Blogging Roller

I blogged about Alfonso Romero's Apache Roller 4.0 Beginner's Guide book before. It's a great resource for folks who want to get the most out of their Apache Roller-based blogs, and not just beginners. As you can see in the photo on the right, I've got my copy. You can get yours directly from Pakt publishing:

Buy a copy of Beginner's Guide to Apache Roller 4.0

To publicize the book, Pakt publishing has been publishing some useful excerpts and even a complete sample chapter online. Here's summary of the excerpts so far:

• Chapter 9 - Advanced topics (PDF)
• Working with Templates in Apache Roller 4.0
• Using video and sound files in Roller
• Including Google Maps in Roller blog posts
• Spicing up your Roller blog with uploaded images

If you've been following Roller development you know that Roller 5.0 is on the way. Most of the changes in Roller 5.0 are "under the hood" so 5.0 won't make Alfonso's book obsolete. Except for a couple of pages in Chapter 5 "Spicing Up Your Blog" that need updated screenshots, I believe everything in the book applies to Roller 5.0 as well.

Crammed into one post...

After a month of blog neglect, my automatic Latest Links from my Delicious.com account started to pile up. Back in the glory days of this blog, I blogged about things instead just saving links or tweeting about them. I realized that, by adding some commentary/opinion for each, I could turn a month's worth of links into a month's worth of blog posts and thus gain total absolution for my sin of going a full month without a post. So that's what I did.  [Read More]

I've attended every JavaOne since 2004, but this year I've got new job and a new conference to attend. This year I'll be traveling to Orlando, FL and attending the Rational Software Conference also known as #rsc2000 in the twit'o'sphere.

I'm not going to be giving a talk, but I will be manning a demo pedestal and showing some of what I've been working on in my first couple of months at IBM: working on getting Rational Team Concert and other Jazz-based products to work well with Lotus Connections, IBM's social software suite which includes communities, forums, blogs, bookmarking, social networking and wikis (coming soon in Connections 2.5).

Why would you want to use Team Concert with Connections? It's all about connecting developers to community, helping developers use social software tools to inform, share and collaborate with the wider community of people that support, manage, sell and use the software.

The tentative plan that we've outlined for all (registered users) to see on the Jazz.net is all about making it easy to setup and integrate community infrastructure for a new software project.

For example, wouldn't it be nice if, when you setup a new project in Team Concert you'd have the option of setting up an integrated Lotus Connections community complete with a project blog, discussion forum, wiki space and shared bookmarks? Shouldn't those blogs, forums and wikis be searched when you do a project search and shouldn't it be dead-simple to fire-off a blog entry or forum post to start a community conversation about a work-item or any other Team Concert artifact? We think so and we think that's just a start; there's lots more we can do.

If you're going to be at RSC 2009, please stop by and say hi. I'll be on duty from 5-8PM on Monday and most of the day Tuesday. Whether you're there or not, if you've got ideas about developer tool and social software integration, I'd love to hear from you.

For the past five months I've had the pleasure of mentoring two San Jose State Univ. graduate students, Ganesh Mathrubootham and Tanuja Varkanthe, who are working on a project for classes CMP 295A and B. They picked one of the projects that I first proposed for Google Summer of Code and then for Glassfish's student outreach program, Media Blogging for Apache Roller. It's turned out to be a major project and the central new feature in the upcoming Roller 5.0 release. [Read More]

Good news for ROME fans. Nick Lothian picked up the puck and is galloping towards the finish line (sorry, I'm terrible at sports analogies).

Nick Lothian on ROME dev:

I've gone and built some preview jars for the upcoming ROME 1.0RC2, ROME Fetcher 1.0RC2 and Modules 0.3 release.

Those jars can be found here: https://rome.dev.java.net/servlets/ProjectDoc...

I've created source and javadoc jars as well as the normal jars - the idea being that I'll get them uploaded to some maven repository.

If you have some spare time, please take a look at these and test them and let me know of any problems. Assuming there are no big issues found I'd like to do a proper release in a couple of days.

