Open Repositories 09 developer view

I just got back from the Open Repositories 2009 conference in Atlanta, GA, US and wanted to highlight a few things which were interesting to me (from a developer's perspective).

1. Pluggable (extendable) repository systems
   DSpace 2 was initially designed to support plugins and there were some suggestions which will improve it further. The Eprints team showed off a really cool proof of concept of a plugins store which allows browsing, downloading, and installing from within eprints. The Fedora Commons team indicated interest in using OSGi to manage their services and enable plugin points.
2. ReST interfaces
   All the major systems have some ReST in place now and are working on having fully restful access available in the fairly near future. I think (and hope) this will lead to more mashup style integrations and easier access to repository data which can only be a good thing.
   
3. DuraSpace
   The merging of the DSpace and Fedora Commons communities into DuraSpace is cool because it means 2 teams of great developers will now be one. They also showed off the DuraCloud distributed storage service which is interesting from a scaling and backup perspective.
4. Developer Repo Challenge
   There were some really cool projects and ideas demonstrated for the repo challenge. My personal favorite was the EprintsAppStore. I also really liked the FedoraFS entry from a technical coolness perspective and MentionIt (the winner) for its simplicity.