Blogging Roller

• OpenSolaris distributions show promise | eWeek
  "these distributions point to intriguing new directions for Solaris"
• New file system boosts the already excellent Solaris 10 | eWeek
  "One of the most impressive things about ZFS is how easy it is to use"
• Sun narrows loss significantly | InfoWorld
  "Stronger sales of its Solaris 10 operating system helped..."
  
  
• blojsom/Google Maps template mashup
  "You're looking at blog entries 'rendered' on a map of the earth"
  
  
• Open-Source Portal Initiative at Sun, Part 1: Overview
  Overview of plans to transition Sun's portal server to an open source project at Java.Net
• Open-Source Portal Initiative at Sun, Part 2: Portlet Repository
  Overview of Open Source Portlet Repo, which includes RSS feed viewing and blog editing portlets
  
  
• The dictator's free cookie day?
  Opening Move podcast with Simon Phipps, David Van Couvering and yours truly
  
  
• Wiley::Professional Apache Geronimo
  by Bruce "this one time, at band camp" Snyder, Jeff Gerender and Sing Li
• RSS and Atom in Action: Newsfeed Formats
  Excerpts from Chapter 4 of RSS and Atom in Action, at WebReference.com

Don Brown has written an interesting history of Struts 2. In case you don't already know, Struts 2 is the result of the merger of two competing open source communities: Apache Struts and OpenSymphony WebWork.

I meant to blog it last week, but I forgot. When I arrived at Cafe Cyclo last week for the bloggers meet-up I found Josh and Sam standing under the awning taking shelter from the rain. The outside tables were gone and peering through the dark windows, I saw that everything was gone. Wow. Sad to lose such a unique place (unique for Raleigh, that is). I'm not sure what happened. Maybe the Raleighing folks have a clue.

So now we need a new meeting place. Josh and I think Helios is probably the best choice. Any other ideas, Raleigh bloggers? Ideally we'd like a relatively quiet place with good coffee, beer, food and free WIFI.

Lots of reading material on rules or lack of rules for blogging today.

First, some posts about Tim Bray's use of the F-word in a blog about Sun's new Project Blackbox. My take on the F-word? It's good and I use it, but I haven't had the guts or the reason to use it on my blog (although I have posted quotes that include the word). I'm with Scoble on this one: when somebody like Tim says something is F-ing cool, then I sit up and take notice.

• Can a corporate blogger use the "F-word?"
  Scoble: "I paid attention to that new product launch BECAUSE of Tim's language"
• Tim's Bomb
  Douglas: "If you believe [free speech laws] carry over to your corporate blog, then we disagree."
• The F-bomb: never cool
  Robertson: "when you use coarse language, there's no upside. That's right - none."
• Oh My Goodness Gracious
  Bray: "I'm sincerely sorry. But that's really what I'm like."

Sun VP Dave Douglas' point about corporate vs. personal blogs seems valid, but as Douglas points out, it's not clear whether Tim's blog personal or corporate. Tim's posts are included on the front page of blogs.sun.com through the magic of aggregation (actually, only the first sentence or two). Do we need to add a bad language filter to the aggregator? Should Tim and other externally hosted Sun bloggers provide a safe-for-Sun feed for our aggregator that includes only polished professional posts?

And second, some links from Raleigh News and Observer's Sunday feature on blogging, which included articles by Triangle blogging mavens Ruby Sinreich and Anton Zuiker:

• Raleigh News and Observer: Rules to blog by
  Sunday feature on blogging, rules, ethics and journalism
• When blogging, face the conversation
  by local blogger Anton Zuiker, published in the Raleigh News and Observer
• Moving past the "blogs versus journalism" debate
  by local blogger Ruby Sinreich, published in the Raleigh News and Observer

Nick Lothian wrote to tell me about the Education.au blog, an aggregated site that uses the PlanetTool example from Chapter 11 of RSS and Atom in Action.

We're just about ready to create a first release candidate for Roller 3.1 so I've installed it on this site. The major new user-facing features are tagging (thanks to Elias) and a new WYSIWYG editor (thanks to Xinha).

I'm still playing with tags and how to add them to my blog. Roller 3.1 won't copy your categories to tags, so I had to use some SQL to do that -- I don't want to start from scratch. For now, I put my tag cloud at the top of the page but it will probably end up on the sidebar.

My Java.net article on the Blogapps Project just went live today.

The Blogapps project provides what is essentially a complete RSS and Atom development kit, which includes feed parsers, generators, blog client libraries, an Atom protocol implementation, a set of ten useful blogapps, and an easy-to-install blog and wiki server. This article explains the project's purpose and how to install and use the project's products, the Blogapps Examples and Blogapps Server, to jump-start your RSS and Atom development.