Guess that means I should test Propono with RC2.

Tim Bray: What Sun should do: Sun is going through a lousy spell right now. Well, so is the world’s economy in general and the IT business in particular, but this is about Sun. This is my opinion about what my employer should do about it.

It takes a lot of guts to write a piece like that and I'm really glad Tim did it. I'm going to walk out on the same limb and agree with pretty much everything Tim wrote. Tim wants Sun to focus like a laser on providing the best web platform around with Solaris, storage offerings, Java/Hotspot, Glassfish, MySQL and Netbeans for Java, Ruby, PHP, Groovy, etc. tooling. He writes:

It’s easy to understand how our servers, CMT and x86, and the Solaris OS, fit into the Web Suite. All the software, including the HotSpot, GlassFish, and MySQL runtimes, needs to be obsessively tuned and optimized to run best in the context of the Suite. Obviously, the Suite will also include Ruby and Python and PHP runtimes, similarly tuned.

All of Sun’s software tooling should have a laser focus on usability, performance, and ease of adoption for the Web Suite.

I agree, but as a web geek I guess I'm pretty biased.

Tim doesn't shy away from the critical question of what Sun should stop doing. Tim says Sun should give up on the client-side, dropping JavaFX and JavaME (and OpenOffice too, I presume). Here's Tim on JavaFX:

For actual business apps, the kind that our servers spend most of their time running, the war for the desktop is over and the Web Browser won. I just totally don’t believe that any combination of Flash and Silverlight and JavaFX is going to win it back.

I can't say I disagree with that either. Cutting JavaFX and JavaME would be extremely tough and painful decisions, but somebody's going to make to make some of those. Looking at things from Tim's web-platform-only point of view, they make sense. Sun needs only enough client-side software to keep Solaris attractive to developers and to support great development tools on all the platforms that web developers love.

Congratulations to the Apache Abdera team, who've just graduated to full Apache top level project status. The don't have the new site at abdera.apache.org up yet and they're still not quite at 1.0 yet, but this is a major milestone. They've got the best Atom format and protocol toolkit around, in my opinion.

via Garett and James.

We want Project SocialSite to have a Flexible Relationship model that a site operator can tweak to suit the unique requirements of the site's community. We've settled on a model based on relationship types and named levels. In this post, I'll review this new model that we have designed. [Read More]

Next year there will be two CommunityOne events in the US of A; one in New York City on March 18 and the other, coinciding with JavaOne week in June 1 in San Francisco. Here's the call for papers link. The call closes on December 11.

Meena Vyas, Murthy Chintalapati and Allen Gilliland just published an article on BigAdmin that describes the architecture of blogs.sun.com, a Roller, Sun Web Server, Memcached and MySQL based site that averages 4 million hits a day with its two SunFire T2000 servers at 97% idle. You can get the article for free (registration required) here: Sun Blogs: A Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 Reference Deployment

From the Seam Framework team's wiki page on JSF2 major issues:

The JSF2 expert group should work closely with the JSR 311 expert group to define overlapping integration points (unified configuration) and programming models, so that a JSF implementation can work seamlessly with a JAX-RS implementation. For example, a @Path annotated POJO should work as a JSF backing bean without any additional configuration. A JSF application programmer should be able to expose RESTful remote APIs easily.

Right on.

Via Matt Raible

We demonstrated the Project SocialSite widgets in Roller at JavaOne, but we didn't show much other than just the basic widgets. We modified a Roller front-page theme to include a people directory, added a profile page for each user and slapped the widgets on the page. It was pretty rough, as you can see on the right, like our other SocialSite demo vehicles.

