when it is necessary to move the webapp to another server), and we started to lay out the plans for the week (doing more with GWT, getting rid of the SVG 1.2 dependency for maps, etc.)

In other news, one of the more interesting people that I met at OSCON mentioned my talk in his blog. John Willis has been doing this whole network management thing longer than I have, and it was nice to see how much we agreed on what a management platform should be able to do.

Back to Dev-Jam, we took several breaks to play with the Wii:

although I am not very good at it … yet.

Weather issues on the east coast caused some delays, but by dinner time (around 9pm) most everyone had arrived except for Alejandro, who had been stuck in Miami since leaving Venezuela, although he is supposed to be landing soon. We ended up at Sally’s, which worked out well since Sunday nights after 9pm all of the drink specials offered over the week are in force.

It may be a little hard for me to get out of bed in the morning.

We made a massive Sam’s run today. Several cases of soda, a couple cases of Red Bull, coffee, and both salty and sweet snacks. We based a lot of our purchasing decisions on last years conference, so we hope we bought enough this time.

Today both jeffg and ranger showed up. joed’s plane flight got cancelled so he doesn’t make it here until tomorrow, and Alejandro’s flight was also delayed, so instead of getting in around midnight he’ll be here around noon on Sunday. Pretty much everyone else shows up tomorrow as well.

We are hoping to tag 1.3.6 this weekend. All of the C-based JNI code has been excised from the main OpenNMS code, so now jrrd (to support RRDtool files) is optional, iplike (to allow for powerful IP address based matches when querying the database) is optional but highly recommended, and jicmp (which allows for Java to perform pings) is required but provided as a separate package.

What does this mean for OpenNMS? A number of things. First of all the opennms, opennms-webapp and opennms-docs packages are now “noarch”. This will allow us to build and release in a fraction of the time it used to take, and we will be able to provide nightly snapshots. Second, OpenNMS should build on Windows. Now, I didn’t say it would run on Windows, but it should build – which is the first step (we still need to work on any hardcoded file separators).

Since I was responsible for building on the umpteen platforms we support, I at least am ecstatic. We are also setting up some yum repos in addition to the debian/ubuntu repos, so installation should be a breeze.

In other news, OpenNMS has been appearing in a couple of blogs. One of our clients in Europe who we’d hoped could make it to Dev-Jam talks about his experiences with the app, and Coté over at Redmonk links to a post I made in the past about the glory days of OpenView.

He writes “Developers seem to have a diminished role in IT management.” This is very true in the case of OpenNMS. Unlike some other open source management projects, all of us came from a background in enterprise management, and only a few of us were “classically” trained developers. This has meant that getting to a critical mass of developers has taken us a long time, and it has made our annual Dev-Jam conference essential for the success of the project (plus it is a whole lot of fun). Most other open source projects are written by developers for developers.

On the upside, by bringing together network management professionals and not strictly developers, we’ve managed to create a product focused on their needs.

Anyway, tomorrow is the big reunion day. It’s nice being back at UMN. We went out to Big 10 for lunch and one of our favorite waitresses from last year, Meegen, was there. She’s a blast. Having an unusual name myself, we swapped stories. She won. She said that often when she tells someone her name, they don’t believe her (it’s pronounced “Me” vs. “May”), so they often ask her to spell it, as if she spelled it “Megan” they could go “aha! you’re saying it wrong”.

Well, it was funny in the bar.

Friday was a travel day for me. Up at 5am, off to the airport, PDX to ORD, then ORD to MSP. The flight out was delayed but I had enough of a layover in Chicago to make the next flight, and so did my luggage.

Mike picked me up at the airport and we met up with his wife Katie, Matt and Dave at the Wayzata Yacht Club. Mike and Katie are part owners in a sail boat, so we went out on Lake Minnetonka for a couple of hours.

[Me, Matt, Katie, and Cap’n Mike – Dave took the picture]

It was nice. We then got some ice cream and I got some much needed sleep.

Last year we started a Dev-Jam tradition of having a special guest. Dev-Jam is all about building up the OpenNMS developer community and what better way than to bring in an expert from another open project to cross-train.

Last year we had Ben Hale from Interface21 come and tell us all about Spring. We then spent the last year “springifying” OpenNMS. This year the development focus is on the webUI, so we wanted someone to tell us about cool web tools.

First I had to come up with a name for this person. Mardi Gras has its King of Carnival, the Oscars has its Master of Ceremonies, and now OpenNMS has …

The Deacon of Dev-Jam

We are very excited to have as this year’s Deacon Robert Hanson, author of GWT in Action. We have started using the Google Web Toolkit in our Dashboard feature, and we’d like to expand it to other areas of the webUI. We are very lucky to have Robert join us for the first half of Dev-Jam, and as an added bonus everyone who attends will get a copy of his book. Well, everyone but Robert, that is.

So, remember, Dev-Jam registration closes on July 20th. Sponsorship opportunities are still available. Google was an early silver sponsor and this week we added Sun Microsystems as a silver sponsor as well.