My A list

Here's a concept that I've been using to help me both in my blog writing and to filter all the incoming feeds, tweets, photo sharing and social bookmarking items that come in via my feed reader: my A list. It's not made up of famous folks and big blog names like Scoble or Winer or Arrington. My A list is made up of people that I know or work with and that I believe are following me in some way, reading my blog, subscribing to my tweets or working with me on a project. I've got a folder in my feed reader and my A list is always the one I read first. Sometimes I don't get much farther than than before hitting the mark all read button. And when I do blog, that folder helps remind my of who I'm writing for. "A" stands for audience.


Latest Links: open source, social networking and etc.


We want you to blog about Netbeans 6.1 beta

netbeans logo It's not a new runtime or a component model or some bastardized chunk of code yanked from the guts of the wombeast, it's just Netbeans 6.1 beta, the latest revision of a good solid and Jolt award winning IDE.

So I'm here telling you to download it, install it, try it out and blog about it because the Netbeans team really wants and, in fact, needs your feedback. Plus, you could even win some money.

I can't win since I'm a Sun employee, but I downloaded 6.1-beta today and started using it for development. I put it through its paces with some heavy refactoring work without single crash, a stack-trace or any of the usual things a beta brings. Of course, YMMV. I did see a weird-ass anomaly in the Mac OS X activity monitor.


Google Summer of Code ideas for Roller

I asked for Google Summer of Code (GSOC) ideas for Roller a couple of days ago. Below are links to the proposals I thought were good enough to volunteer as possible mentor for and to submit. The deadline is tomorrow, so you've still got time to suggest additions to the list.

  • Roller OpenID: Open ID support for Roller blog server, for user accounts and comments
  • Roller Mobile: Mobile interface for Roller blog server
  • Roller Activities: Simple Social Networking for Roller blog server, Twitter-like activities
  • Roller Abdera: Abdera-based AtomPub implementation for Roller blog server
  • AtomPub Export: AtomPub Export for Roller blog server, export all!
  • Roller Shindig: Google Gadget support in Roller blog server themes via Shindig
  • Roller Photo Gallery: Better photo and file upload features in Roller blog server

Here's the full list of Apache GSOC proposals.


Fluffy little lambs vs. goats in training

Henry Yandel: I continue to grapple with the concept of how to treat users of Open Source projects. Should you be cruel, or kind?

It sounds like a dumb question - rude hackers who rip users apart for daring to ask a question in a not perfect way are just arseholes who need to get off their high horse. Right?

I’m not convinced. And I’m someone who usually over worries about being polite. Mostly because the voice inside my head is, I suspect, the kind of stormtrooper who after the Death Star blows up for the second time, will be found out of uniform at the Rebel party selling little burgers of ‘forest meat - mind the blaster marks on the fur’. Read more...

Insightful and fun post from Apache board member Henri Yandell. Worth a read for folks trying to grow an open source community of contributors.

Latest Links: Twitter and JavaFX

As you can tell from the links below, I've been goofing around with the Twitter API and JavaFX. The Twitter API looks pretty nice and very easy to use. JavaFX looks cool to this old Swing geek, but I'm a little surprised at the state of the docs and the absence of apps. I expected more after the hyped-up launch last year. Oh, well. The Netbeans plugin is pretty nice. I'll stick with it and maybe I'll be able to squeeze a Twitter Client or at least a Java.net or O'Reilly article out of my late night JavaFX noodlings.


Daffodils


Daffodils
Originally uploaded by snoopdave

It's still a little chilly around here, but the flowers and trees are starting to bloom.


Six

By my count that's how many Apache members work at Sun. I thought I had a complete count, but Nick Kew's recent post revealed a sixth (see the comments). Here's the list:

  • Craig McClanahan
  • Craig Russell
  • Dave Johnson
  • Jim Winstead
  • Nick Kew
  • Ted Leung

Know of any other Sun employees that are Apache members?


Latest Links: Friday March 7, 2008


blogcentral.jpost.com

The Jerusalem Post is blogging with Apache Roller. (Belated) Congratulations to developer Odelya Glick and the rest of the JPost web team on the site launch.

blog central logo
[link]

Sweet OpenSocial preso

From the Graphing Social Patterns 2008 conference, a sweet OpenSocial presentation with a nice overview of the emerging standard, status of the Apache Shindig project, details of the Hi5 implementation, some cute pictures of my buddy Pat Chanezon's kids and some very fine art (I think Pat forgot to credit the artist).