Today, I've got some Blackbox links,

• New York Times: Its a Shipping Container. No, its a Data Center in a Box
  New York Time article about Sun's new Project Blackbox
• Innovation Blog: Blackbox podcast episode
  Interview on Project Blackbox with Sun VPs Hal Stern and David Douglas
• CNET News.com: Sun to unveil data center in a box
  "latest attempt by Sun to sweep away complexity in the computing industry"
• Blackbox web page
  Project Blackbox's Sun.com home page

some Roller links

• Blogging Roller: Talkin' Roller at ApacheCon US 2006
  Outline and slides from my ApacheCon talk on Roller project and new features in 3.0
• SPARQLing Roller
  "Would you like to have a standard and extensible query language for querying any blog server?"

and RSS and Atom in Action links.

• java.net: The Blogapps Project
  Guide to the Blogapps project, blog/wiki server and example RSS/Atom apps
• Slashdot | RSS and Atom in Action
  (positive) review of my book hits Slashdot.

Join us tomorrow night 6:30PM at Cafe Cyclo in Cameron Village.
 
For details, check the Raleigh bloggers wiki.

I'm finally back home after a week in Austin, TX attending ApacheCon during the weekdays and exploring the city with Andi over the weekend. I always find ApacheCon an enjoyable and very productive conference. Here are some highlights from my point of view.

Getting to know the Struts, MyFaces and Shale teams. I got to spend some time with the Struts, Shale and MyFaces folks at the hackathon and at the various parties. It's really cool how well the teams get along and even contribute to each other's projects, despite the fact that they're working on competing Java web application frameworks.

Don Brown's talk. Don gave a very professional and persuasive talk on Struts 2.0. His coverage of themes and plugins and the new tags convinced me that I've got to give Struts 2.0 a closer look before I go any farther with JSF.

Stefano Mazzocchi's talk on "patterns in community building for open development projects" drawn from his 9 years of involvement at the ASF was wonderful and full of lots of useful tips and memorable analogies. I'd read about the "good ideas and bad code" pattern before (here and here) and it was interesting to hear Stefano explain it himself.

Clifford Stoll put on quite a show in the opening keynote. He frantically raced and hopped around the room firing lasers through beam splitters and Crayola Markers at monkeys and actually measured the speed of light and the speed of sound right there in the room with amazing accuacy -- lots of thought provoking fun. He also stole Craig McClannahan's coffee, drank it up and claimed it was chocolate milk. Unfortunately, I missed the Benetech keynote.

The Sun UnBOF/open source smack down between Tom Marble and Gier Magnusson got off to a shaky start, but once other folks joined in it started to work, at least for me. It wasn't really a smackdown and there wasn't really a concrete outcome, but it was definitely an interesting discussion of open source community and licensing issues.

Getting to know my Sun co-workers. I work remotely, so I really enjoy spending time with Sun folks and getting to know my co-workers despite the fact  that they're from different areas of Sun. This time around, I spent time with the open source and Java DB teams.

Andi and I had some good luck on Friday the 13th. Old 97's just happened to be playing a couple of blocks away from the ApacheCon hotel.

Old 97's at Stubbs BBQ in Austin, TX

Simon P. Chappell writes "We've all seen them, those icons that decorate blogs and websites; sometimes they're just little orange squares with white stripes, while others say RSS or Atom. Many of us have heard of feeds and podcasts and aggregators. What are these things and where did they come from? Well, Dave Johnson, the author of the open source Roller blogging software, is glad you asked and by way of an answer, he's written RSS and Atom in Action." Read the rest of Simon's review.

Woohoo! Simon likes the book and gives it an 8/10 rating.

Via the Open Office Tips'n'Tricks blog:

Finally, the new blogging extension for StarOffice and OpenOffice.org is available. Browse to the Sun Store at http://globalspecials.sun.com/ and click the link or go direct to this page

Now formatting your Blog is as easy as in Writer. Include pictures. Use the spellchecker.

You can retrieve your existing blog entries, edit them in Writer and then upload with a single click.

I haven't tried it yet, so I can't say whether or not it's worth the $9.95 download price. I must admit, I'm a surprised that it's payware (not that there's any wrong with that). Is the pay-for-plugins model something new for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice?

The announcement is not up on the Derby site yet, but I got the word from Rebecca Hansen (of the Java DB team) that Derby 10.2 (actually, it's 10.2.1.6) was released last week. I downloaded it and it seems to work fine with Roller. BTW, I've using Derby instead of MySQL for development work on my Mac now because it is so easy to deal with. 

