Blogging Roller

It's been a couple of weeks since the last Roller Strong because I've been very busy with 4.0 and some other new projects. Plus, I was getting a little tired of saying "we're still working on 4.0." So now I'm happy to report that release candidates have been made available for upcoming Apache Roller 4.0 release.

It should be very easy to try out the new release because we spent a lot of time focusing on a new easy-install process, plus there is no need to download a separate bundle of Hibernate files as Roller no longer uses Hibernate. With the new easy-install, installation should be as easy as editing four settings in a small configuration file and dropping the WAR into Tomcat or Glassfish.

Below are some links to the 4.0 RC1 release files.

• apache-roller-4.0-rc1.tar.gz (key)
• apache-roller-4.0-rc1.zip (key)
• What's new in Roller 4.0
• Roller 4.0 Change list in JIRA
• Roller 4.0 Installation Guide (PDF)
• Roller 4.0 User Guide (PDF)
• Roller 4.0 Template Guide (PDF)

Keep in mind that 4.0 RC1 is not an official Apache release and is meant for testing only. Even so, this is probably a pretty solid release. The .Sun Engineering team put the code into production at at blogs.sun.com over a month ago and my coworkers on the Sun App Platform team just put the code through a couple weeks of testing.

rollerthemes.com

Big thanks to Gene Strokine! As seen on raibledesigns.com, Gene has been busy with Roller theme development and has started a new site rollerthemes.com to promote his work. Gene is also the newest committer on the Roller Support project at Java.net and has committed many of his themes there (they still need to be upgraded to work with 4.0 though).

Notes on Roller and JA-SIG CAS SSO

And Phillip Rhodes reports success integrating Roller and JavaBB with single-sign on via JA-SIG CAS and has plans for additional identity related work. He has posted his notes on Roller and CAS/SSO to the Roller dev list.

JRoller.com troubles

In the "OK, so maybe Roller ain't so strong" department, JRoller.com has been having problems with Roller 3.1. Matt Schmidt upgraded JRoller.com from Roller 2.0 to Roller 3.1 a couple of weeks back and ran into database connection pool problems, which were resolved by switching back from Tomcat to Resin. Now he's dealing with some explosive memory usage and asking for help from the Javalobby community.

Coming soon: a Geronimo plugin for Roller

Our Geronimo friends David Jencks and Peter Peterssen stopped by the Roller-dev list this month to contribute some code to make it easier for Roller to work in Apache Geronimo. They're cookin' up a Geronimo plugin for Roller and I'm looking forward to seeing it in action.

In other news...

One final note. We've made a bunch of fixes to 3.1 so we also have a new RC available for the upcoming Apache Roller 3.1.1 fix release. You can find the RC files for 3.1.1 in my Apache site and the change list in JIRA.