Blogging Roller

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]

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 another JavaOne bloggers bash at Thirsty Bear this year, at 6PM on Wednesday night. I'll be there and I hope to see other Roller users and developers there too.

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.

As promised here's some more info on my JavaOne 2007 session. It's based in part on the Beyond Blogging presentation that I presented to a tiny audience at the local Tri-XML conference last year. Tim Bray didn't attend my talk, but he read the slides and called them "the single best introduction and overview I’ve ever seen about feeds and syndication and RSS and Atom and all that stuff." I shouldn't brag. Had he attended the talk he might have had an entirely different opinion, who knows. Anyhow, the presentation has been updated, stream-lined and large portions rewritten to cover ROME and ROME's new Propono sub-project. [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.

Geir's got a great idea for JavaOne. Hope it's not too late for 2007.

There's still time to get those proposals in. I ended up submitting three proposals for technical sessions related to RSS/Atom and one for a Roller birds-of-a-feather (BOF) session.

Here's the link to submit proposals: http://www.cplan.com/sun/javaone07/cfp.

The 2007 JavaOne Conference is May 8th-May 11th and this is the perfect forum to share your technology expertise at Sun's Worldwide Developer Conference.  This year, the conference is being expanded so that while Java is at the core, with a significant emphasis on Java ME, SE and EE, there will be ample opportunity to present your technology or ideas in such areas as open source & community development (which includes Java, OpenSolaris, OpenOffice and others), next generation web or "web 2.0" technologies, web services and platform integration, consumer technologies and how to leverage Java and other technologies for businesses (including start-ups).

So if you have a hot topic, specific tips or tricks that you believe will help developers, then please go to http://www.cplan.com/sun/javaone07/cfp and submit your session abstract.

I've got a trio of proposals just about ready to go. Hopefully, at least one will be accepted and I'll be attending my 4th JavaOne next year and my 3rd one as a speaker.

(photo thanks to Marc Hadley)

I haven't seen any reviews yet, but I thought my talk went quite well. Over 500 people registered and it seemed that the room (capacity 620) was overflowing. My demo worked, despite the fact that I had to work on a Windows box (and found some problems in my .BAT scripts). And I got the timing right too. I finished about ten minutes early, but that was perfect because there were lots of questions.

I think I got the point across that Atom protocol is generic, not just for blogs and applicable to a wide range of problems. I also made a point of promoting Marc Hadley's work on WADL and his talk on RESTful web services with JAX-WS.  Turns out Marc Hadley was in the audience. We'd never met before and my talk ended at noon, so we had lunch together and had a nice chat about WS-* and REST and life in general.

I attended Marc's talk later in the day and it was packed; I'd estimate he had over a thousand attendees. Based on the attendance at my talk, Marc's talk and the number of times I've heard or seen the acronym REST mentioned, I'd have to say that Java folks are pretty interested in putting the web back into web services (is that a Jon Udellism?).

You can get my slides from the JavaOne Content Catalog (link is TS-1756). You can also get the software that I demonstrated, which was the Blogapps Server (the Atom server) and the Chapter 10 code from the Blogapps Examples (the Atom client) download. You can get both of those from the Blogapps project on Java.Net.

Tags: Java, JavaOne, REST, Atom

I'm here in San Francisco and ready for JavaOne. Time for some more horn tooting: one more reminder to come see my talk on Tuesday morning. Here's the info:

I'm back to work after a week of JavaOne and week of summer-shutdown imposed vacation. What did I do on my vacation? After returning from JavaOne, I joined the rest of the family at the grandparent's new beach/golf house close to Topsail Island, NC. I tried my best to avoid work. I did pretty well and that's not as easy as it sounds; I first starting working on Roller during a summer vacation at Ocracoke Island.

I forced myself to take a break. I did the beach thing: dragged beach chairs and umbrellas around, covered my body in sunblock, built sand-drip castles, etc. I showed the boys the original three Star Wars films. I saw The War of the Worlds, which was surprisingly good in a summer fun movie kind of way. I read Freakonomics, also good. That was great; I needed a break. Now I'm back, the older boys are in all-day camp at the YMCA, I'm ready to get back into Roller 2.0 group blogging work.

My second JavaOne was a great experience, but it was a little stressful because up until last night I couldn't find any of my co-speakers. I spent most of Wednesday preparing to give the whole talk by myself, but luckily for me (and the attendees), Pat and Kevin showed up just in time. Unfortunately, Pat showed up with some very bad news for us at Sun: he's leaving to work at Google.

In the end, I think the talk went pretty well. Kevin did most of Pat and my slides on syndication because we had split the talk 50-50 when we couldn't locate Pat on Wednesday night (and assumed he was still in Paris). He did a good job with the material and added in some interesting points from his experience at Rojo.com where they parse millions of feeds per hour with the Java-based Apache Commons (sandbox) FeedParser.

We were a little disappointed with the turnout. I'd be surprised if the 700+ seat Yerba Buena theater was more than 30% full. The fact that were in a lunchtime timeslot on the last day of the show certainly didn't help. Anyhow, I'm relieved that it's over and ready for a nice long week off.

Last week: wrapped up documentation and final fixes Roller 1.2 release. I'm doing the build now. Also, I was able to devote several full days of work to Roller 2.0/Group Blogging and made some real progress.

This week: JavaOne! My talk is Thursday at noon (Blogging: Feed Syndication and Publishing With Java™ Technology TS-7318).