Blogging Roller

Looks like we made it to the final round of the Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad competition and so Project SocialSite will be one of the five projects that will "present their ideas in front of an audience of creators, evangelists and adopters of cutting edge technologies who will provide feedback in real-time and decide the winner." Thanks to all who voted for SocialSite.

And in other news, Arun Gupta has put together a very nice ten minute screencast that shows Project SocialSite in action.

As Arun notes in his post, Project SocialSite made it to round #2 of the Enterprise 2.0 conference Lauchpad and so we made another short video. This time we got some help from Sun internal TV studio folks and added a little extra polish. Check it out and rate it up

There will be a OpenSocial Summit: May 14th, at the Googleplex covering the new v0.8 spec changes and all sorts of other interesting things. Wish I could make it, but I'll be happily back home in the old north state. Hopefully, somebody from the SocialSite team will be able to attend.

Struts 2 is my favorite Java web framework these days; it's REST-friendly, simple, easy to use, very flexible and the only thing it has with its creaky old Struts 1.x parent is the fact that it's an action framework rather than a component framework like JSF. As most of my readers probably already know, Struts 2 is based on WebWork/XWork the framework that powers JIRA and Confluence, two of the coolest Java webapps around.

Apparently, I'm not alone in this thinking -- I keep on running into folks at JavaOne who feel the same way. But unfortunately, Struts 2 docs are lacking, so I was very happy to see two new books on Struts 2 at the JavaOne bookstore. There's Struts 2 in Action, a rewrite of the classic Manning book, and Practical Apache Struts 2 Web 2.0 Projects from Apress.

I picked up a copy of Struts 2 in Action on Monday and it looks great so far, but I've only skimmed it. I'll let you know what I think once I dig-in on the flight home.

If you're at JavaOne, check out TS-5739 - Hands-on Struts2 by Ian Roughley (author of the Apress book) today at 10:50 AM in Esplanade 307/310.

One more thing to mention before I hit the JavaOne opening reception: Bobby Bissett submitted a short and to-the-point video on Project SocialSite to the Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad. Please check it out and help us vote it up

Jamey Wood and I presented our Introduction to Project SocialSite yesterday. We had a much larger crowd than I expected, given the number of concurrent talks -- I'm guessing there were close to 300 people in the room. I hope to be able to post a link to the slides at some point in the near future because right now we've got almost no information on Project SocialSite on the web. Now that we've got permission to talk about the project, I'm going to try to change that.

I spent most of the day in the Sun booth answering questions about SocialSite and demonstrating our widgets and web services in Roller and MediaWiki and talking through some key slides in our deck. At this point, we only have a handful of our widgets implemented and they're pretty bare bones, but folks seemed to "get it" and liked the idea of adding social networking features to existing web applications.

If you're at JavaOne, then please stop by the Sun both and say hi. Look for us under the banner Social Networking for Glassfish. And if you want the full scoop then check out our Birds of a Feather (BOF) session:

Jamey and I will be ready with slides and demos and answers to (almost) all of your questions and you'll have plenty of time to make it to the After Dark shindig.

As promised, here's some more information about the talk I and my co-speaker Jamey Wood are giving tomorrow at CommunityOne (2:35 PM in Moscone Hall E 135).

Below is the official title and blurb.

Turn your Web Application into an OpenSocial container (link)

Wouldn't it be nice if developers around the world could add new features to your web site for you? The OpenSocial API makes it possible. This session demonstrates how you can make your existing web site capable of hosting OpenSocial applications. To illustrate the process, it shows an example application and how it benefits from becoming an OpenSocial container. Attendees should be familiar with HTML, JavaScript™ technology, and XML.

Perhaps a better title would have been, "make your webapps social with Project SocialSite" but we didn't have permission to talk about our project until very recently. Now, we're ready to talk about the Project SocialSite widgets and web services and how you can use them to add Social Networking features to your existing Java, PHP and Ruby webapps. We're not ready to talk about product plans, features or schedules but we are ready to demonstrate our work in Netbeans, MediaWiki, Portal, Roller and possibly some other apps as the JavaOne week progresses.

Here are the slides: socialsite-j1-2008.pdf (1MB PDF file)

And here's an outline of the talk:

Look for Project SocialSite in the CommunityOne demo area and at the Sun booth in the JavaOne pavillion all week.