Blogging Roller

IBM press release: Rod Smith, IBM's vice president of emerging Internet technologies, declared that the technologies underpinning blogs, wikis and innovative sites like Google Maps and Wikipedia on the Web will transform the way productivity applications are developed...

...IBM's Enterprise Mashup blends external information and web services (e.g., news feeds, weather reports, maps, traffic conditions and more) with enterprise content and services, instantly "mashing" them together to create a fast, flexible and affordable application for specific business needs. Mashup, derived from the hip-hop practice of mixing song samples, are a website or applications that combine content from more than one source into an integrated user application using open technologies like Ajax, PHP and syndicated feeds (RSS or ATOM).

Nice to see IBM paying homage to blogs, wikis and feeds: the web 2.0 building blocks, but the press release is a bit nebulous. It's hard to tell if Smith is discussing an actual product, a "mashup server" as James Govenor put it, consulting services or just making reference to various IBM Web 2.0™ initiatives. If it is a server, I wonder if it's the effort that spawned the Abdera project.

Alex and I made the jump from Steve Jackson mini-games to our first full-blown wargame tonight with my old copy of Panzer Blitz.

We've been putting the final touches on RSS and Atom in Action this week and now I've actually got some dates for you: e-book release July 3 and print-book release on July 21. Hard to believe, but this time we're done for real.

This weekend, I've got to package up the examples. So you can expect the final Blogapps 1.0 release some time next week. Atom protocol fans will be happy to hear that the Atom Blogapps server and client implementations have been updated to support Atom protocol draft 8 + the new PaceMediaEntries5 proposal, which appears to have strong consensus.

Update: Blogapps server v1.0-rc1 (37mb tar.gz) and Blogapps examples v1.0-rc1 (10mb tar.gz) are available for testing.

Tropical Storm Alberto dumped a lot of rain on us yesterday. Normally I don't worry about flooding, since I'm on a hill, but we had 4-5 inches of water flowing through the backyard for a couple of hours. I waded out and took a couple of photos for Andi since she's at the beach. Also, WRAL's has a nice slideshow of Alberto-hits-the-Triangle photos.

And speaking product-oriented bloggers, the Open Solaris community is having a blog birthday party tomorrow to celebrate the first anniversary of the community launch. Hard to believe it's been a year. Check out the community metrics page to see how the community is doing.

Business blogging superstar Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft and that means it's time to warn folks again about those out-of-control bloggers, lament the loss of our last example of a productive business blogger and worry about the end of honest corporate blogging. Balderdash I say!

Are stars like Scoble of Microsoft or Schwartz of Sun the most important part of the corporate blogging value proposition? Stars speak to a broad audience and that's important, but the value of corporate blogging is that the "the people who are really doing the work tell the story to the world, directly" as Tim Bray wrote in his July 2005 piece on The New Public Relations. The thousands of employee bloggers and product-oriented bloggers that help build community around a company's products, services and initiatives are where the big value is -- especially for development platform companies like Microsoft and Sun.

Some good examples of product-oriented bloggers at Sun are The Aquarium, a group blog devoted to Java EE, Roumen Strobl, a Netbeans evangelist, and Tor Norbye of Java Creator and Java Posse podcast fame.

I'll be speaking about Atom format and protocol at the Tri-XML 2006 conference in Raleigh on Saturday July 29, 2006. I won't even have to miss  a day of work. Here are the presentation summaries -- hope I won't get in trouble for using he phrase Web 2.0 in my  summary.

User reviews and ratings are now live in the Sun online store. You can review and rate products like the Sun Fire T2000. Cool stuff, very Web 2.0 and all that, but I've got an RFE [Read More]

When: First and third Tuesdays of every month at 6:30PM
Where: Cafe Cyclo in Cameron Village (Map)

   Cafe Cyclo
   2020 Cameron St
   Raleigh, NC 27605
   (919) 829-3773

Check the new Raleigh Bloggers Wiki for more details.

I'm in the market for a new laptop and I've been thinking about doing the very same thing that Mark Pilgrim just did, switching from a Mac to a Linux laptop. I wasn't thinking about Freedom 0 so much as I was thinking about my lap and my wallet. I don't want to burn a hole in either one. I've read too many blog entries about Mac Books running too hot, too loud or not running at all. And all the while, I've been seeing rave reviews of Ubuntu everywhere I look.

I don't want to give up on Macs altogether. I like the multimedia stuff like iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto and GarageBand, but I don't necessarily need those on my laptop. I can buy a Mac Mini for that stuff. I use my laptop for work and everything I need for development would run just fine on Ubuntu or maybe even Solaris/x86 (see Sun's HCL and the one at Bolthole.com). What I need is speed, Java, Netbeans and sometimes Open Office (which I know will run better on Linux). Clearly I need to do some research. Are the Mac Books really too hot and flakey? Will be savings be significant? Will wifi and sleep-mode work as flawlessly on Linux as with Mac OS, what about Solaris? Will I be able to live without NetNewsWire?

ApacheCon.com blog: It’s only a few days left until June 6th, the deadline for the Early Bird Discount! Sign up today and save 220 EUR to be part of the ultimate Apache experience in Europe.

ApacheCon Europe 2006 will be held at the Burlington Hotel in Dublin, Ireland, June 26-30, 2006. The conference offers more than 70 top-quality sessions and 20 tutorials covering the whole spectrum of Apache projects and technologies.

We look forward to seeing you in Dublin.

I just signed up for BarCampRDU in Raleigh, July 22, 2006 on the NC State campus (at Red Hat HQ). That's the week before Tri-XML 2006, also at NC State. I'm signing-up for that one too.

