Blogging Roller

Here's a diagram I worked up over the weekend to explain Shindig REST API internals to my team mates. See the Project SocialSite blog for the full story.

• snellspace.com: Contact!
  "So Google announced it?s Contacts API? based on Atompub of course"
• netzooid: Writing Your First AtomPub Service with Abdera
  "This shows the much simplified server code base in action, so beware - this requires the latest trunk/ code. 0.4.0 should be out soon though"
• Astoria: AtomPub support in the ADO.NET
  "We have been looking for the last few months at adding first-class support for AtomPub to Project Astoria"
• Marc Hadley's Blog: Authentication in Jersey
  "Actions on some resources require authentication and I need access to the name of the authenticated user in the resource method"
• The Aquarium: Jersey 0.6 released
  "the Jersey client API, enhanced JSON suport, and better integration of Jersey with IoC containers"
• Carrot2 - Open Source Search Results Clustering Engine
  "Carrot2 is an Open Source Search Results Clustering Engine. It can automatically organize (cluster) search results into thematic categorie"
• MySQL Forums: Partitioning
  The official discussion forum for those interested in or experimenting with MySQL Partitioning technology
• Partha's Blog: MySQL Table Partitioning
  Nice series of posts on table partitioning in MySQL 5.1
• Simon Phipps: The Adoption-Led Market
  "emerging approach which is rapidly spreading for smaller software projects and in my view is the future of all software acquisition"
• Will Acquia ruin Drupal? | Open Source | ZDNet.com
  "Acquia, a commercial version with all the bells and whistles, including venture capital partners, who’ve put in $7 million."
• JPost.com | BlogCentral
  Jerusalem Post is blogging with Roller!
• triangletweetup wiki
  Triangle Tweetup Attendance & information

I missed this one in my social networking API link-fest yesterday: Google announced version 0.7 of the OpenSocial API, some of the data APIs are outlined in the spec and they're still using AtomPub protocol (just like GData).

I had heard there was some push-back against AtomPub, but I really don't know what is going on because there is no transparency at all in the specification development process. So, who knows, but I really don't think they have time to invent an all new protocol. In fact, they'd better wrap things up tout de suite because Google's planning to go live with OpenSocial on Orkut during the last week of February.

I've got to carve out some time ASAP to take a close look at this. The code is in Abdera SVN and there's 20-minute implementation guide (PDF) too:

James Snell: Dan Diephouse and I have been spending the last week refactoring the Abdera server framework with the goal of making is less complicated, easier, and generally better.

There have been some interetsing Atom items recently on James Snell's blog. There was a link to a nice IBM DeveloperWorks article on using Abdera to write Atom feeds to JSON. (I was kinda hoping for an XSL/T, but not matter how you do it, it's a definitely feature that belongs in Abdera.) And there's a good quote from Adrian Sutton's blog post about the Atom features in IBM's Roller and Abdera based Lotus Connections product. And most recently, James linked to the new Google Feed Server project: an Abdera based AtomPub server from Google. All good stuff.

Gotta say, Abdera's looking better and better. It's got the features (IRI support, encrytion, pluggable auth, STAX parsing, etc.) and it's got Dan and appears to have some good momentum going. At this rate, I'm not sure how much more work I'll be putting into ROME Propono. If somebody were to, just for example, contribute an Abdera based AtomPub implementation to Roller, I might have to stop entirely.

• snellspace.com: Sync!
  "Within the course of implementing several Atompub servers, the issue of “feed synchronization” has come up repeatedly"
• Paul Fremantle's Blog: A new kind of (SOA) Registry
  "as we looked at the REST space, we kept noticing how close the [AtomPub] is to our needs"


• OpenSocial - Berlin Web 2.0 Expo
  Google API evangelist Pat Chanezon's OpenSocial presentation
• opensocket - Run OpenSocial Gadgets in Facebook
  An OpenSocial container written as a Facebook application.
• Ruby on Rails: OpenSocial container plugin 0.0.1
  "This is a very early version, but it is under very active development "


• IBM's Carol Jones on Web 2.0 Research and Collaborative Software
  Redmonk video discussion of Lotus Connections, Dogear, internal/private vs. external bookmarking
• Wayne Horkan's weblog eclectic: Weblog language translator
  With Roller specific functionality. Based on JavaScript and Google translation API
• ZDNet.com: Social nets and identity fragmentation
  FaberNovel Consulting has mapped out some trends in social networking and digital identity"
• Postgres at Hi5: June 2007 user group preso
  How unique features of PostgreSQL helped Hi5 scale (PDF presentation)
• Scaling Java and PostgreSQL with Hyperic
  Another perspective on PostgreSQL scalability at Hi5 (PDF presentation)
• Skrentablog: Scaling Facebook, Hi5 with memcached
  "discussion of high volume [sites] using memcached as a critical scaling tool"

Joe Cheng posted another entry in his series explaining the details of AtomPub support in Windows Live Writer (WLM), titled WLW+AtomPub, Part 2: Authentication.

Wondering what WLM looks like? Travelin' Librarian has a nice set of screen-shots of WLM on Flickr including shots of the installation process, HTML mode, preview mode and more. Looks pretty sweet.

I've been in crunch-mode working on a new project, but I've been trying to keep an eye on what's going on the world of Atom Publishing Protocol or AtomPub as the cool kids call it. Here's a wrap-up of some of the AtomPub news I've picked up on the past month or so. [Read More]