This week, I'm working to put together a much better demonstration, something useful enough to deploy to our internal blog site at Sun. Since I have limited time and I really need to get back to working on the SocialSite widgets and web services, I've been thinking about minimum set of features needed to add some value. Here's what I think we need:

• Landing page: shows activities of your friends and groups, your inbox of social requests and place for you to update your status. This could be added to Roller's Main Menu page or to pages of the Front Page blog, which is my preferred option.
• Personal profile page: shows your mugshot and the subset of your profile information that the viewer is allowed to see. Shows your activities and the OpenSocial gadgets you have installed. This could be done in the pages of each user's blog, which would give folks complete control of profile layout via page templates. Or I could be done in the pages of the Front Page blog.
• Activity per entry or comment: whenever you publish a weblog post, or comment on one, an entry will be added to your activity feed so that your friends can see what you're doing. This will be implemented as a feature of a Roller-specific OpenSocial Gadget.
• Protected entries: ability to publish blog entries that are visible only to your friends via the Roller Gadget.

Most of the above items should be pretty easy with the SocialSite widgets, but I'm sure I'll run into a snag or two at least. I always do. I'll post again next week and let you know how far I got.

JSF spec lead Ed Burns just pointed out that some of my Sun-internal comments about JSF have made it outside the firewall and into an issue on the JSF specification project:

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, David M Johnson said:

I think the goal should be to make JSF applications RESTful by default, with proper use of GET and POST, i.e. only use POST when application data is changing, not for component state. Another goal should be clean, book-markable URLs that only carry path-info and parameters needed by the application logic.

That's easy and the default situation with Rails, Grails, Struts, etc. How hard would it be to redesign JSF along those lines? Would it require EJB2 -> EJB3 level changes to JSF?

I suspect work on JSF 2.0 is too far along for this kind of change now, but it's nice to hear that the idea of a truly RESTful JSF is at least under consideration.

• InfoWorld 2008-07-07 Lab test: Climb aboard Ruby on Rails
  Interesting that the best rated Ruby-on-Rails IDE is the one that is free & opensource. Go Netbeans!
• ongoin · Atomic Monday
  "Herewith some evidence, for the general tech public, that Atompub is a big deal"
• InfoQ: AtomServer – The Power of Publishing for Data Distribution
  "a distributed, publish-subscribe service is a great way to address resiliency and loose coupling of subsystems"
• blog.reddit -- what's new on reddit: reddit goes open source
  "Until now, the only portion of reddit that wasn't freely available is reddit itself"
• OAuth for Google Data APIs
  "we're proud to announce that all of the Google Data APIs support OAuth"
• Google Code Blog: Protocol Buffers released as Open Source
  "think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler"


• Daily Kos: Cars After The Age of Oil
  "We can switch to a new tech that is older and simpler than the Internal Combustion Engine - the electric horseless carriage was first created in 1830"
• Wired.com: Laugh at High Gas Prices With a 282-MPG VW
  "VW has approved a plan to build a limited number of One-Liters in 2010"
• SAS Solar Farm | New Raleigh, NC
  "Our local 500 pound software gorilla is building a five acre, one megawatt photovoltaic solar farm"

Nick Lothian tweeted about this JavaOne presentation on LinkedIn because it mentions the ROME RSS/Atom feed parser. I'm really sorry I missed it at JavaOne. What's particularly interesting to me are the diagrams that explain how the LinkedIn architecture has evolved to scale up to 22 million users. Here's an example:

Struts 2 is my favorite Java web framework these days; it's REST-friendly, simple, easy to use, very flexible and the only thing it has with its creaky old Struts 1.x parent is the fact that it's an action framework rather than a component framework like JSF. As most of my readers probably already know, Struts 2 is based on WebWork/XWork the framework that powers JIRA and Confluence, two of the coolest Java webapps around.

Apparently, I'm not alone in this thinking -- I keep on running into folks at JavaOne who feel the same way. But unfortunately, Struts 2 docs are lacking, so I was very happy to see two new books on Struts 2 at the JavaOne bookstore. There's Struts 2 in Action, a rewrite of the classic Manning book, and Practical Apache Struts 2 Web 2.0 Projects from Apress.

I picked up a copy of Struts 2 in Action on Monday and it looks great so far, but I've only skimmed it. I'll let you know what I think once I dig-in on the flight home.