I got together with Sun co-worker Tom Marble (and here) for dinner last night. We went to a nice Cuban restaurant called Cuba Libre only a short walk from the hotel. Shortly after we arrived, we just happened to run into Apache Harmony folks Geir Magnusson and Tim Ellison (from IBM Hursley). A little later Sara Dornsife showed up. We had a nice dinner and enjoyed the mojitos. If you know Tom and Gier, then you can probably guess the #1 topic of conversation. We talked about the pros and cons of various open source licenses for Java, the Linux ecosystem vs. the Java ecosystem, secret sauce and fair playing fields. All-and-all a very interesting conversation, but good grief, it's a complex issue -- I'm glad I'm not the one making that decision. 

I got to meet Will Glass-Husain today who, I was happy to learn, works on the Apache Velocity project. In case you don't know, Velocity is the template engine that Roller uses to generate blogs and feeds -- so it's near and dear to my heart, dispite it's many little deficiencies. I was a worried that Velocity was stagnating but Will told me the Velocity 1.5 is coming out soon with a load of good bug fixes and a promise of 100% backwards compatibility. We'll have to see about that. Velocity 1.5beta1 has been out for almost a month now.

I didn't bring my normal assortment of carry-on sauces, lotions, juices and pastes today so air travel was no problem at all. I made it to Austin and ApacheCon around two, checked in and made myself comfortable in the hackathon. Within minutes I was talking tech; bitching about my recent JSF experience with one of the MyFaces developers and discussing the upcoming Velocity release with members of the Velocity team. And hey look, there's the afternoon beer delivery. This is gonna be fun.

• URI Templates
  Interesting new piece in the REST-based web services puzzle
• Revise the RSS 2.0 Specification
  Cadenhead: "I propose that the RSS Advisory Board adopt the following document as RSS 2.0.9"
  
• One Small Step for the Blogosphere...
  Schwartz: "Usage of this or [any other] company blog or web site should be considered sufficient in satisfying the objectives of [Reg FD]"
• Sun PR: Planting the Flag in Second Life
  "We're the first Fortune 500 company to hold a press conference in [Second Life]"
• GlassFish at ApacheCon US 2006
  Eduardo: "Ken and Jim are travelling to ApacheCon next week"
  
• Desktop Java [doing well]. Thanks for asking.
  "Calling Swing a toy is just not serious"

ApacheCon kinda snuck up on me and now its suddenly time to pack. I'll be in Austin from Monday thorugh Sunday, attending the hackathon and the conference. This is my fourth ApacheCon so I know I'm gonna have fun, but I also hope to get some Roller 3.1 work on during the hackathon and try to knock off some of the minor issues that are still keeping the project from graduating from the Apache Incubator.

I'm speaking on Thursday at 3PM on the subject of Roller. The talk is similar to previous talks I've given on the topic, but it's been improved and updated to cover all of the cool stuff in Roller 3.0. Here's the abstract and an outline of the talk with a couple of bonus links.

Session title: TH18 - Apache Roller: an open source Java blog server
When/where: 3PM in Salon E

Roller is the open source Java blog server that drives the popular Sun's employee blogs at blogs.sun.com, IBM developerWorks blogs, JRoller.com and numerous other blog sites. Currently making its way through the Apache incubation process, Roller is built on a host of Apache technologies including Struts, Velocity, Lucene, Jakarta Commons, XMLRPC and more. This overview, a primer for Roller users and contributors, covers the Roller feature set, the all-new Roller 3.0 page models/macros, Roller 3.0 architecture, lessons learned, project status and future plans.

• Roller history
• The O'Reilly article (link)
  
• FreeRoller and JRoller and...
  
• Roller features
• Standard blog stuff
• Blogs per user, users per blog
• Blog client support
• What's new in 3.0
• New URL structure
• Front page is a blog
• New models and macros (see roller30-template-guide.pdf)
• Why choose Roller
• Roller limitations
  
• Roller community
• Developers, admins and bloggers
• Community challenges
• Release cycle
• How to add a feature
• How to make a release
• Why is Roller still incubating?
  
• Roller internals: backend
• Architectural overview
• POJOs: users, blogs and entries
• POJOs and XDoclet markup
  
• The manager interfaces
• Today Hibernate, someday JDO, JPA ...?
  
• Roller internals: frontend
• UI archtecture
• Struts actions and XDoclet markup
• Page and feed rendering
• Changes in Roller 3.0
• New template models and macros
  
• The pager interface
• $site and $planet models
• The new macros
• Customizing Roller
• Roller futures
• Tagging (Roller 3.1, coming soon)
• Modular Roller (and Modular Planet)
  
• Protected weblogs
  

I'll post the slides once I made the final changes.

Update: here they are ApacheConUS2006-TH18-RollerBlogServer.pdf

It's that time again...
 
For details, check the Raleigh bloggers wiki.

Looks to be a beautiful evening to sit outside and talk blogs, podcasts and other geekly goodness.