Blogging Roller

In the rather unlikely case that you read my blog and don't know it yet, Java SE 6 was released today. The Sun bloggers are blogging it up and Danny Coward has posted a very nice top ten new features list with links to related blog posts and articles and such. Maybe someday I'll be able to upgrade.

A new release of the RSS and Atom Utilities (ROME) project ROME 0.9 (beta) is now available on the project's Java.net website. This new release includes fixes to Atom relative URI resolution, easier parsing for RSS feeds that use <content:encoded>, better support for mapping of RSS to and from Atom and numerous small fixes. [Read More]

• snellspace.com: Rollin' on with Roller
  More good news for Roller. We seem to be picking up some momentum
• jMaki framework, Phobos and jRuby on Rails on Java EE...
  Ludovic announces jMaki 1.0 beta and new Phobos plugins for Netbeans
• Phobos module for Netbeans
  Embedded Grizzly enables easy server-side JavaScript debugging in Netbeans
• Jezzly or Gretty? Running Jetty on top of Grizzly
  Grizzly-Jetty integration cound bring Grizzly to JBoss, Jonas, Geronimo, etc.
• Understanding Grizzly part I: Embedding Grizzly HTTP Web Server in 5 lines
  Light weight alternative to Jetty

We celebrated a milestone tonight, Alex's 10th birthday. He's grown into a great kid, smart, healthy, eager to learn (math) and questioning everything. We're very lucky. It's hard to believe 10 years has gone by since we started building this family. Seems like yesterday, a dream and an eternity ago all at once. I didn't have a blog back then of course, but I had a web site and I posted a birth announcement with photos, measurements, foot-prints, doctor's names and this little stroller that I drew for the printed announcements: 

 

Abdera is an open source Atom parser, generator, client and server tool-kit for Java. James Snell announced a new version of Apache Abdera (incubating) the other day and the feature list is impressive, especially for a "0.2.0" release. Here's an excerpt:

The goal of the Apache Abdera project is to build a functionally-complete, high-performance implementation of the IETF Atom Syndication Format (RFC 4287) and Atom Publishing Protocol (in-progress) specifications. [... incubator blah blah blah ...]

• A reworked API that improves usability
• Decoupled extensions from the underlying parser implementation
• An Atom Publishing Protocol client implementation
• Updated support for the current Atom Publishing Protocol draft specification
• Added support for Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs)
• Improved Thread Safety
• Fixed a number of Classloader issues that kept Abdera from working properly in application server environments.
• Improved Javadocs
• Added test cases and sample code
• Added experimental Bidirectional Text support
• Improved implementation of OpenSearch v1.0 and v1.1 extensions
• Implementation of MediaRSS extensions
• Implementation of Feed Paging and Archiving extensions
• GoogleLogin Authentication Support

We might have to steal that IRI support for ROME. Actually, that's something that should be built right into the Java platform. Apparently IRI support was considered for Java SE 6 and something was implemented, but then rolled back.

Roumen: Visual tools for web development are a double-edged sword. They have their advantages and disadvantages. Some users love Visual Web Pack for what it provides but some of them go crazy because by using visual tools they lose a bit of control or they don't fit their development environment. So I'd like to discuss this topic, so that you can decide whether Visual Web Pack is for you or it is not.

A very thoughtful and balanced post from Netbeans evangelist Roumen Strobl that examines some of the reasons you might or might not want to use the new Netbeans Visual Web Pack.

In the past we've had up to ten attendees. A US congressman, an actual female and once even Sam Ruby showed up, but since Cafe Cyclo shutdown and we moved to Helios it's been just Josh and I. That's fine and all, Josh's a great guy, but we'd really dig some company. So come on down and entertain us with stories of your fascinating blog-related legal troubles, sinister government conspiracies you've exposed via podcast, that band you saw last night or maybe just the time you forgot the HTML tag for making text blink. Did I mention they make a great latte at Helios? They have beer too.

When: First and third Tuesdays of every month at 6:30PM

Where: Helios Coffee (Map)

413 Glenwood Avenue
Raleigh, NC 27603
919.838.5177

In case you haven't heard the news or followed my Latest Links: at an analyst conference last week IBM announced a new server-side product suite called Ventura that includes blogging, social bookmarking and social networking. Ventura is Java EE-based, runs on Websphere (with DB2 or Oracle) and the blog server component is based on Apache Roller (incubating) 3.1. That's the very same version of Roller that we're currently running at blogs.sun.com.

