Latest Links: social networking platforms and more...

First, some social software links.

And second, some feel-good PHP, Rails and Linux links.

Dave Johnson in Links Comments [0]
Tags: linux php ruby socialsoftware

Holiday project: JMaki for Roller

JMaki seal Over the holidays I avoided doing anything directly related to my current set of work tasks. Sun went quiet, which helped, and I ignored the messages that piled-up in the Roller user and dev lists. It was so quiet that I had time for a fun little project: a JMaki plugin for Roller.

JMaki makes it easy to use JavaScript widgets (Dojo, Google, YUI, etc.) from PHP, JSP, JSF and now Roller. To use a widget, all you have to do is call a method or include a tag and JMaki takes care of including the right JavaScript files and generating the right HTML for you. That's not all JMaki does, there's also a pub/sub facility to make it easy to wire widgets together via events, there's a proxy for fetching remote resources common table and tree data models. The theme is cool widgets with ease-of-development and that's what I'd like to see in Roller. You can read more about the JMaki value proposition on the Why Use JMaki page.

Here's an example. Below is a Roller page template that uses two JavaScript widgest, the Dojo Clock and the YUI Data Table. All it takes is a single line of template code to include each widget, and one widget is dynamic i.e. the table is populated via an RSS feed.


    <html>
    <head><title>JMaki test page</title></head>
    <body>

        <h1>JMaki test: dojo.clock</h1>
        $jmaki.addWidget("dojo.clock")

        <h1>JMaki test: yahoo.dataTable</h1>
        $jmaki.addWidget("yahoo.dataTable", "/roller/xhp?id=rss","","")

    </body>
    </html>

And here's what that page looks like when displayed by Roller:

JMaki Plugin for Roller w/Dojo and YUI

I'll write more about the plugin once I install it on this site. If you want some details about how the plugin was developed, you can read the email that I sent to the JMaki dev list: JMaki for Roller issues and suggestions. It links to the Java source code for the plugin.

Dave Johnson in Java Comments [0]
Tags: java javascript jmaki roller

Happy New Year 2008

Happy New Year to all the readers of this blog and all the folks who happen to have arrived here via one of the various planets, spam blogs and Google search result pages that include it. I hope you all have a prosperous and pleasant year ahead. I'm hoping for the same. It's nice to start the new year with some good news and I've got some; check this out:

RSS and Atom in Action book

RSS and Atom in Action has been out for over a year now and just as the phenomenal sales are starting to drop off, something wonderful has happened. The book has been nominated for the prestigious Stephen T. Colbert Award for Literary Excellence. As you can see in the photo above, at least one copy of the book is already carrying the Colbert nominee seal. Avoid the rush and buy your copy of RSS and Atom in Action now.

Those who have read Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!) will understand the significance of this important award and understand the impact on future sales of the book. To learn more about the nomination process and criteria, buy yourself a copy of Colbert's book and then flip to page 214½. Cheers!

Dave Johnson in General Comments [0]
Tags: atom feeds rss

SSG EA2

I'm supposed to be on vacation today and I'm doing my best, but I just wanted to point out that something interesting has quietly appeared in the Glassfish Update Center. Why so quiet? Well, it's an EA2 release and the emphasis is definitely on the E. I'll post some more details later, perhaps after winter break. I've still got shopping to do now and I'm supposed to be on vacation.

Social Software for Glassfish

Interested? If you haven't done so already grab yourself a copy of the new Glassfish V2 UR1 release. Run the updatetool and install the latest EA2 release of Social Software for GlassFish.

See also: Something fishy.

Dave Johnson in Sun Comments [0]
Tags: glassfish roller socialsoftware

Latest Links

Today, I've got a couple of additions to my powered-by-Roller list: More about the opening of the Social Networking platforms of the world: And some more about the intersection of corporate interests and community open source:
  • InfoWorld: Open source and the corporate elephant (FOSS.IN coverage)
    Danese Cooper: "Having a well-read blog is the best defense you can have against any problems you may encounter"
  • eWeek: Sun Open-Source Support Questioned
    "The only reason anyone should be surprised by anything Sun does with [the open-source projects] it controls is because that person has fundamentally created an expectation that access to source code meant more than just that—and that is a flawed assumption."
  • Reg Developer: Bruce Perens on the OpenDS spat
    "In general open source is only going to work if you let it be a community led project. Sun has had a hard time learning this, and some of their open source projects have had a hard time getting outside contributors, because Sun has insisted on owning the [project]"

Dave Johnson in Links Comments [0]
Tags: opensocial opensource roller

Off to the mountains

I'm off to the NC mountains and away from internet access so you won't see a blog, link, photo or tweet from me for a couple of days. Have a nice weekend. Over and out.

