Despite the heavy emphasis on Java at this year's ApacheCon, I still enjoyed the conference and learned a lot. Michael Radwin was giving a talk that looked very interesting, but my travel plans prevented me from being able to attend. Although it's not nearly as good as seeing him live, you can view his slides online:

• Hacking Apache HTTP Server at Yahoo

I got to see Rasmus Lerdorf's talk, and you can also view his slides online:

• Large-Scale PHP

Rasmus actually covered many topics, including Ajax, Flickr, and Yahoo Maps. It felt like he was just having fun and talking about the cool things he's been playing with recently. You can see more of his toys on his toys page, which is the closest thing he has to a blog.

Andrei Zmievski spoke about Unicode. He very clearly presents the problems faced in the work he's doing, which helps you understand and appreciate the solution.

Adam Trachtenberg spoke about web services, but I also missed his talk. He hasn't posted the slides yet, but hopefully he will soon - he's already been bragging about finishing them early. :-)

My favorite talk was Christian Wenz's talk on web application security. It's always interesting to see other people's approach to this topic, particularly the audience's reaction. The audience simply loved his talk. He covered several of the most common web application vulnerabilities, and the talk was mostly driven by live demonstrations. Rather than focusing on principles and theory, he demonstrated realistic attacks. It was a bit disorganized, but very entertaining.

You can view my ApacheCon 2005 gallery online.