Welcome to Sun!

It's great to be welcoming new folks to Sun, especially when they're brilliant people like Ted Leung and Nick Kew, both of whom, by the way, are members of the Apache Software Foundation. I met Ted at ApacheCon US 2004 in Vegas and he answered all my questions about the implications of moving Roller to the ASF. And I met Nick at ApacheCon EU 2006 in Dublin and we chatted, over a couple of pints of Guiness, about the perils and pleasures of working from home and other things.

I'm also pretty damn pleased to be part of the MySQL welcoming committee, AKA the SunVisor program, and paired-up with Chuck Bell of MySQL. He's the author of Expert MySQL. I'll be answering his questions about Sun and, I hope, learning a thing or two about MySQL in the process.

Welcome to Sun guys!


Latest Links: March 2, 2008


ApacheCons 2008

I've been busy as can be, working on launching a new project at work, lots of presentations and not enough code. March seems to have snuck up behind me, spun me around and punched me right in the stomach. Not good. I need more time. Slides for my Advanced Roller talk are due today, ApacheCon EU is a little over a month away and JavaOne is right around the corner (more about that later). That's enough whining. Now, it's my duty to remind you that there's still plenty of time to register for ApacheCon EU in beautiful city of Amsterdam, so here goes:

ApacheCon banner ad

Click here to register for ApacheCon EU 2008.

And in other news, the ApacheCon US 2008 Call For Papers is now open. This year ApacheCon US will be November 3-7 in New Orleans, Louisiana.


Evans Data Corp. Web 2.0 survey

Evans Data Corp. is doing a survey on Web 2.0 development and they've included some interesting questions on social networking:

  • How is your organization using Social Networking?
  • What is keeping your organization from using Social Networking now?
  • Why are you planning to use Social Networking technology?
  • Which of these Social Networking APIs are you most interested in developing with?
  • What are your plans for OpenSocial?
  • What are your plans for developing Facebook applications?

Social Software for Glassfish screencast

fish1 fish2 fish3

I mentioned the Social Software for Glassfish (SSG) EA2 release before the winter break, but I never got around to posting any details. Since then some documentation has appeared, Manveen Kaur blogged it, The Aquarium too and now screen-cast master Arun Gupta has created an excellent Social Software for Glassfish screencast that walks you through the features in this very early access release. Now I don't have to say nearly as much.

Blackbox tour coming to the Triangle

In case you're not following the Blackbox blog, the Sun Modular Data Center is coming to the Triangle on March 12, 2008. The event will be hosted at the SAS Institute campus in Cary, NC. Here's the blurb:

Join us and enjoy presentations and tours throughout the day of Sun's Modular Datacenter, the world's first datacenter in a box - a 6.1 meter (20 foot) shipping container. Also known as Project Blackbox, this is a virtualized datacenter optimized for extreme energy, space, and performance efficiency. It applies Sun's trademark innovation and network computing infrastructure expertise to engineer out complexity and provide a whole new alternative for quickly adding datacenter capacity anywhere it's needed, with the ability to move it as business needs change. Because of its modular, high density design, the Sun Modular Datacenter packs more heterogeneous compute power in less space than a traditional datacenter, and can be configured, deployed, and quickly modified and redeployed for another project virtually anywhere worldwide.

Interested? The sign up is here.


Latest Links: JSF vs. REST

I've been very happy with the choice of Struts 2 for Roller, but I still follow JSF because it's the Java standard. A couple of articles by Ryan Lubke about what's coming in JSF 2.0 got me thinking about JSF again.

One of my problems with JSF is REST. REST fans say JSF is inherently RESTless because every JSF request is a POST. JSF advocates say JSF can do GET and bookmarkable URLs if necessary and that's good enough.

Fortunately, the plans for JSF 2.0 indicate that REST improvements are coming:

Unfortunately, it sounds like all they're planning to do is make it easier to create bookmarkable URLs and add some support for the JSF-311 REST API. Why can't the goal be to make JSF applications RESTful by default? Why can't JSF ensure that POST is only used when required by the application (not the framework) and JSF URLs are simple, clean and always bookmarkable.

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