This conference is smaller than OSCOM 3 held in Harvard university and in about the same range as OSCOM 2 in Berkeley. However, this just means that this time most people attending are developers instead of end-users, and discussion ranges from interoperability topics to cultural issues.

I'm chairing the Apache Track of the event. The first day was mostly Jakarta topics, and so not that interesting to me personally. Day two will be focused on PHP and so closer to my interests. However, day one brought forward several interesting projects:

• HttpUnit - Web application unit testing framework
• Lucene search engine and its Perl port, inspiring to post MidCOM bug #107
• FlowScript, Cocoon's JavaScript-based session control system
• OS Web Design provides free web templates. We have to think about how to include them when planning the CSS naming conventions
• We're planning to try integrating BXE WYSIWYG XML editor to MidCOM as widget_xml, with an XSLT transforming datatype_xml
• Pubcookie, a single sign-on system for Apache and IIS

In addition,

• I solved the UTF-8 issues between Midgard and blogging tools
• Tested in the OSCOM Wiki, net.nemein.wiki is now much more useful

After the event and some beers we had a nice Italian dinner outside in slight rain in the old city of Zürich, and continued to caipirinhas and cigars in a Brazilian bar.