• Ubuntu's Dapper Drake
  "easiest install of any operating system I've ever installed"
• Red Hat Summit, pt 1
  Joe Barr on the second annual Red Hat Summit in Nashville, Tennessee.
• Red Hat Summit, pt 2
  Joe Barr: Day 2 keynotes at the Red Hat Summit
• Red Hat Summit, pt 3
  Red Hat Summit sessions educate, stimulate
• Working with the Google Web Toolkit
  "GWT takes Java code [and] converts it into browser-runnable Ajax code"
• W.W.B.D.
  T-shirt for Micro$ofties: "What Would Bill Do"
• Jon Udell: Earth to Google PR
  "We don't have a product called Gdata that I'm aware of....."
• Verisign Personal Identity Provider
  "I was able to successfully log in to LiveJournal, LifeWiki.net, Zooomr and OpenID using my OpenID credentials"
• Firefox plugins on Solaris/X86
  Flash, Java Acrobat, Real Player, Plugger, MPlayer
• Gnoos: The Other Blog Search Engine That Launched Yesterday
  "Each result (a blog post) can be commented on at Gnoos, and rated."
• Finally! Bloglines Blog Search
  "Bloglines has been the subject of a considerable number of jokes over the last year"

Jonathan Schwartz: you'll see something very interesting next week start to appear on Sun's web pages and throughout our on-line store. You'll start to see product reviews written by users. You'll see user defined ratings, right on our products. Just like book or product reviews at Amazon. We're starting with just a few products, but it'll ultimately extend all the way up to our highest end enterprise offerings.

In other words, the on-line store is getting the Web 2.0™ upgrade.

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It's been a while since my last status, CC:World post, so here's an update on the things I'm working on these days.

RSS and Atom in Action. Because I added those two new chapters on Windows RSS and ROME, Manning had to renumber about 3/4 of the book. That took a bit longer than expected, but now the work is done and I've got the whole book in one big PDF file. I'll do one final review this weekend and, if we can quickly wrap up the loose ends and the index, we'll be off to the printers before the end of June.

Blogapps is the Java.Net project that I started to manage and support the Java and C# example code for RSS and Atom in Action. Now that the book is essentially done, it's time for the Blogapps 1.0 release. I'll create a 1.0 branch so that I can do bug fix releases like 1.0.1, 1.0.2, etc. -- but the code in that 1.0 branch will always match the code in the book.

Once Atom protocol is complete, I'll make the changes necessary to support it in a separate branch of the Blogapps project, because those changes may diverge significantly from the code in the book. Perhaps I'll call that branch Blogapps 1.5 or even 2.0 depending on how different the new code is. After that, I hope to continune to improve the apps but making use of newer releases of ROME and perhaps Abdera.

Roller@Apache. Roller has been in the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubator for almost a year now. We've been in limbo because Roller depends on a 3rd party library (Hibernate) that is licensed under the LGPL and ASF doesn't like LGPL, but it's still not clear if that LGPL dependency will prevent Roller fom graduating from the incubator. Recently, our ASF mentors told us that we can temporarily depend on LGPL components, but we cannot ship them. So we removed Hibernate from the release, added instructions to the installation guide explaining how download Hibernate separately and, thanks to Craig Russell, we've got the beginnings of a plan to eventually replace Hibernate with either JDO or EJB3/JPA.

Apache Roller 2.3 (incubating). We've been trying to get the 2.3 release out for quite a while, ever since 2.2 in fact. Now that we've removed Hibernate from our release, we've been cleared to release 2.3 via Apache infrastructure (i.e. make the release files avialable on an apache.org site). That should happen very soon.

Apache Roller 3.0 (incubating). The 3.0 release isn't due for deployment or release until July, but this week I've been working like crazy to get the new Atlas frontpage stuff into a usable state so we can get some early feedback. Tomorrow is my self-imposed deadline and I'm just about ready to put together a test build.

ApacheCon EU 2006. I'm giving a talk titled Roller: an open source blog server, which is essentiually a primer for new Roller users and developers. It's the same talk I gave at ApacheCon US 2005, but I'm going to update it to cover the major changes in Roller since then (and fast, the slides were due last week).

Pat Chanezon responds to James Snell's proposal for collaboration between ROME, which is (in my mind) the premier feeds API for Java, and Abdera, a newly proposed Apache project that aims to implement the Atom format and protocol.

Seema explains how to get the latest Roller code running on Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 Preview 1. And Seema's right, Roller 2.3 (incubating) should be out real soon now. RC4 is looking good and I think it might be the gold.

• Jonathan Schwartz: Java Jedi?
  "I would really love to see Jonathan and the people trying to change Sun succeed"
• Sun stuns server market in Q1 with sales spike
  "Sun regained its position as the big-iron leader"
• MetaWeblog API for MSN Spaces
  Via Dave Winer: MSN Spaces now supports MetaWeblog API
• Sun Portal is now Open Source
  "Liferay, eXo, JBoss time to watch Sun driving open source Portals market"

SAS Institute is still shying away from blogging, but Sun's Phillip Kinslow recently started a blog about his job, which is to align Sun with the SAS mantra "The power to know." So we've got SAS employees blogging about Eclipse and Sun employees blogging about SAS; how about some SAS employees blogging about SAS? There are lots of cool things going on at SAS and I bet the employees are just dying to tell us about it, but they need a push. Plus, they need a policy, some servers and some software.

PS. Sun's BM Seer is also blogging about SAS and some world record setting ETL benchmarks by SAS Enterprise Data Integration Server and a Sun Fire E25K.