Blogging Roller

Dave Johnson on social software, open source and Java

Try Roller, it's easy!

To make it easier for folks to try Roller, I have created a standalone Roller demo by bundling Roller with JSPWiki, Tomcat, and the tiny pure-Java HSQLDB database. Everything is preconfigured and ready to run. All you need to do to try Roller is the following:

1. Download roller-demo-0.9.9.2.zip from SourceForge (an 18MB download)

2. Unzip the file into a directory on your hard-drive (directory name should have no spaces)

3. Ensure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to point to your JDK

4. Ensure that CATALINA_HOME is NOT set in your environment

5. To start Roller, either:
     - on Windows: open the Roller bin directory and double-click on startup.bat 
     - on UNIX: cd to the Roller bin directory, chmod +x on all files, run ./startup.sh

6. Point your browser at http://localhost:8080 

7. Login as testuser1/testuser1, admin/admin, or register as a new user

8. Get rollin'
Dave in Roller Comments[14]

Tags: Roller

Comments:

Dave, sorry to comment here, but: the popup comment link for Mr. Roller isn't working. The popup works for Vanity Foul so I think it may be your template or something.

Posted by Lance on July 08, 2004 at 10:01 AM EDT #

Nice! I downloaded it, unzipped it, and clicked on startup.bat -- bam! Instant Roller. Everything seems to work, although I did get a little stack trace in the start-up log: <pre> Jul 8, 2004 7:12:54 AM org.apache.catalina.session.StandardManager doLoad SEVERE: IOException while loading persisted sessions: java.io.WriteAbortedException: writing aborted; java.io.NotSerializableException: org.apache.jasper.runtime.PageContextImpl java.io.WriteAbortedException: writing aborted; java.io.NotSerializableException: org.apache.jasper.runtime.PageContextImpl at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readObject0(ObjectInputStream.java:1278) at java.io.ObjectInputStream.defaultReadFields(ObjectInputStream.java:1845) at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readSerialData(ObjectInputStream.java:1769) at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readOrdinaryObject(ObjectInputStream.java:1646) at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readObject0(ObjectInputStream.java:1274) at java.io.ObjectInputStream.defaultReadFields(ObjectInputStream.java:1845) at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readSerialData(ObjectInputStream.java:1769) at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readOrdinaryObject(ObjectInputStream.java:1646) at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readObject0(ObjectInputStream.java:1274) at java.io.ObjectInputStream.readObject(ObjectInputStream.java:324) </pre>

Posted by Jeff Chilton on July 08, 2004 at 10:29 AM EDT #

Foo! Thanks for pointing that out. I must have left a session.ser file in the work directory. I suspect that JSPWiki is storing something that is not serializable in the session. The stack trace is ugly, but it should not affect operation of the Roller demo.

Posted by Dave Johnson on July 08, 2004 at 10:31 AM EDT #

The Roller demo works a treat. Nice one, Dave. :-)

Posted by Simon Brown on July 08, 2004 at 11:57 AM EDT #

Yup. It's a known problem with some versions of JSPWiki. Does not affect the functionality though.

Posted by Janne on July 09, 2004 at 12:05 PM EDT #

Things were working fine till I choose to encrypt passwords and couldn't log back on :(

Posted by mal on July 12, 2004 at 01:38 PM EDT #

Sounds like the Encrypt Passwords options should be a web.xml setting only, not exposed in the UI.

Posted by Dave Johnson on July 12, 2004 at 03:54 PM EDT #

Actually, the encrypting password feature isn't complete. If you turn it on, you have to manually encrypt password in the database. I plan on (someday) <a href="http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller/browse/ROL-331">adding a utility</a> that can (1) encrypt all passwords and (2) reset all passwords to some specified text (since you can't decrypt them). <br /><br /> Here's how to <a href="http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-5.0-doc/realm-howto.html#Digested%20Passwords">manually encrypt passwords</a>.

Posted by Matt Raible on July 12, 2004 at 06:42 PM EDT #

Hi, the demo is using HSQLDB, but the roller site states it's not supported anymore. How does that comply? Regards, Matthias

Posted by Matthias Steiner on July 14, 2004 at 05:49 AM EDT #

We had dropped HSQLDB because none of the Roller developers were using it (and we had a problem with the way HSQLDB does LIMIT). Now, Hibernate shields us from that LIMIT problem and support is no problem.

Posted by Dave Johnson on July 14, 2004 at 07:57 AM EDT #

Got it working - nice n easy... except a bunch of the wiki links are localhost only - non local users can't get to them. Any ideas? I've tried updating all references to the real host name that I can find but no change. Any help appreciated.

Posted by Ken Horn on July 16, 2004 at 09:31 AM EDT #

Ken, you should be able to set the root URL for the Wiki in the jspwiki.properties file (the one in the wiki context not the roller context).

Posted by Dave Johnson on July 16, 2004 at 11:11 AM EDT #

Small point but demo does require JDK 1.4... some of us hokeys are still using a 1.3.x environment...

Posted by Julian on July 27, 2004 at 04:48 AM EDT #

-�

Posted by 203.169.187.55 on August 04, 2004 at 03:17 AM EDT #

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