Blogging Roller

I travelled to Budapest, Hungary for a couple of weeks for a very nice vacation with my wife and to speak at ApacheCon EU. Here are the slides that I presented at ApacheCon EU:

(you can also view the presentation on Slideshare.)

And here is the session abstract:

Whether you are building a mobile app or a web app, Apache Usergrid (incubating) can provide you with a complete backend that supports authentication, persistence and social features like activities and followers all via a comprehensive REST API — and backed by Cassandra, giving you linear scalability. All that, and Usergrid is open source too.

This session will explain how you can use Usergrid to provide a back-end for your application. We’ll start with an overview of Usergrid features, then explore in depth how to authenticate users, store data and query data with the REST API provided by a Usergrid server. We’ll develop a simple HTML5 app and package it as a native mobile app via Apache Cordova. We'll also cover how to run Usergrid locally for development and testing.

I've been working at Apigee since September 2013 and one of the things I love most about my new job is the fact that I'm actively contributing to open source again.

I'm working on Apache Usergrid (incubating), an open source Backend-As-A-Service (BaaS) that's built on the Apache Cassandra database system. Apigee uses Usergrid as part of Apigee Edge (see the Build Apps part of the docs).

Apigee contributed code for Usergrid to the Apache Software Foundation back in October 2013 and Usergrid is now part of the Apache Incubator. The project is working towards graduating from the Incubator. That means learning the Apache way, following the processes to get a release out and most importantly, building a diverse community of contributors to build and maintain Usergrid.

One on the most important parts of building an open source community is making it easy for people to contribute and and that's why I submitted a talk to the ApacheCon US 2014 conference (April 7-9 in Denver, CO) titled How to Contribute to Usergrid.

The talk is intended to be a briefing for contributors, one that will lead you through building and running Usergrid locally, understanding the code-base and test infrastructure and how to get your code accepted into the Usergrid project.

Here's the outline I have so far:

How to Contribute to Apache Usergrid

• Motivation
  • Why would anybody want to contribute to Usergrid?
• First steps
  • The basics
  • Getting signed up
• Contributing to the Stack
  • Understanding the architecture & code base
  • Building the code. Making and testing changes
  • Running Usergrid locally via launcher & via Tomcat
• Contributing to the Portal
  • Understanding the architecture & code base
  • Building the code. Making and testing changes
  • Running the portal locally via node.js
• Contributing to the SDKs
  • Understanding the architecture & code base
  • Building the code. Making and testing changes
• Contributor workflow: how to get your code into Usergrid
  • For quickie drive-by code contributions
  • For more substantial code contributions
  • For documentation & website changes
• Contributing Docs and Website changes
  • Website, wiki and GitHub pages
  • How to build the website and docs
• Roadmap
  • First release
  • New Core Persistence system
  • The two-dot-o branch
  • Other ideas

I'm in the process of writing this talk now so suggestions and other feedback are most welcome.

It's been a while since I have blogged about it, but I haven't completely stopped working on Roller. In case you're wondering what's up in Roller-land, here's an update based on an email I recently sent to the Roller dev mailing list.

I've been doing some weekend and evening work on Roller 5.0 to get it ready for release. Ganesh and Tanuja did great work on the new Media Blogging features, but there were a couple of significant pieces missing such as data migration and I18N. I had hoped to finish that work during the summer, but life got in the way. Now I'm scrambling to wrap things up. I'll be speaking at ApacheCon US 2009 in November on the topic of What's New in Roller 5.0, so I'd really like to have a 5.0 release candidate ready by then.

Just as a reminder, here's what's currently on the 5.0 feature list:

• Media Blogging Support
• Externalizable User Management
• OpenID Support
• Tag Data API
• OpenSearch
• OAuth for AtomPub
• See the full list on the Roller wiki

Except for Media Blogging, all of those features are complete. My plan is this. I'll do some more cleanup work on Media Blogging, which is the major new feature in 5.0, fix some bugs and then I'll cut an RC.

The early-bird special ends on August 14, so you'd better get moving.

Sign up for ApacheCon US by 14 August and save up to $500!

This year's ApacheCon US promises to deliver our most extensive program to date, and largest anticipated gathering of the global Apache community to celebrate the ASF's milestone 10th Anniversary. The San Francisco Bay Area is where the very first ASF official user conference was held, and we hope that you will join us in celebrating the ASF's success!

Apache members, code contributors, users, developers, system administrators, business managers, service providers, and vendors will convene 2-6 November in Oakland, California, for a week of training, presentations, sharing and hacking. ApacheCon US 2009 features new content tracks, MeetUps, and GetTogethers, as well as a number of events open to the public free of charge, such as the Hackathon and 2-day BarCampApache, in appreciation of their support over the past decade.

Be sure to register by 14 August to save up to $500! To sign up, visit http://www.us.apachecon.com

I'll be there and speaking on the topic of What's New in Roller 5.0. I also plan to attend the Social and Widgets Meetup with folks from Shindig, SocialSite and Wookie. I hope to see you there.