If you're at JavaOne, check out TS-5739 - Hands-on Struts2 by Ian Roughley (author of the Apress book) today at 10:50 AM in Esplanade 307/310.

There are quite a number of Social Software related talks at JavaOne and CommunityOne this year. You can learn about everything from building Social Networks with the Liferay portal and federated relationships with OpenSSO to creating 3D virtual works and implementing OpenSocial with Java. And, I'll finally be able to talk about what I've been working on for the past couple of months -- more about that later. [Read More]

• cgwalters - A software tsunami
  "OpenJDK is finally changing that. Now, you can write a library using Java, it can be sensibly integrated with Free operating systems"
• Countdown for IBM Project Zero | Reg Developer
  "bringing the feedback typical of an open source project without any of the obligations to give the resulting technology back to the community."
• Soviet-era JCP needs change, concedes top commissar | Reg Developer
  Patrick Curran has reached a firm conclusion on his organization: "We have to change," he said. "No more smoke-filled rooms."
• Glynn Foster: Why Our Governance Doesn’t Work
  "There’s no substitute to JFDI - or improving our governance model so that it doesn’t get in the way of suitably motivated people who want to contribute."


• Skype Journal: Skype and the Social Network Stack
  "We need a new stack to sort out social media's plumbing"
• An Open Letter to American Express ~ Chris Pirillo
  "You know, for all the buzz that FaceBook gets… I get far more value out of Twitter."
• buddypress - Google Code
  "suite of plugins that will completely transform a vanilla installation of Wordpress MU into a fully functional social network platform"


• App Platform Strategies Blog: Looking for SOA success stories
  "SOA is not working in most organizations"
• OLPC News: Negroponte Says XP on XO in 60 Days
  "the end of a dream".
• Atlassian Dev Blog - Maven in our development process. Part 4.
  "Maven users need training."

Since the early days, Roller has included a pluggable caching system for blog pages and feeds. In Roller 2.1 (early 2006), Sun's Allen Gilliland rewrote the whole cache system and made it much more flexible and much easier to configure. But, apart from comments in the configuration file, we never provided any documentation for the cache system. In this post, I'll start to correct that. I'll explain the basics of how the cache works and how to configure it.[Read More]

I've been very happy with the choice of Struts 2 for Roller, but I still follow JSF because it's the Java standard. A couple of articles by Ryan Lubke about what's coming in JSF 2.0 got me thinking about JSF again.

• Ryan Lubke's Blog: JSF 2.0 New Feature Preview Series, pt. 2.1: Resources
  "Previous versions of JSF had no facility for serving resources"
• Ryan Lubke's Blog: JSF 2.0 New Feature Preview, pt. 1: ProjectStage
  "the JSF 2.0 EG has given a nod to Ruby on Rails' RAILS_ENV functionality"

One of my problems with JSF is REST. REST fans say JSF is inherently RESTless because every JSF request is a POST. JSF advocates say JSF can do GET and bookmarkable URLs if necessary and that's good enough.

• Bill de hÓra on JSF and REST
  "JSF is clearly not focused on or suitable for working in the REST style to the extent REST principles seem to be actively excluded from the design."
• Gavin King on JSF and REST
  "On these community sites that claim you can't build restful application with JSF. I mean it is total nonsense. It is not even remotely true."
• Gavin's JSF bookmarkable URL example
  In the comments thread of an anti-JSF story at The Server Side.

Fortunately, the plans for JSF 2.0 indicate that REST improvements are coming:

• Java.Net TWik: JSF 2.0 Requirements Scratchpad
  Mentions REST API (JSR-311) and navigation without using POST
• JSR-314: JavaServer Faces 2.0
  "Allow JSF application resources to be accessed via REST" and "Add support for REST (JSR 311)"

Unfortunately, it sounds like all they're planning to do is make it easier to create bookmarkable URLs and add some support for the JSF-311 REST API. Why can't the goal be to make JSF applications RESTful by default? Why can't JSF ensure that POST is only used when required by the application (not the framework) and JSF URLs are simple, clean and always bookmarkable.