The day started with a keynote not from Netscape's Tom Paquin, who was unable to attend, but from the big N's Tim Howes (gee, we hope we got that name right). He discussed Open Source movements at Netscape, which are not limited to Mozilla. Netscape's entire server line will move to Linux, and their SDKs for those servers will likely all be Open Source; the Messaging Server will be hosted on Linux in early 1999, and the Messaging Server SDK will be available soon on Mozilla.org.
Netscape has also written a Perl interface to LDAP, called PerLDAP, which is on Mozilla.org and CPAN. It is used by such industry heavyweights as Motorola, Ford, and Bay Networks. Tim spent some considerable time talking about how prevalent Perl is in businesses like these, how Perl is really the glue that holds many (most?) company internet infrastructures together.
Tim Bray, designer of the XML spec, spoke in an early session, briefing conference attendees on why XML is good. Basically, XML is HTML (or SGML, depending on your point of view) done right. Larry Wall's XML parser (demoed in the workshop on Tuesday) is a big step forward in working with XML content.
The day ended with a town meeting, where similar concerns and praises were raised then as were raised throughout the week: making CPAN easier to use, making perl more acceptable to people, etc.
Everyone we talked to agreed that the conference was very good this year, significantly better than last. Few complaints were noted, though room for improvement does exist. Next year's conference will be Saturday-Tuesday, August 21-24, 1999, in Monterey, California.
