Blogging Roller

Janne Jalkanen This is the reason why I care so much about bloggers: blogging gives You and Your voice (and I mean YOU, my dear reader) a possibility to be heard in a far more better and efficient manner than ever before in human history.

Monday morning traffic has proven that the JRoller performance troubles are not quite over yet. That slow query I mentioned earlier was not the only problem with Roller 0.9.9. We have been experiencing heavy load and have had to restart multiple times.

Update: we're working with Kirk Pepperdine of JavaPerformanceTuning.com to zero in on what looks like a very bad memory leak.

Tonight I was finally able to get UTF-8 support going with Roller and MySQL. It was relatively easy for me to do this because of the hard work of new Roller team member Jaap van der Molen. Thanks Jaap! Also, working with a local copy of the JRoller database, I figured out how to convert the database to UTF-8. I used mysqldump to dump the database to a text file, edited the table definitions, and then "sourced" it back into the database. I'm not sure that this is the best approach, but it works. Here is a screenshot to prove it:

Day number two went very well and all of the talks were excellent. I started with David Thomas' Mock Objects talk and Ben Galbraith's SWT talk. After lunch I went to David Geary's advanced JSF talk and ended up the day with Ben Galbraith again with his How to make Swing Sing talk. All of the speakers did an excellent job, covered lots of material, and had very different presentation styles. For example, Galbraith spent most of his talks sitting down in front on an IDE coding up examples and demos on the fly. Geary is a great speaker, but he seems to have a fear of demos. I have seen him speak three times now and every time he has a slightly different reason for not running his live demos. The Javalobby party was nice, with kabobs and baklava and beer and good company. I got to talk to Erik Hatcher for a couple of minutes about Roller's search engine problems and I will attend his Lucene in Action talk today for more insight into this issue.

I'm attending the Triangle Software Symposium this weekend. So far it has been great. I went to David Geary's talk on JSF, Stuart Halloway's talk on Meta-programming and Bruce Tate's talk on Spring. Geary's talk was excellent, but I probably should have atteneded a different talk because it was essentially the same talk he gave to the Tri-JUG a couple of months ago. Halloway's talk was thought provoking and fun. Tate's presentation was good, but the subject matter was less than impressive. He told us that we would be blown away, but at the end, a show of hands proved that few people were even intrigued by Spring.

Today I'm going to focus on UI, as I have been doing in my day job. I'm going to attend David Geary's advanced JSF talk and Ben Galbraith's talks on SWT/JFace and "How to make Swing sing."

I believe that we have finally stabilized JRoller. In case you didn't know, JRoller has been "on the fritz" for the two weeks since I deployed the latest version of Roller (0.9.9 -> 1.0) there. The root problem appears to have been a horrible query that would examine and sort 1.8 million rows and drag down MySQL for over 5 minutes. The query would only occur on one weblog and the use case that caused the query would not cause the query on other weblogs. I stress tested Roller on my homebox before deploying to JRoller, as I always do, but I don't have the test setup to simulate the JRoller load and I certainly would not have found this bug because it affects only one weblog and in only one use case.

Personally speaking, the bug caused me a lot of stress. My three children now hate me and think I am a barking monster, my wife is worried that I am going to snap, and I can't shake the desire to constantly check JRoller to see if it is up. It makes me wonder why I on earth ever volunteered to keep JRoller running after Anthony Eden walked away. Support from the Javalobby, Rick Ross and Matthew Schmidt, are what kept me going through this little nightmare.

On the positive side of things, the bug cause me to take a good hard look at the Roller queries and caching once again. I made a hell of a lot of fixes, optimizations, and improvements. Roller is probably running better than it ever has before and is putting only a tiny load on the Javalobby server. We still have some queries that run too slow, and I have some bugs to fix, but I think we are out of the fire (fingers crossed).

Roller's JIRA issue tracker is somewhat broken at the moment, so we are tracking issues to Fix-For Roller 1.0 on the Roller Wiki. This list is mainly for the use of the Roller developers. Please continue to report Roller bugs to Roller's JIRA issue tracker and Roller developers will promote as many of the the worthy ones to the Fix-For list as time permits.

With a couple of tweaks to Roller's HibernateStrategy, I've gotten Roller to work again with the tiny pure-Java database HSQLDB.

The other day, I added the notion of "pinned" weblog entries to Roller. This new feature makes it easier for Roller admins to communicate with other bloggers on a Roller site by allowing admin users to "pin" their own weblog entries to the top of the main Roller page. You can see the new feature in action on the JRoller main page.

I've got to say, the SourceBeat blogs, which are all hosted on JRoller, look great. Here is a list of the active SourceBeat author blogs, RSS feeds, and topics:

• Matt Raible [RSS]: Spring
• Rick Hightower [RSS]: Struts
• James Goodwil [RSS]: Apache Axis
• Bill Dudney [RSS]: Eclipse
• Jonathan Lehr [RSS]: Jakarta Commons

Russell has been busy updating his minimalistic JSP-based Weblogging package, which he now calls MyBlog. He added an Atom feed and then added a single JSP page implementation of the Blogger, Blogger2, MovableType, and MetaWeblog APIs. It is amazing and a little scary what you can do with a single JSP. He mentions the complexity of the same API implementation in other Java blogging packages, Blojsom, Pebble, and Roller. I can't take credit for the Roller implementation, I stole it from Blojsom.