Blogging Roller

In case you haven't heard the news or followed my Latest Links: at an analyst conference last week IBM announced a new server-side product suite called Ventura that includes blogging, social bookmarking and social networking. Ventura is Java EE-based, runs on Websphere (with DB2 or Oracle) and the blog server component is based on Apache Roller (incubating) 3.1. That's the very same version of Roller that we're currently running at blogs.sun.com.

So how do I feel about it? I'm thrilled to see IBM contributing to, building on and supporting the Roller project. No matter how you cut it, that's good news for Roller users including those at blogs.sun.com who are already benefiting from IBM's contributions (e.g. tagging support in 3.1). Of course to be honest, I'm also a little disappointed that Sun isn't shipping and supporting a Roller distribution -- that's always been one of my goals. Sun has put heck of a lot of engineering time into Roller, helped to grow the community in the Apache incubator and benefitted greatly via blogs.sun.com -- it sure would be nice to share those benefits with our customers by offering service and support.