I'm off to ApacheCon EU 2009> tomorrow in Amsterdam to speak on the topic of Shindig for Blogs and Wikis. I'm really looking forward to catching up with my Apache friends and colleagues. That's the conference venue in the photo on the right, the Movenpick hotel (in the background behind the music hall).

I'm staying a couple of extra days, so I hope to have time for bicycling around the city as I've done in the past (see also: Flickr photo sets for 2007 and 2008). Unfortunately, the weather forecast stinks. There's a 60% chance of rain every day that I'm in town. Oh well; guess I'll have plenty of time for blogging.

Speaking of blogging.This week, I'll be posting some blog entries to highlight the work that I've done in preparation for my talk. Here's what I plan to cover:

* Monday: OAuth for AtomPub in Roller
* Tuesday: OAuth for ROME Propono
* Wednesday: SocialSite on rollerweblogger.org
* Thursday: OAuth everywhere (continued)
* Friday: the future of Project SocialSite

If you plan to attend my talk, at 4:30PM on Friday March 27, then you should follow along. Pay special attention to the SocialSite on rollerweblogger.org and OAuth everywhere (continued) posts, which will include detailed background info. I'm looking forward to seeing you there.

The other day I got the happy news that my one of my proposed sessions was accepted for ApacheCon EU. ApacheCon and Amsterdam are definitely among my favorite places to be, so I'm thrilled. You ought to go too; here's the information on the conference, which will include training, the hackathon and a BarCamp.

My session is titled Shindig for Blogs and Wikis. I'll cover different approaches to adding social features to blogs and wikis and I'll zoom-in on OpenSocial related options Shindig and Project SocialSite. Here's the abstract, with some formatting that is missing from the ApacheCon site:

Blogs, wikis and feeds helped to make the web more social by making it easy for folks to read, write and have conversations on the web; and now social networking technologies are making the web and even more social.

In this session you'll learn about OpenSocial, a new standard for interacting with social networking data via Web Service and via JavaScript Gadgets that can be embedded into social networking sites. You'll learn about Apache Shindig (incubating), which is the reference implementation of OpenSocial, and how it can be used to add support for social networking and gadgets to existing web applications and specifically Apache Roller and Apache JSPWiki. The session will cover:

• Quick introduction to OpenSocial and Shindig
• Overview of products/services that leverage OpenSocial
• Benefits of social networking in blogs and wikis
• How to support Google Gadgets in Roller and JSPWiki via Shindig
• How to enable social features in Roller and JSPWiki via Shindig
• How to add comprensive social graph support to Roller and JSPWiki via SocialSite
• How to create an OpenSocial Applications that access Roller and JSPWiki

I'm already working on the demos and slides for this as it's going to be quite a bit of work. Fortunately, I'll be able to recycle some of the material in some other upcoming gigs.

I've been busy as can be, working on launching a new project at work, lots of presentations and not enough code. March seems to have snuck up behind me, spun me around and punched me right in the stomach. Not good. I need more time. Slides for my Advanced Roller talk are due today, ApacheCon EU is a little over a month away and JavaOne is right around the corner (more about that later). That's enough whining. Now, it's my duty to remind you that there's still plenty of time to register for ApacheCon EU in beautiful city of Amsterdam, so here goes:

Click here to register for ApacheCon EU 2008.

And in other news, the ApacheCon US 2008 Call For Papers is now open. This year ApacheCon US will be November 3-7 in New Orleans, Louisiana.

One of my five ApacheCon EU 2008 proposals was accepted. I submitted a couple of proposals for customizing Roller, one for advanced Roller and one on RSS/Atom. The advanced Roller talk was accepted. Here's the abstract:

Apache Roller is a popular open source blog server designed to serve the needs of large multi-user blogging sites and typically used by large corporations, universities and government organizations. This session for managers, sysadmins and developers will goes beyond the Roller installation guide and explores the advanced issues of planning and executing a Roller deployment, including deployment architecture and configuration options as well as options for customization and automation.

I spent last week at the ApacheCon US 2007 conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Here's a write up of some of my experiences there. [Read More]

I just posted the slides for my ApacheCon US 2007 talk on the ApacheCon wiki. It's basically the same talk that I gave at ApacheCon EU earlier this year, but I spent some time tweaking the slides, simplifying removing unnecessary bits and adding a little Abdera coverage. That, and the fact that the power did not fail, seemed to make the talk go more smoothly this morning. Here are the slides:

Apache Roller and blogs as a web development platform (2MB PDF)

Matt Raible, Don Brown and I will be doing at "Roller and Struts 2" birds-of-a-feather (BOF) session on Wednesday night at ApacheCon at 8:30PM. Thanks to Atlassian for sponsoring the beer-of-freeness (BOF). The sign-up is here:

http://wiki.apache.org/apachecon/BirdsOfaFeatherUs07

There are already handful of people signed up, so I guess I better work on some preso materials. I'll be prepared to talk about Roller status, future plans and Roller's recent migration from Struts 1 to 2.