So how do I feel about it? I'm thrilled to see IBM contributing to, building on and supporting the Roller project. No matter how you cut it, that's good news for Roller users including those at blogs.sun.com who are already benefiting from IBM's contributions (e.g. tagging support in 3.1). Of course to be honest, I'm also a little disappointed that Sun isn't shipping and supporting a Roller distribution -- that's always been one of my goals. Sun has put heck of a lot of engineering time into Roller, helped to grow the community in the Apache incubator and benefitted greatly via blogs.sun.com -- it sure would be nice to share those benefits with our customers by offering service and support.

• People Over Process: IBM SWG: Lotus "Ventura"
  "the most exciting thing I've seen at the event is IBM's 'Ventura' project"
• Elias Torres: A New Ventura
  "The experience of taking something built by the community and making it a product has been incredibly rewarding"
• snellspace.com: chmod 777 ventura
  "Sprinkled throughout the entire suite is support for Atom and the Atom Publishing Protocol"
• The lost outpost: Ventura is revealed
  "I've been a user of IBM's internal blogging platform - known as BlogCentral, and based off of Roller - for well over a year now."
• Mixing Dojo and Roller
  "category chooser that uses Dojo (a powerful JavaScript library) to create a Fisheye effect"

Hmmm... That link to Cote's People Over Process blog is now a 404. I'll let Cote explain that if he wants to. You can find details similar to those that Cote posted in Luis Suarez's blog post titled IBM Lotus Ventura: IBM's Take of Social Software within the Enterprise. Here's an excerpt: 

Lotus Ventura is supposed to be IBM’s adventure (Pun intended ) into the social computing world for the enterprise. Yes, once again, that IBM 2.0 thing. And as you may have been able to read already over at Cote’s weblog post Ventura would be an application that will integrate a number of different social software tools that, as James mentioned, some of us, inside of IBM, have been using for years now!:

1. IBM’s BluePages (a.k.a. IBM’s employee directory): So that expertise location within the enterprise can be easier than ever having access not only to knowledge workers but also to the information behind those same knowledge workers. That is, their information.
2. Dogear: IBM’s social bookmarking application: and which I have talked about over here a few times already.
3. Activities: Of which you would be able to read some more about on the presentation I shared yesterday over here from Mike Roche (Slides 6, 23, 46 and 49) and of which I will talk about some time later on.
4. Communities: Given my role as a community builder and knowledge manager, this is actually one of the components that I will be really looking forward to and that, as time goes by, I will be able to share some further details on it.
5. Roller: Or, as we all know, weblogging; yes, that is right. Ventura will have a component that would connect knowledge workers with the world of weblogs using the Roller weblogging engine, which is basically what we have been using as well inside IBM with Blog Central. I have been keeping my Intranet weblog over there for nearly three years and it would be an incredible experience to be able to see it integrate nicely into Ventura’s other components. Nifty!
6. Integration with other components: Like search or Lotus Sametime 7.5, amongst others. Actually with the inclusion of that integration with Sametime 7.5 we would be getting the best out of both worlds, synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. And all that available from a single point of entry. Can it get better than this ? Hummm. I don’t think so.

One of the things that new bloggers tend to complain about is theme customization. It's just too hard to customize the look and feel of your blog. And that's true even if you just want to make a couple of minor tweaks like changing a banner image, changing a background color or adding a "widget" to your sidebar. In this post, I briefly review how a couple of popular blog servers enable blog customization.
[Read More]

• JBoss's Fleury on the GPL and IBM's reaction
  Mark Fleury: "Sun calls their bluff and goes GPL, they're not happy"
• Netbeans + Ruby = true
  Syntax high-lighting and code completion for Ruby, in Netbeans
• Blogtronix built white label "Channel 9" for enterprises
  Blogtronix sells blog/wiki applicance, now with Channel 9 like video blogging features
• GNU Classpath, Sun, Java, GPL, Reflections & The Future
  Harmony between OpenJDK and GNU Classpath projects

In case you missed the mention in my Latest Links post yesterday, there's a new release of ROME coming out in the very near future. The last release was v0.8 and was made in February 2006. Since then then ROME team has made numerous small fixes and a couple of design changes, which I'll cover in a later email. I proposed the release, so I get the honor of acting as release manager.

