Blogging Roller

Speaking of open source projects that need help, there's Coyote, which promised to bring scripting support to Netbeans and did so for Netbeans 5.0. Since then, the project has been pretty stagnant. JRuby's getting all the attention these days.

Geertjan is doing his best to jump-start Groovy support in Netbeans, but it's not really his job. He's gone beyond the call of duty and it looks like he's got something pretty functional going, which is very nice. I've been doing some Groovy scripting lately, so I'll try it out. It would be cool if the Groovy project itself had time to help out, or even take over, but they're probably pretty busy too.

Sun just open sourced an interesting Java webapp called Slynkr that supports a Digg-like form of social bookmarking and tagging. You can get the source and docs at slynkr.dev.java.net.

Slynkr was developed inside Sun by Jamey Wood and others. The small community that formed around it found it useful and fun and wanted to share it. Slynkr was first deployed externally (and experimentally) at slynkr.sunwarp.net and more recently it was put into production at www.sdnshare.com.

Slynkr has a nice feature set and UI, but under the covers it needs some work. It's only been tested with the Sun app server and Oracle, so it's probably got some "portability" issues. For better or worse, it's got a simple Servlet/JSP and JDBC architecture -- no frameworks or persistence layer yet. Jamey is interested in improving the architecture, making it work on multiple servers and databases and growing a community around the project. So if you're interested, grab the source, join the mailing-list and get in on the ground-floor of an cool new open source project.

Update: check out Jamey's post on Slynkr for some more background.

Is it this http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html, promoted by Dave Winer?

This http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification, from the RSS advisory board?

Or one of the other dozen or so incompatible formats.

It doesn't really matter. There's only one Atom: RFC-4287.

Hat tip to Sam Ruby.

WALNUT CREEK, CA, May 15, 2007 -- Covalent Technologies, the most trusted source for enterprise open source solutions, today announced it is now offering full commercial support for Apache Roller, the open source blog server from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

[...]

Organizations are increasingly using blogs as a means of more effectively communicating with their customers and ecosystem, says Mark Brewer, CEO of Covalent Technologies. Consequently, for the enterprise, blog technology is rapidly becoming an important and essential piece of their infrastructure. We are very pleased to be supporting this very worthwhile ASF project. More...

German Viscuso: Generally spoken GData provides a general interface to make information available even beyond a browser context by providing a single API that could be used to query, update, and index structured data anywhere on the web. Could GData become a simple and open replacement for all the proprietary communications protocols currently in use by database vendors?

I found it via Joe Gregorio's blog, followed the link to the plugin homepage and the link to the source code and saw that it's powered by ROME Propono. I haven't tried the plugin myself yet, but it appears that it allows you to create, retrieve, update and delete Confluence wiki pages via the APP. Very cool!

And from the author himself:

Zohar Melamed: Just released an APP plugin for confluence. The code is based on code from Propono, so a thank you goes to the ROME guys. The protocol is great to work with , all you need to debug and test is wget or similar and it worked right off the bat with Joe's APP Test Client. Looking forward to many more happy atom hours. 

Oh, and by the way: ROME Propono is included in Sun Web Developer Pack (SWDP) R2, which was just released last week.

Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby's new book RESTful Web Services is now available. It was one of the best sellers in the JavaOne bookstore this year, so congrats to Leonard and Sam. It sold out before I was able to get a copy; Rajiv bought the last one in the store.

It's been a fun four weeks of travel with the APP interop event, vacation, ApacheCon EU and JavaOne but damn it's nice to be home with Andi and the boys.

By the way, my talk went very smoothly yesterday and I estimate that about 300 people showed up. I pitched my book at the end of the talk and pointed people to JavaOne bookstore, but by that time it was sold out.

• jcp.org: Apache named as JCP member of the year
  "ASF has impacted the direction of the JCP program by consistently driving collaborative transparency"
• Ethisphere™ Magazine: 2007 World's Most Ethical Companies
  Sun Microsystems named as one of the world's most ethical companies

As usual, I'm enjoying JavaOne and meeting lots of new people and putting faces to names. I've also been practicing my talk daily so I can give you my best performance, so eat lunch a little early or a little late and come see how it goes. Here are the details:

• TS-6029 - Beyond Blogging: Feeds in Action
• Friday 05/11/2007  12:10 PM -1:10 PM
• Moscone Center Esplanade 307 / 310

Here are some of my (raw and unedited) notes from Rich Green's opening keynote this morning:

