Dave Johnson on open web technologies, social software and software development
We've decided to change the time and place of our Raleigh Bloggers meet-up. Too many folks complained about Tuesday night, so we've moved to the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of each month. Now we'll find out if "Tuesday's not good for me" was just an excuse to avoid hanging with the tech/geek patrol. And we've moved from crowded and loud Helios Coffee to the quiet Raleigh Times Bar (yeah, right). I mean, if nobody's gonna show up we might as well drink, no?
When: Second and Fourth Wednesdays of every month at 6:30PM
Where: The Raleigh Times Bar (Map)
14 E Hargett St
Raleigh, NC 27601
919.833.0999
Dave Johnson in Blogging
04:59PM Feb 27, 2007
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Dave Johnson in Links 07:08PM Feb 26, 2007 Comments [1]
In case you're wondering what's going on lately with Roller, ROME and other projects I've been working on, here's a status update from my point-of-view.
Apache Roller graduation. The Roller team voted for graduation, the Apache Incubator PMC voted for incubation and the next step is to take the resolution to the Apache board meeting, which is coming up in the next week or so.
Roller 3.1 release. We've been moving slowly on this one. RC1 was released Nov. 20 and today RC4 just about ready to go. It's possible that 3.1 will be our first "official" Apache Roller release -- depending on what happens on the board meeting. Wonder what's coming in Roller 3.1? The What's New in Roller 3.1 page is now available on our new wiki at apache.org.
Roller 4.0 development. We started the Roller 4.0 branch a couple of weeks ago and I've been spending most of my time updating and trying to perfect Craig and Mitesh's new JPA back-end. Elias outlined a bunch of IBM contributions including an iBatis based back-end. We hope to get some of those in the 4.0 and do some JPA vs. iBatis testing, but we haven't seen any proposals or code yet.
Roller-Planet. Actually, Allen's taken over work on Roller-Planet and he's implementing many of the things I outlined in the Roller-Planet mind-map. He promoted Roller-Planet from the sandbox, built a nice Struts2 UI, added a Roller-style feed/page rendering system and Roller-style caching. Good stuff. We have not discussed when to start making standalone releases of Roller-Planet.
ROME Propono. I've been working on a new ROME subproject called Propono that will include a blog client library, an Atom protocol client library and an Atom protocol server kit. I've been quiet on the ROME dev list, but I've been working on the client bits an they're basically done. I'm waiting for final approval to commit them to ROME CVS.
Blogapps examples and server. I'm still working on a 1.0.5 release, which will include updated Atom protocol support and some bug fixes. I just haven't had the time to get a release out, but I have had some time to work on Blogapps 2.0 where I've ditched the chapter-based directory names and switched to org.blogapps packaging. Once ROME Propono is available, I'll include it in Blogapps 2.0 and drop my old Blog Client library.
Dave Johnson in Roller
06:39PM Feb 22, 2007
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apache
blogapps
roller
rome
I've been slacking off with the blogging this week, but there's some other Johnson blogging going on. Dad's enjoying his Photophys blog and getting good feedback on the draft chapters of his book. He's posted the first seven chapters now. By the way, my multi-domain hack seems to be working pretty well -- photophys.com is hosted on the same Roller instance as this site rollerweblogger.org.
And brother Dan is keeping the blogging going at Film Babble blog. Check out his Oscar predictions. He's also writing at Helium.com and up to 119 posts there, each a mini movie or music review.
Dave Johnson in Blogging
06:35PM Feb 22, 2007
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blogging
I've been updating my javax.ws.rest post with links to blogs about JSR 311: Java (TM) API for RESTful Web Services. I went from a couple to nine links today and I'll probably keep on linking, but I'm about to go quiet for couple of days. It's wiki mountain weekend time again.
Dave Johnson in Java
05:57AM Feb 15, 2007
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That's big news. A standard Java API is coming for building REST based web services. If you're an expert in REST, you can participate in it's development by signing up for the expert group. Apache, BEA, Google and Jerome Louvel (the RESTlet guy) are on-board. Here's the intro from the JSR:
JSR 311: Java (TM) API for RESTful Web Services: This API will enable developers to rapidly build Web applications in Java that are characteristic of the best designed parts of the Web. This JSR will develop an API for providing REST(Representational State Transfer - See reference to Roy Fielding's dissertation in section 3.1) support in the Java Platform. Lightweight, RESTful approaches are emerging as a popular alternative to SOAP-based technologies for deployment of services on the internet. Currently, building RESTful Web services using the Java Platform is significantly more complex than building SOAP-based services and requires using low-level APIs like Servlets or the dynamic JAX-WS APIs. Correct implementation requires a high level of HTTP knowledge on the developer's part.This JSR will aim to provide a high level easy-to use API for developers to write RESTful web services independent of the underlying technology and will allow these services to run on top of the Java EE or the Java SE platforms. The expert group will investigate whether a subset of the API can be made used with Java ME. The goal of this JSR is to provide an easy to use, declarative style of programming using annotations for developers to write REST ful Web Services and also enable low level access in cases where needed by the application.
RESTful Web Services is a relatively new area in the industry and there are still a lot of unknowns in this space. For example, a key aspect of RESTful Web Services is for the service to be stateless. However, this often requires the developer to produce boiler-plate state restoration code that could be avoided with state-aware API help. We expect the expert group to be an active and engaged group of people participating to prioritize and help drive issues to achieve the end goal of a developer friendly API.
