Today's links [March 08, 2006]


Today's links [March 07, 2006]

Raleigh bloggers meetup, Cafe Cyclo tonight


Join us tonight at Cafe Cyclo in Raleigh's Cameron Village at 6:30PM. See Josh's blog for details.

Today is...

...the birthday of a truly great man and a wonderful father. Happy 70th birthday DAD!!!

Charles S. Johnson
(c) Charles S. Johnson, Jr.

Wilco's Jeff Tweedy on the local jock rivalry

Audience member: (screams) Duke sucks!
Jeff Tweedy: Whatever.
Jeff Tweedy: Ah, OK, (pause) Duke sucks!
Audience: (loud applause)
Jeff Tweedy: Unless we're playing Duke, in which case, uh... (mumbles something)

... later, during the encore ...

Jeff Tweedy: (sarcastically) And my sincere congraluations on your sports successes.

And by the way, Wilco rocked! UNC's Memorial Hall is a great place to see a show. It's pretty sure it's been renovated at least once since the last time I saw a rock show there (Hüsker Dü, back in in the stone age).

Roller 2.1 available for download


Roller 2.1 is available (announcement). The major new features are comment management, comment moderation, trackback verification (optional), security improvements, performance improvements, an all-new pluggable cache system and Atom 1.0 support in the integrated planet aggregator. New features are summarized in What's New doc.

Pebble and Blojsom and Atom protocol


I've used code from the excellent Pebble and Blojsom blog servers in the past (and given credit in the Roller CREDITS file). I'd love to be able to contribute back and now there's an opportunity to do that. So to Simon and David (or anybody else hacking those servers), if you want to get Atom protocol working in your server, the easiest way might be for you to bring in some code from Roller. I specifically designed our Atom protocol implementation to allow for sharing and to be free of Roller dependencies.

For example, here's how you'd do it for Pebble:
  • Bring the classes from the package org.roller.presentation.atomapi into Pebble (except for RollerAtomHandler, you won't need that one).
  • You'll also need to bring in the ROME and JDOM jars if you're not aleady using them.
  • Implement the interface AtomHandler with calls to the Pebble backend, call it PebbleAtomHandler or something similar.
  • Change one line of code in the AtomServlet method createAtomRequestHandler() to create your new PebbleAtomHandler instead of the Roller one.
And feel free to pepper me with questions along the way. I'd be happy to help and happy to make changes to make this sharing easier. I'm also considering the idea of an Atom Server Kit package in my Blogapps project (on second thought, ROME might be a better home).

When you're done, head over to the #atom channel on irc.freenode.net so we can do some interop testing with MatisseBlogger and other Atom protocol clients.

Blog server news


Couple of interesting items in the land of open source blog server software.

First, the Ibiblio folks over at UNC have announced a new project (or is it a new direction for an old project) called Lyceum to modify Wordpress for multi-user blogging. I'm a little surprised by this because I thought Wordpress already supported multi-user, that's what Wordpress.com does and that's what the Wordpress/Mu is all about. Update: this post from Matt Mullenweg explains the difference between Wordpress and the Lyceum fork.

I think some of the Computer Science folks at UNC are pushing Roller (ITS already has one), which has been doing multi-user blogging for years now, so it will be interesting to see what UNC chooses for student blogs.

Second, Simon Brown has released milestone 1 of Pebble 2.0. This new version of Pebble will require Java 5.0, something I wish we could do now with Roller. I read recently that he decided to keep Pebble file-system based, which I think is a good choice. Part of the charm of Pebble is the super-easy install.

MatisseBlogger


With the final deadline for my book and my JavaOne presentation on Java and REST: Implementing the Atom protocol coming up on the 10th, I've been spending a lot of time with Atom and specifically the Atom protocol (draft 8). I've been tweaking my BlogClient library, which provides an abstract interface over both Atom protocol and he MetaWeblog API. And, you may be surprised to hear that I've also been spending some time with Netbeans Matisse.

I've been working with Matisse to create MatisseBlogger, a Swing GUI that's built on top of my BlogClient library. In a very short amount of time, I've been able to build a pretty nice client. That's it in the screenshot below (click for full-size image).

MatisseBlogger screenshot
Today I spent some time in the #atom channel on irc.freenode.net doing Atom protocol interop testing with James Tauber and Joe Gregorio. James has an Atom protocol server named Demokritos and Joe has one called, well, I'm not sure what it's called. Long story short, MatisseBlogger made it's first posts today to two different servers.