• Community, openness, community! humans require communication
• Over the last year, we open sourced Java, grew Glassfish and Netbeans communities
  
• Martin Harriman of Ericssen on stage to announce
• Sun Java System Communications Application Server
• And open sourcing of Ericssen IMS technologies
• Anna Ewing CIO of NASDAQ on stage to say
• Trading tech has been running Java for some time now
• Now prototyping new systems using Real Time Java
• Tom Hallman of Sony on stage to tout
  
• New levels of DVD interactivity and thanks to Blueray
• Netbeans use is up 92% year over year
• Annoucement: Open souring of Java is now complete
• Annoucement: OpenJDK interim governing board
• Doug Lea, Simon Phipps, Mark Rhinehold, Dalibor Topic, Fabiane Nardone
• Will decide constitution and governance processes of OpenJDK community
• Annoucement: improvements to availability of TCK
• Why did Sun choose GPL V2?
• Compatibility matters and GPL forces innovation into open
• Compatible with Linux distributions
• Annoucement: Series of three new faster Java SE 6 releases this year
• Annoucement: Java FX scripting language for rich UX and interactivity
• Rich Green: "Profound change to Java"
• James Gosling: other scripting languages focus on HTML generation not rich UI
• Drives Swing and Java 2D graphics
• Complete line of authoring tools on the way
• Annoucement: JavaFX mobile, complete "desktop scale" environment for phones
• Shows demo models that look pretty iPhoney
  

And a little commentary:

I was a little surprised by JavaFX. I read about F3 a couple of months ago and was pretty impressed. Now we've renamed F3 to JavaFX, we're making it work well everywhere that Java runs incuding the browser and mobile phones and we're developing a line of non-developer friendly authoring tools for it. In short, we're positioning it to compete directly against Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight and to some extent JavaScript/Ajax.

I don't know enough about Flex or Silverlight to know how JavaFX stacks up, but it does worry me a bit that JavaFX in the browser relies on Java Applet technology, which may have been greatly improved, but still doesn't have a great reputation. Maybe that's changed: Alex and Linus' favorite game, Runescape, is based on applet technology and it works flawlessly on all of our various computers and operating systems. We didn't notice it was Java until Leo pointed out the  tiny Duke icon in the browser tray.

Update: Apparently, one big problem with Applets will be fixed in Java SE 6 Update 2:

InfoQ.com: "Brewin fleshed out remarks made during the keynote to the effect that Java 6 Update 2 will introduce a new deployment model for the JRE where the initial download is very small and additional JRE components are lazily downloaded only as needed. He said that the concept is very similar to the Java Kernel project proposed for Java 7."

JavaFX is new news, so there are not many blogs or new articles about it. Here are some links I've found useful:

• JavaFX page on Sun.com 
• ZDNet.com: JavaFX headlines JavaOne
• Ed Burnette: JavaFX takes center stage at JavaOne
• http://blogs.sun.com/main/tags/javafx - posts tagged with 'javafx' at blogs.sun.com
• http://technorati.com/tag/javafx - posts tagged 'javafx' via Technorati.com
• Chris Oliver's weblog: the creator of JavaFX (originally known as F3)
• The F3 Programming Language
• Ajaxian - F3: Sun’s new declarative Java scripting language
• Lambda the Ultimate - F3: New statically typed scripting language for java

The announcement of OpenJDK interim board is a good thing is definitely a good thing. It will be interesting to see how the governance shapes up and how quickly the project can become truly an open source project, i.e. with external contributors on equal footing with Sun developers. Like Geir, I did not understand the Java JCK annoucement and haven't yet been able to find a clarification.

Sun is throwing another JavaOne bloggers bash at Thirsty Bear this year, at 6PM on Wednesday night. I'll be there and I hope to see other Roller users and developers there too.

Tim Bray: What’s more interesting is that we’re rolling out an OpenID provider at (last time I looked) openid.sun.com, but with a twist: You can’t get an OpenID there unless you’re a Sun employee, and if someone offers an OpenID whose URI is there, and it authenticates, you can be really sure that they’re a Sun employee. It doesn’t tell you their name or address or anything else; that’s up to the individual to provide (or not). The authentication relies on our Access Manager product, and it’s pretty strong; employees here have to use those crypto-magic SecureCard token generators for serious authentication, passwords aren’t good enough. 