• Sam Ruby: Atom AutoDiscovery
  Comments seem to indicate we may see a shared RSS and Atom spec, which would be good
  
• Atom Autodiscovery spec
  M. Pilgrim and J.Snell, Ed.
• RSS Autodiscovery spec 1.0
  Rogers Cadenhead, James Holderness and Randy Charles Morin
• The Cafes: RELAX Wins
  "Among the XML cognoscenti, the debate is effectively over"
• Time for ROME 0.9?
  New release coming soon with fixes to content/summary handing, relative URI resolving and date parsing

I used Firefox 2.0 for a while on my Powerbook without any major problems, but since I switched over to my MacBook last week, Firefox 2.0 been just as crashy as hell -- locking up multiple times each day. From this looks of this thread on MozillaZine, I'm not alone. I took some advice from a comment on this post at creativebits.org and uninstalled the Google Toolbar extension. So far so good.

Here's a little something else I'm thankful for. My brother Dan has been low-frequency blogging for a while and he's getting better and better. His blog is called Film Babble and it's definitely babble (and I mean that in the absolutely best way possible), but his writing style is interesting and he got a pretty deep knowledge base to draw on when it comes to movies and music. His latest post is about director Robert Altman, who just passed away.

Happy Thanksgiving to those that celebrate this fine American holiday and happy Thursday to those that don't. As always, I'm thankful for my happy and healthy family and happy that we'll be able to get together this weekend. And, as usual, we enjoyed a traditional Thanksgiving dinner at my parent's place over in Chapel Hill. For us, the traditional dinner is turkey, stuffing, gravy, rice, cranberry sauce, stir-fried veggies and dessert of pumpkin pie and chocolate pecan pie (my personal favorite). Tomorrow we'll head down to Andi's folk's beach house near Topsail Island, NC for a couple of days of doing mostly nothing -- the water will be cold but with temps around 70F my crazy kids might just brave the icy waves. Hope you have a good one too.

And Helios is a very nice little coffee/bar, if a little crowded at times. Details are on the wiki.

I'm a bit late in blogging this. Tonight's talk at the TriJUG looks to be a very good one, presented by Sun blogger and JVM guru Steve Goldman who works from Sun's Cary, NC office.

New Compiler Optimizations in the Java HotSpot(tm) virtual machine.
Presented by Steve Goldman

This talk covers recent work in the client and server compilers for the Java HotSpot(tm) virtual machine to achieve higher performance of Java(tm) programming language applications. Synchronization-related optimizations, escape analysis, multi-tier compilation, and other topics will be covered. This talk is targeted at users of the Java(tm) programming language interested in how their programs are dynamically compiled to high-performance machine code and what performance improvements to expect in various areas in the Java(tm) SE 6 release.

I've been itching to try Ubuntu so I decided to install it on my old Dell box, which as running Debian. I downloaded Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft, burned it to CD, backed up my data and booted off the new CD.

While I expected my Mac upgrade to go smoothly, I was expecting this upgrade to require a long morning of opening the computer, growling and cursing under my breath. That didn't happen. The Linux installers I've used in the past didn't give me the option to resize partitions and I've been using one big partition, so I was pleasantly surprised that the installer has the built-in ability to resize my partition without losing data. I was also happy to see that my video card was configured properly, which is a first for me -- previously, I've always had to edit X config files to get things right. So far, it's thumbs up to Ubuntu.

I was tempted to switch away from Apple, but in the end I decided to take the easy route and buy another Mac laptop. When Apple updated the MacBook Pros a couple of weeks ago, I ordered one.

And I'm not kidding about the easy route. Transitioning from my old Powerbook to my new MacBook was amazingly easy, especially when you consider the fact that I moved from a PowerPC processor to an Intel. It was this easy: start up new Mac and when prompted hook old Mac to new Mac via Firewire cable, wait 2 hours and boom... all applications, settings, mail... everything... is perfectly duplicated and ready to on my new laptop. And yes, it's fast. As long as my battery doesn't explode and I don't get hit by random shutdown syndrome -- fingers crossed, knock on wood and all that -- I think I'll be a happy with my new Mac for very long time.