NC mountain house

Dave Johnson in General Comments [0]
Tags: vacation

How to create a Roller 4.0 theme, part 2

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Dave Johnson in Roller Comments [7]
Tags: blogging roller

Blog server as social networking platform?

Anne Zelenka, Gigaom: Could open-source blogging platform WordPress serve as your next social networking profile? Chris Messina, co-founder of Citizen Agency, thinks so. He’s started a project called DiSo, for distributed social networking, that aims to “build a social network with its skin inside out.” DiSo will first look to WordPress as its foundation.

This could be the next step towards the unified social graph that some technologists wish for. WordPress suits the purpose because it provides a person-centric way of coming online, offers an extensible architecture, and already has some features — such as an OpenID and a blogroll plugin — that can be pressed into social networking service. And its users represent exactly the sort of audience that might appreciate the permanent, relatively public identity that DiSo aims to offer.

Interesting. I think that blogs should be the corner-stone of social networking and I'd much rather have my blog be my social network profile rather than some page inside somebody else's container. Then again, as a blog server developer I'm pretty biased.

Dave Johnson in Blogging Comments [1]
Tags: blogging socialnetworking socialsoftware

How to create a Roller 4.0 theme, part 1

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Dave Johnson in Roller Comments [5]
Tags: blogging roller velocity

Latest Links: Feedsync, AtomPub for SOA, OpenSocial and more

Dave Johnson in Links Comments [0]
Tags: atom atompub opensocial socialsoftware

Roller 4.0 released

$entry.displayContent($url.entry($entry.anchor))

Dave Johnson in Roller Comments [4]
Tags: blogging java roller

OpenQabal: a social software platform w/Roller

I'm always happy to see Roller used in new sites, projects and products. Here's an interesting new example that I've been meaning to blog for a while now. Phillip Rhodes is working on building what he calls OpenQabal a "social software operating system." The project integrates a set of social software applications, including Roller and JavaBB, via Single Sign-On (SSO), a common look-and-feel and Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC). He explains it all in an lengthy and informative blog post on the project's JRoller.com blog.

I'd never heard of SIOC before. Here's the executive summary:

Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities SIOC or is a framework aimed at connecting online community sites and internet-based discussions. Currently, online communities (boards, blogs, etc.) are like islands - they contain valuable information but are not well connected. SIOC allows us to interlink these sites, and enables the extraction of richer information from various discussion services.

Sounds like it could be pretty darn useful. But then again, I spent a little time exploring the list of SIOC enabled sites with the SIOC Firefox plugin and didn't really find any examples of interlinked communities or conversations. Am I missing something?

Dave Johnson in Open Source Comments [3]
Tags: java opensource roller socialsoftware

RC10 is 4.0

We've got the votes to release our tenth release candidate as Apache Roller 4.0. I'll make formal announcements after I've put files in place and updated the various release and docs pages.

Dave Johnson in Roller Comments [1]
Tags: roller

Advanced Roller at ApacheCon EU, April 2008

One of my five ApacheCon EU 2008 proposals was accepted. I submitted a couple of proposals for customizing Roller, one for advanced Roller and one on RSS/Atom. The advanced Roller talk was accepted. Here's the abstract:

Apache Roller is a popular open source blog server designed to serve the needs of large multi-user blogging sites and typically used by large corporations, universities and government organizations. This session for managers, sysadmins and developers will goes beyond the Roller installation guide and explores the advanced issues of planning and executing a Roller deployment, including deployment architecture and configuration options as well as options for customization and automation.

Dave Johnson in Roller Comments [4]
Tags: apachecon conferences roller

2008 NC Science Blogging Conference

I just registered for the 2008 NC Science Blogging Conference and I'm really looking forward to another excellent BlogTogether production. I attended the first edition of the conference last year and learned a lot about how scientists are using blogs, how they'd like to use them and the issues they're facing with both the medium and the software tools, very useful stuff for a blog software developer like me. I'm itchin' to learn more, and to get another chance to hang with the BlogTogether folks and science bloggers from far and wide.

If you're interested in science or blogging, check it out.

conference logo

Here's the conference wiki

Here's the conference registration page.

And here's the conference sponsorship page.

Dave Johnson in General Comments [0]

Sun open source project governance

Here's a sampling of governance docs from some of Sun's many open source projects. I've listed them in order of what I feel to be, the most progressive (i.e. community governance) to least progressive (i.e. corporate control). I've also listed a key quote from each doc and made a brief comment about each.

  • OpenSolaris governance: "The OpenSolaris Community has the authority and responsibility for all decisions" - seems to approach ASF style governance.

  • OpenJDK interim governance: "The [board] shall be comprised of [5 and ] shall conduct its affairs in accordance with democratic principles and shall represent the interests of the Community. Two [members] shall be employees of Sun" - not final, but looking good.