Are there any specific Roller issues you'd like to discuss in the BOF?

ApacheCon US 2007 is only about 20 days away. I'm getting psyched up to do my Roller and blogs as a web development platform talk again (and thinking about topics for ApacheCon EU 2008). There's still plenty of time for you to register and attend. And Apache fans, please grab a banner and help promote ApacheCon on your project site and blogs.

ApacheCon is coming up fast. I just faxed in my speaker's agreement and I'm starting to update my talk to cover the latest changes in the upcoming Apache Roller 4.0 and 4.1 releases.

I've been four times now and ApacheCon is always a great conference. It's small and cozy enough, but almost all of the Apache projects are represented. So it's easy to find the experts, make new friends and get all of your questions answered. The session line-up looks great this year; here are ones that caught my eye:

• Hacking Atom with Apache Abdera - Garret Rooney
• A little REST and Relaxation - Roy Fielding
• WS-* vs. REST: Facts, Myths and Lies - Sanjiva Weerawarana
• Go Light with Apache Struts 2 and REST - Don Brown
• How to Run a Business Around The ASF - Sanjiva Weerawarana
• Open Source Community Anti-Patterns - Ted Leung
• RIAs using Apache Derby and Comet - Jeanfrancois Arcand & Francois Orsini
• Apache Derby - Saucer Separation - Rick Hillegas
• JCR in Action - Content-based Applications with Apache Jackrabbit - Carsten Ziegeler

Want to go? There's still time to shave a couple of hundred dollars off the conference fees by registering early. Early bird pricing has been extended to Sept. 22, 2007.

And the Weston looks like a pretty nice place for a conference:

ApacheCon US 2007 | Register here
November 12-16, 2007
Westin Peachtree Plaza
Atlanta, Georgia

It's been a fun four weeks of travel with the APP interop event, vacation, ApacheCon EU and JavaOne but damn it's nice to be home with Andi and the boys.

By the way, my talk went very smoothly yesterday and I estimate that about 300 people showed up. I pitched my book at the end of the talk and pointed people to JavaOne bookstore, but by that time it was sold out.

Sun is throwing a party at ApacheCon EU on Thursday night, right after the lightning talks. It looks like Rebecca has arranged a very nice party-space (see below) at the Lloyd, a self-described "Trendy Design Hotel" just down the water from the Movenpick. So please stop by, say hello and enjoy a beverage or two to start the evening.

 

Vacation is over and it's back to work today. I rode the tram up to Amsterdam Central Station to see Andi off, checked out of our vacation hotel and made my way up to the Movenpick Hotel for ApacheCon EU.

I'm in the ApacheCon hackathon room now working to clear my in-box, catch-up on blogs and figure out what work things need my (rather limited) attention this week.

Vacation was wonderful, by the way. I didn't do any travel blogging on this trip, but I've taken about 200 photos and uploaded some of the best to my Flickr account. I took a bunch of nice shots of the Queens Day festivities yesterday. and the ad hoc boat parades. I've also been building a Google map of our travels, annotated with photos and comments. I'll share that link later this week once it's more complete.

My work on the next releases of Roller, Propono and my upcoming talks is basically done and now it's time to test code and practice talks. Unfortunately, I've only got a week to devote to that. Then I'm off and on the road for most of four weeks in a row: to Google for the Atom interop meeting next week, to Amsterdam for a week of vacation and a week of ApacheCon EU and finally to San Francisco for JavaOne. I'm looking forward to it, but I wish all the year's travel didn't have to be crammed into one month.

Last week was deadline week for JavaOne and ApacheCon EU presentations, so I was busy. Fortunately for me, my other deadlines were postponed, I did some begging for time and I actually had time to take a short vacation; a family reunion at Stone Mountain park, Georgia. Here's some more information about my ApacheCon talk and an outline of the slides. 

[Read More]

Lots of good news and stuff to blog this past week including the Sun makes a profit story, the Sun-Intel deal and more. I really like reading news like this Amid Profit, Brighter Days for Sun and this Sun turns profit after five quarters in red.

And how could I fail to mention the announcement of Lotus Connections, the product formerly known as Ventura. Connections is IBM's new Web 2.0 social networking suite and it includes Roller. IBM's James Snell posted some background info about IBM's internal use of social networking tools and how that led to Lotus Connections. Elias Torres blogged about it too and included a screen-shot of the new Connections based BlogCentral (IBM's internal blogging site).

And in other news...

My ApacheCon EU talk on 'Roller and Blogs as a Web Development Platform' was accepted. Looks like I'll have a busy May, Amsterdam for ApacheCon and (hopefully) San Francisco for JavaOne all in the space of two weeks.

Wordpress is finally gonna get Atom format support and apparently Atom protocol support is going to happen too.

The ROME project is just about ready for ROME 1.0 and there's a new subproject in the works: ROME Propono. co-worker Ramesh Mandava and I are putting together a Blog Client library (based on code from Blogapps) and an Atom client/server library (based on code from Roller). Hopefully, we'll have it ready by the time that ROME 1.0 comes out.