Here are a couple more links about the new JSR:
Dave Johnson in Java
05:24AM Feb 14, 2007
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java
rest
webservices
James Governor: Covalent gets its mojo back and refocuses on its core competence - supporting open source code, and doubles down on Apache projects, going back to its roots. The latest example of Covalent seeing an opportunity and nailing it is the companyâs announcement of support for the Roller blog platform. Thatâs now two companies, IBM and Covalent, making direct revenues from a platform originally built by a Sun employee, but for which Sun has no business model. Here is a hint Sun - perhaps its not software you need to sell but service and support. That is what Covalent is nailing.
I appreciate the support from James and the Redmonk crew. They always seem to be rootin' for Roller.
Of course I'd like to see better support for Roller all around, but at this point I can't say much beyond this: I'm focused on building a great blog platform and support is a very important part of any platform.
A couple of small corrections for James. I was not a Sun employee when I originally developed Roller. Second, IBM hasn't shipped Connections, so they're not any making "direct revenues" yet. Third, I don't know if Covalent has "nailed" anything -- I haven't heard from anybody who has tried the service and I'm still trying to figure out exactly what they offer.
Dave Johnson in Roller
04:29AM Feb 14, 2007
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blogging
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ibm
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sun
I mentioned before that I convinced my Dad to start a blog. Well, now after a week or so of back-and-forth with Kattare.com getting the domain handling setup properly and modifying Roller to support multiple domains, his blog is live running on the same Roller instance that I use for this blog (but with the domain photophys.com).
Dad's blog is titled Photography: Appreciation through Understanding. He's publishing draft chapters from his new book there, hoping to get feedback and attract some new readers.
Hmm... RSS and Atom feeds don't seem to be working correctly. Apparently, I've still got some multi-domain work to do...
Dave Johnson in Blogging
02:49PM Feb 13, 2007
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blogging
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Dave Johnson in Blogging
06:17PM Feb 12, 2007
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app
atom
blogging
java
portlet
roller
And before I leave the topic of movies I'll mention this; recently I've been enjoying Neil Young's Heart of Gold, an absolutely wonderful concert film of and documentary about the debut of Neil's Prairie Wind album last year. See also, my brother Dan's brief review of the film over at Helium.com.
Dave Johnson in General
06:15PM Feb 12, 2007
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family
movies
rock
Dave Johnson in General
12:41PM Feb 09, 2007
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movies
politics
religion
science
Dave Johnson in Roller
12:32PM Feb 08, 2007
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apache
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Dave Johnson in Roller
11:28AM Feb 08, 2007
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I can't get to pipes.yahoo.com (due to heavy web traffic I assume) so I haven't had a chance to check it out myself, but Pipes sounds pretty amazing. According to Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny:
Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.
Jeremy also posted a list of the blogs that are covering Pipes and every one that I read is a rave review. Tim O'Reilly calls it a "milestone in the history of the internet." Apparently, I'm not the only one who wants to put feed creation, aggregation and filtering tools in the hands of ordinary folks and not just developers Everybody seems to think this is a great idea and Yahoo appears to have executed it very well, so it will be interesting to see how well it works and how it is put to use.
Niall Kennedy and Anil Dash both posted a screen-shots of the Pipes UI, here's one from Niall's blog:
Cool stuff.
A possibly related side-note: ROME co-founder Alejandro Abdelnur now works for Yahoo.
Dave Johnson in General 05:56AM Feb 08, 2007 Comments [2]
And I mean that in the nicest way possible, i.e. the Codehaus way.
Bob McWhirter: Ultimately all open-source survives and grows based upon goodwill. Tending to the community is required, else you risk alienating your own users. I aim to use my experiences from a variety of open-source projects and communities to make sure the JBoss community is one of which Iâm proud to be a member.
Congrats Bob. Sounds like a great new job. This mean you'll be coming to Raleigh more often?
Dave Johnson in Open Source
04:51AM Feb 08, 2007
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jboss
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redhat
Dave Johnson in Roller
07:03PM Feb 06, 2007
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blogging
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Aaron Cohen is looking for feedback on a simple and clean new Roller theme known as Eco.
Update: Linda says Eco is not really a "Roller theme" as it relies on some .Sun Engineering ad-server components to serve up the rotating eco-fact. She's got some instructions for BSC users interested in the theme on her blog.
Dave Johnson in Roller
07:02PM Feb 06, 2007
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Since I upgraded this site to Roller 3.2-dev, with pluggable comment validators and Akismet support, not a single spam has gotten through the system. Over the weekend I saw 20-30 email messages like this:
This comment failed validation for these reasons:
* Akismet service (akismet.com) says comment is spam
* Trackback from site/page that does not link to your weblog entry
Brisa wrote: [Trackback] nothing here
That's music to my ears. Die spammers die!
Dave Johnson in Roller
08:10AM Feb 05, 2007
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roller
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Dave Johnson in Roller
08:02AM Feb 05, 2007
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apache
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roller
Usually I find a couple of contradictory stories every time I read the feeds. Here's a pair from today's session. First via John Gruber.
Bll Gates in Newsweek: Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.
And next, via John Robb, I found:
Spencer Kelly, BBC: We set up a poor Windows XP machine with no firewall or anti-virus software. Connecting it to the internet would be like throwing it into a lion pen with raw meat strapped to its hard drive. How long would it be before we were hit by something nasty on the net? Hours, minutes? As it turned out - eight seconds!
Of course Bill may have been talking about Vista, even though he did not qualify. Maybe Vista is better, but I wouldn't count on it. Initial reports don't sound so good (Vista users: keep your speakers and microphones turned off).
Dave Johnson in Microsoft
06:34PM Feb 03, 2007
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security
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