Trey Drake: How do you demo a directory server? Build cool apps around it. To that end, we've built an Atom/APP server, a lightweight OpenID server, a blogging and "twitter" like app - all powered by OpenDS. Drop by our booth (Glassfish alley at CommunityONE and .org section of the pavilion during JavaONE). Ludo and I will introduce OpenDS and show off the demos in two talks; today at CommunityONE at 5PM and Wednesday at 1:30 in the CommunityCorner.

Very cool. I'm not going to be the only one talking about Atom protocol at JavaOne. I'll have to stop by the CommunityCorner, that sounds too good to miss.

Celebrating with Movie and TV mind teasers

1. What was in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction?
2. What was in the package left in the care of Barton Fink?
3. What state in Springfield in on The Simpsons?

...and more from bro man Dan.

As usual ApacheCon was a blast. I showed-up on Tuesday, made myself at home in the hackathon room and started reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones. I arrived at the members reception a little late and missed the beer, but was not too late to meet Lars Trieloff of Mindquarry, a startup that's working on an interesting open source product suite that combines content management, task management and wiki functionality. Behind the scenes the product combines Subversion, Apache Jackrabbit and other open source products. Apparently everything is tied together via the Java Content Repository (JCR) API and that's why Lars is interested in the possibility of hooking Roller up with a JCR backend.

Talks began Wednesday and I sat in the business track for most of the day. I particularly enjoyed Rebecca Hansen's talk Better than free: Strategic opportunities in open source and Bill Stoddards talk on Best Practices for Incorporating Open Source Code in Commercial Production. I also enjoyed Alexandru Popescu talk on Up to Speed with Java Content Repository API and Jackrabbit. I attended Stefano Machacci's excellent Community Building Practices talk again -- I think it should be required for all Apache contributors.

Thursday night was the Sun party at Lloyd Hotel, which was was quite successful. I had an interesting Roller-related chat with Paolo Castagna of HP, who is investigating new ways to integrate blogs, planets and wikis -- so we had a lot to talk about. I'm hoping he'll find that Roller is a good foundation for his work and encouraged him to collaborate with us via the Roller mailing lists. By the way, like Lars Trieloff, he is also interested in JCR as a back-end for blog/wiki data.

My talk Roller and blogs as a web development platform was scheduled for 10:30 Friday morning. It didn't go so well. Power went out at around 10AM and didn't come back until about 20 minutes into the talk. That left me a bit frazzled and feeling rushed, so I don't think I gave my best performance. If you'd like more information on the talk, you can find the outline here and the slides here (1.6MB PDF).

Sun is throwing a party at ApacheCon EU on Thursday night, right after the lightning talks. It looks like Rebecca has arranged a very nice party-space (see below) at the Lloyd, a self-described "Trendy Design Hotel" just down the water from the Movenpick. So please stop by, say hello and enjoy a beverage or two to start the evening.

Vacation is over and it's back to work today. I rode the tram up to Amsterdam Central Station to see Andi off, checked out of our vacation hotel and made my way up to the Movenpick Hotel for ApacheCon EU.

I'm in the ApacheCon hackathon room now working to clear my in-box, catch-up on blogs and figure out what work things need my (rather limited) attention this week.

Vacation was wonderful, by the way. I didn't do any travel blogging on this trip, but I've taken about 200 photos and uploaded some of the best to my Flickr account. I took a bunch of nice shots of the Queens Day festivities yesterday. and the ad hoc boat parades. I've also been building a Google map of our travels, annotated with photos and comments. I'll share that link later this week once it's more complete.

It's hard to believe it's been three years since the blogs.sun.com (BSC) launch. Sun bloggers are having a birthday party of sorts around the tag bsc3years, so check out all the posts. My favorite is Linda's, which sums up the successes and reasons for the success of BSC. I think she's right on the money with her comments about employee blogging. Let me add this: you don't need a marketing team or a blog consulting firm to write your company's blogs. Trust your employees. Encourage them to blog and, if you can, provide the enabling infrastructure. I think I may have said that before

I still remember how amazed, surprised and pleased I was to learn that Sun was using Roller. I found out on May 5, 2004 via Roller; I noticed referrers from blogs.sun.com and just couldn't believe my eyes. Shortly after that I wrote to Tim Bray, who introduced me to Will Snow and soon I managed to become part of the BSC phenomenon. I'm proud to have played a part in the BSC success, but the success was certainly not due to the Roller software; it's the bloggers who made BSC. So here's to the BSC bloggers: happy birthday!