Blogging Roller

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.

Crossposted from the Roller project blog

Apache Roller 2.3-incubating is now available via the Apache incubator. For more information about the release see What's New in Roller 2.3 on the Roller wiki. This is a new release, but the Roller 2.3 codebase has been in use for over a month at a number of production sites, including http://blogs.sun.com and this site. Here are direct links to the download files:

• Roller 2.3 Web application (key)
• Roller 2.3 Source code (key)

Note that we no longer use the wiki for the user and installation guides. Instead, we're using OpenOffice format and generating HTML and PDF versions of these two documents. Here are links to the latest docs for Roller 2.3.

• Roller 2.3 Installation Guide (HTML)
• Roller 2.3 Installation Guide (PDF)
• Roller 2.3 User Guide (HTML)
• Roller 2.3 User Guide (PDF)

Please report bugs and enhancement requests to Roller's JIRA-based issue tracker.

NOTE: Roller is in the Apache Incubator, but this release is not an official release of or endorsed by the Apache Software Foundation. Roller itself is licensed under the Apache license v2.0, but requires some components that have more restrictive licenses (i.e. Hibernate).

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).