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Blojsom vs. Roller.

Comments[10] by Dave in Roller

I just received an email that asked the question "could you please tell me the differences between Blojsom and Roller Weblogger? Which one is better or what could you tell me about these both projects?" Below is my reply.

I think the main advantages that Roller has over Blojsom are full multi-user support and a web-based UI for editing blogs, managing bookmarks, configuring blogs/themes, and for configuring the system. Blojsom doesn't have an extensive web-based UI like Roller's. The main disadvantage of Roller is that it requires a database and this requirement makes installation and maintenance a little more difficult. If you are going to build a community site like ruckyou.com or jroller.com, then Roller seems like the obvious choice. For comparison: the Roller Installation Guide and User Guide.

The main advantages that Blogsom has over Roller are that it is small, easy to setup, has an extensible architecture with excellent support for plugins. One example: with Roller, your page templates must use Velocity macros. With Blojsom, there are a number of plugin options for page templates. If you are going to run a single user blog, you don't want the hassles of setting up a database, and you are happy without a web UI for managing your blog, then Blojsom seems like the obvious choice. For comparison: the Blojsom Installation/User Guide

If you looking for a good blogging tool, you might want to widen your search. Is there a reason that you are looking only at Java-based blogging software? If you are a Java programmer and you want to be able to customize your blogging software or contribute to it's development then Roller or Blojsom are good choices. If you are techically saavy, you want to setup you own bogging software on your ISP's site, and you don't care what language was used to write the blogging software, then expand your search to include other choices like MovableType. If you don't want the hassles of setting up your own blogging software then look at JRoller, Blogger, Typepad, or one of the other blogging services.



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Comments:

I received the e-mail as well. I'll respond openly on my site as well, but I did want to reply here that blojsom is a full multi-user blog system. In blojsom 2.0, one installation of blojsom can serve any number of users. On a per-user basis, one can configure flavors (I can support HTML, RSS 0.91, and RSS 2.0 while you can support HTML, RSS 0.91, and Atom 0.2), flavor-based plugin chains (I can support the comments and emoticons plugins for my HTML flavor while you can support the comments, XPath search, and trackback plugins for the HTML flavor), and all the other configuration information (blog information, plugin configuration files, authorized users to post). And yes, blojsom will soon have a Web-based administration UI.

Posted by David Czarnecki on October 05, 2003 at 12:01 PM EDT #

I've read that Blojsom can store entries in a database via a "fetcher." Has anybody implemented this?

Posted by Dave Johnson on October 05, 2003 at 01:01 PM EDT #

No one has done a database fetcher, but someone has written an IMAP fetcher. Categories are folders and entries are messages in those folders on an IMAP server. He'll or we'll release this publicly at some point I suspect. It's wild stuff. Trackback with my comments coming soon.

Posted by David Czarnecki on October 05, 2003 at 06:36 PM EDT #

[Trackback] Regarding the blojsom vs. Roller e-mail that both Dave and I received, here's my rundown.

Posted by David Czarnecki's Blog on October 05, 2003 at 06:49 PM EDT #

I apologize for the off-topic. I just signed up for a free blog at freeroller. I haven't been able to change my theme. (It doesn't show the new theme in the preview. It will save the name of the new theme, but, it doesn't change the blog. I tried flushing the cache and everything else I could think of!) BUT, I DIGRESS: So, I looked all over and I don't see a User Support community anywhere. Is there a bulletin board of something I'm just missing? Am I just blind. Please help. And, again, I apologize for the off topic post! Geoff

Posted by Geoff on October 05, 2003 at 07:21 PM EDT #

Totally off topic, but still deserving an answer. The theme switcher is broken and I'm working on a fix (for it and a couple of other issues). I hope to deploy the fix (and Roller 0.9.8.1) in a couple of days. As far as I know, the support community will consist of JRoller mailing lists, JRoller issue tracking (http://jira.javalobby.org), and the JRoller blog (http://jroller.com/page/jroller) which will have comments enabled. I'm not sure that all of these things are online just yet. Thanks for your patience ;-)

Posted by Dave Johnson on October 05, 2003 at 08:08 PM EDT #

blojsom is fine for multiuser. It doesn't have the user list thing I suppose. Roller has better referrer support. Blojsom doesn't crash. Blojsom is better code. Blojsom could use DB, but doesn't by default....it may need more cache in the future. Roller uses every library that the authors wanted to know...but now they need to know but one thing: simplify.

Posted by Andy on October 29, 2003 at 05:42 PM EST #

Has anyone implemented a database fetcher for blojsom yet. If not is there a sql file or something for the blojsom schema ? -R amit

Posted by amit shanbhag on December 08, 2003 at 06:02 PM EST #

Since my last comment, i'va had a closer look at blojsom .. Implementing a database fetcher for blojsom is not as simple as they make it sound.. Whats worse is that .. even if you actually manage to implement a database fetcher, you will pay the price in performance.. Blojsom code is very tightly coupled to the underlying filesystem based persistence layer... Besides there is too much business logic in the UI, with sevlets loading blogs from the file system and managing data structures that map users to blogs, blogs to blogcategories etc.. I wish they had put some thought into creating an abstraction for the persistence layer. 50% of the code in blojsom is not needed, coz the database can handle relations for you..and in a cleaner more elegant way.. At the same time the code base is small and simple enough tim understand and modify..something i cant say about roller... About roller vs blojsom...id got with blojsom, but with reservations and only if i dint care about using a database.. -R amit

Posted by Amit Shanbhag on December 13, 2003 at 06:24 PM EST #

Also blojsom has millions of properties files scattered all over the place.. They use properties files for user-level and application level configuration/preferences. Im not too crazy about property files...and more so when there are used in a clean way.. -R amit

Posted by amit shanbhag on December 13, 2003 at 06:33 PM EST #

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