  • Netbeans governance: "In the case of an irresolvable dispute, there is a governance board of three people, who are appointed for six month terms." (2 appointed by community, 1 by Sun)." - sounds pretty good, but the doc seems a little vague.

  • SunGrid governance: "The Board positions include the Community Leader, the Community Site Manager, and four general members, two Sun members and from the independent developer Community." - sounds good, again doc seems a little vague.

  • Glassfish governance: "The GlassFish project has an overall Project Lead ... appointed by Sun" - Sun has final say.

  • OpenSSO governance (draft): "Project Managers make the final decision ... are appointed by Sun" - Sun has final say.

  • OpenDS governance: The OpenDS project has single, overall Project Lead [who is] appointed by Sun Microsystems." - Sun has final say.

  • Mobile and embedded: "Sun may change its appointed Governance Board members at any time" - Sun has final say.

Looks to me like the trend is towards community governance and the most important projects are the ones getting the most attention and the most progressive governance. That's good and I sincerely hope the trend continues.

Dave Johnson in Sun Comments [3]
Tags: java opensource sun

Apache Shindig voting in progress and more OpenSocial details emerge

I wrote about Shindig before, it's a new open source project to implement the Google OpenSocial APIs. Well, now the official voting to accept the Shindig project into the Apache Incubator is in progress and some interesting details have emerged in the latest version of the proposal. First, as you can see by the initial list of committers in the proposal Google has joined the Shindig effort in force. Second, the proposal says that Shindig will be the reference implementation of the OpenSocial APIs. And third, Shindig will not only include the client-side JavaScript container but also a Java back-end. Brian McAllister has already made some "gnarly" initial client-side container code available, I can't wait to see the Google contribution.

Dave Johnson in Open Source Comments [0]
Tags: asf java ning opensocial

PHP support in Netbeans

Hadn't heard about this one until today, but Netbeans 6.1 will have plugin support for creating, editing, deploying to Apache HTTPD, running and even debugging PHP projects. Check out the details and screenshots on the Phantom Reference blog.

Here's a sceenshot from the Netbeans Wiki page on PHP:

screenshot of PHP in NB editor

Dave Johnson in Java Comments [0]
Tags: netbeans php

Groovy support back in Netbeans

After going missing in NB 5.5, Groovy support is back in Netbeans. Basic Groovy support with syntax coloring and support for running scripts from the IDE is available in plugin form (download page) for Netbeans 6.0 (starting with RC2), read about it on Geertjan's blog.

Here's what's coming after Netbeans 6.0, Groovy project support: screenshot of Groovy NB project types

After Netbeans 6.0, the story gets better. Geertjan writes that a brand new Groovy plugin will be available in the post-6.0 builds that adds support for three types of Groovy projects: applications, class libraries and Grails webapps.

Dave Johnson in Java Comments [0]
Tags: groovy java netbeans

Roller Strong #11

I've got a couple of Roller related items to blog about, so why not just call it Roller Strong #11.

First, Lars Trieloff responds to some of the questions I raised about JCR and Roller in my ApacheCon wrap-up post. I left a comment on his blog in response. Personally, I think a JCR back-end is a very interesting idea and I wish I had some more time to explore it.

Manchi Leung AKA Thinkboy posted the code for a new Textile plugin to the Roller dev list, using Textile-J. Thinkboy says "it supports almost all of the Textile syntax. very much the same as Confluence wiki. Now I can easily sync or copy working notes from Confluence wiki to my personal Roller blog." Nice. Note to self: I need to fix up some of our existing entry plugins -- I think some of them (e.g. Ekit) still haven't been updated for Roller 3.1.

Arun Gupta blogged recently about Backing up your Roller entries and explained how to use the Grabber example (now known as BlogBackup in Blogapps 2) from the Blogapps project to backup your Roller blog. Backing-up your entries, but backing up your uploads is not. Hopefully, blogs.sun,com will turn on Atom protocol someday and that'll will make it easy for a tool like Grabber backup both entries and uploads.

roller logo

We're still waiting on Roller 4.0, but I sense our wait is soon over. Roller 4.0 RC10 was released one week ago with just a couple of bug fixes. And so far, no critical issues have been found. We've got only one +1 vote (thanks Anil!) so far so committers please test and vote.

And finally, I have to mention MarkMail because I've been using it throughout this blog post. MarkMail provides a slick interface and excellent facilities for mailing lists of all kinds. They're indexing all of the Apache mailing lists and providing statis and charts for each. Check the Roller page at MarkMail for example.

That's all I've got for this go-round. Keep on rollin'

Dave Johnson in Roller Comments [2]
Tags: java opensource roller

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