In the screenshot above you can see that MatisseBlogger shows your blog accounts as a tree view, with each account having multiple blogs and each blog having an entries and resources collection (except for Joe's which currently only supports entries). So far, I've tested it with Demokritos, Joe's server, Roller, Wordpress (MetaWeblog) and MovableType (also MetaWeblog). It's still got some glitches, but it's almost ready for release. So, I'll include MatisseBlogger and Roller (2.2-dev with Atom Protocol enabled) in the next release of the Blogapps project, perhaps this weekend.

Tags: topic:[Atom Protocol], topic:[Atom], topic:[REST], topic:[MetaWeblog API], topic:[Matisse], topic:[Netbeans], topic:[RSS and Atom in Action]

Guerilla cannibal team


I wish I was as smart as James Governor seems to think I am. I agree with some of Governor's points about Roller and I'm honored to be on the same page with his A-Team, but I think he's overlooking a lot of very cool work that's going on at Sun and a lot of absolutely brilliant people here who most definitely "get it" in every way.

ROME is good


Bob Aman did a nice round-up of newsfeed parsers and Java's own ROME came in second (with the only rating of good) only to Mark Pilgrim's Python-based Universal Feed Parser (with the only rating of excellent). His findings are the same as those in Chapter 5 of my book (which lists Universal Feed Parser, ROME, Jakarta Feed Parser, RSS.NET and ATOM.NET), except that I rate Jakarta Feed Parser a bit higher. The book goes to the printers on March 10 and I'm in final review now, so I've still got time to add a reference to Kevin Burton's new Jakarta Feed Parser fork; I need to check that out immediately.

Roller on Geronimo


Jeff Genender explains how to get Roller running on Apache Geronimo. He mentions that Roller binaries are built with JDK5; a mistake (I believe) that affects only Roller 2.0.1. I'm going to respin that build as soon as I get a free minute.

Eclipse 3.1.1 on Solaris/X86/GTK


I've complained in the past about the fact that Eclipse for Solaris/X86 is linked to Motif and thus, drag-and-drop doesn't work, the mouse-wheel support is broken and  the whole thing looks like crap.

Since then I've switched over to Netbeans, but I when I saw that instructions were available for building Eclipse 3.1.1 on Solaris/X86/GTK, I just couldn't resist trying them out. Here's the result, Eclipse 3.1.1 running on Solaris 10 for X86. Looks almost as good as Netbeans, eh? Maybe they'll finally put an end to those awful Motif builds.

screenshot of Eclipse-GTK on Solaris/X86

Roller @ N.C. State


I'm heading down to the D.H. Hill Library at North Carolina State University (go Wolfpack, my alma mater by the way) today help the folks there get started with Roller.

State chose Roller for campus-wide student blogs (> 30,000 students!) and the first order of business is to figure out how to hook Roller into State's WRAP authentication single sign-on system. The answer may be to develop a WRAP plugin for Acegi (the framework Roller uses for authentication), but I hope to also understand how OpenSSO technologies might fit into the picture.

Atom protocol, OpenSearch and Microformats

Joe Gregorio: APP, OpenSearch and Microformats. Get used to seeing them; those small pieces loosely joined are the future of web services.
Joe's talking about the new Lucene Web Services API, which is based on Atom protocol (APP), OpenSearch and Microformats. It's very cool to see the APP already applied outside of the realm of blogs.

Bingo

Ross Rader: Perhaps ATOM is the better way to proceed after all - at least those documents are developed according to a consistent, reliable and predictable process that I can count on from a business perspective.

As another Dave might say: bingo!


Evaluating blogging solutions

Optaros open source CMS study: Roller is the most established of the Java-based blogging softwares. Powering sites such as the popular blogs.sun.com and JRoller, Roller certainly qualifies as industrial strength. Roller is designed to host multiple blogs, each with its own formatting layout and style.

As you can see above, Scott Gottlieb of Optaros included Roller in his evaluation of open source CMS servers. Roller did pretty well considering that Optaros evaluated an old release (1.3) and didn't seem to notice Roller's ongoing move to Apache Software Foundation governance.

And coming soon: Forrester Research will be including Roller in it's Forrester Wave evaluation of blogging solutions. That'll be good for Roller in a couple of ways. It will get us some more publicity for the project and it'll help us understand Roller's deficiencies when compared to other systems.

ROME again


Another excellent introductory article about the ROME feed API today on the O'Reilly network. Check out ROME in a Day by ROME project member Mark Woodman (and while you're at Mark's site check out RSS gets an enema and Mark's charming enema illustration).

Today's links [February 21, 2006]

Backing up your blog with Grabber


Rich Burridge explains how to use Grabber one of the Blogapps utilities to back up your Roller-based blog, but Grabber should work with any blog server that supports the MetaWeblog API. I'm sure you have some questions about this so I'll just go ahead and answer them now. No, I didn't pay Rich to pimp my book. And yes, it would be much better if Roller included an export facility.

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