Blogging Roller

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.

I'm not motivated to write new blog entries but for some reason I was motivated to update my blog's theme. This time I decided to go with Twitter Bootstrap + jQuery. It's responsive, so to speak. What do you think? I think it takes a little too long for the banner image to load.

Just a quick note about this site:

Today I upgraded this site to the latest Roller 5.1.0-SNAPSHOT (unreleased) code base. I did this to fix a couple of vulnerabilities found recently by researchers from Coverity (thanks Coverity!).

The Roller team fixed the vulnerabilities reported by Coverity in both the Roller 5.1-SNAPSHOT (unreleased) and the Roller 5.0.x branch. If you're running Roller, you should upgrade to Roller 5.0.1 immediately.

See also: Apache Roller 5.0.2 security fix release now available.

It's been while since I upgraded this site (or even blogged here) so the upgrade was a little painful. When I first upgraded I found that the JSPWiki plugin was broken and the site would not even load. Turns out, I was using an archaic copy of the JSPWiki jar and it was compiled against an equally archaic version of Lucene. Since we recently upgraded the version of Lucene included in Roller, this broke things. I fixed this by upgrading the Roller JSPWiki plugin to use the latest code from Apache JSPWiki. I also created a Github repo with the new JSPWiki code, which you can find here: Roller JSPWiki Plugin on Github.

I've already mentioned this on Twitter and LinkedIn, but just in case you missed it: I'll be speaking tomorrow night at the Triangle AWS and Triangle DevOps joint meetup at Argyle Social in Durham, NC. I'll give a quick overview of cloud orchestration and Wayin Hub. Then I'll dive into the details of how we automate deployment, scaling and backups for Wayin Hub using AWS and AWS Cloud Formation.

As a little teaser, here's a GIF animation of my automated deployment slide:

For more information check the Triangle DevOps page for the event.

UPDATE: slide are now on SlideShare.

Newer versions of Apache Cassandra include CQL, an SQL-like query language that supports both query, update and delete statements as well as the Data Definition Language (DDL) statements like create and alter for tables and indexes. You can create tables (known as column families in Cassandra lingo) just like you can in a relational database, but there are some caveats.

This is the sixth in my series of Web Integration Patterns. Check out the intro at this URL http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/entry/web_integration_patterns

Synopsys

This pattern is about integrating web sites and applications by using standard feed formats to convey timely information, updates, status messages, events and other things from one web application to another.

Motivations

• Take advantage of the many tools and services that can produce, consume, aggregate and build work-flows around feeds as a way to integrate web applications.
• Use a standards-based approach to ensure that that widest range of feed producers and consumers can be supported. Make it so everybody who needs can read your feeds.

Ten years ago on this day, O'Reilly published an article that I wrote called Building an Open Source J2EE Weblogger, the article that introduced the Roller weblogger (now known as Apache Roller) to the world. It changed my career and my life in a bunch of nice ways and 10 years later I'm still benefiting from my choice to create Roller and write that article. So you can get a taste of the times, here's the intro:

Building an Open Source J2EE Weblogger: As a Java developer, you should be aware of the tremendous wealth of open source development software that is available for your use -- even if you have no desire to release any of your own software as open source. In this article, I will introduce you to some of the most useful open source Java development tools by showing you how I used these tools to develop a complete database-driven Web application called Roller.

Roller fits into the relatively new category of software called webloggers: applications that make it easy for you to maintain a weblog, also known as a blog -- a public diary where you link to recent reading on the Web and comment on items of interest to you.

The Roller Web application allows you to maintain a Web site that consists of a weblog, an organized collection of favorite Web bookmarks, and a collection of favorite news feeds. You can define Web pages to display your weblog, bookmarks, and news feeds. By editing the HTML templates that define these pages, you have almost total control over the layout and appearance of these pages. Most importantly, you can do all of this without leaving the Roller Web application -- no programming is required.

I've written and talked about Roller and the history of Roller numerous times. If you're interested in learning more about it here's my most recent Roller presentation, which covers Roller history in some detail:

These days, Roller isn't really thriving as an open source project. Wordpress became the de facto standard blogging package and then micro-blogging took over the world. There are only a couple of active committers and most recent contributions have come via student contributions. Though IBM, Oracle and other companies still use it heavily, they do not contribute back to the project. If you're interested in contributing to Roller or becoming part of the Apache Software Foundation, then Roller needs YOU!.

Congrats to the Apache Rave team on reaching top-level project status.

OpenSocial API Blog: Announcing Apache Rave: The project started only a year ago, March 1 2011, when entering the Apache Incubator as a collaborative effort by individuals from a wide range of corporations, non-commercial organizations, and institutes from around the world and was seeded by code donations from The MITRE Corporation, Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute, SURFnet, OSS Watch, Hippo, and numerous individual developers.

Rave builds on open standards and leverages and aligns with other open source projects like Apache Shindig and Apache Wookie to deliver a lightweight, flexible, widget-based platform that easily scales across federated application integrations, social intranets, and multi-channel social communities with enhanced personalization and customized content delivery.

Interesting speculation on the make-up of Amazon's cloud:

Amazon EC2 cloud is made up of almost half-a-million Linux servers | ZDNet :

We know that Linux on servers is big and getting bigger. We also knew that Linux, thanks to open-source cloud programs like Eucalyptus and OpenStack, was growing fast on clouds. What he hadn’t know that Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), had close to half-a-million servers already running on a Red Hat Linux variant.

Huang Liu, a Research Manager with Accenture Technology Lab with a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering whose has done extensive work on cloud-computing, analyzed EC2’s infrastructure and found that Amazon EC2 is currently made up of 454,400 servers.

JIRA's got a real REST API now:

REST easy with JIRA 5 | Atlassian Blogs: Now that JIRA 5 is out, let’s talk about one of my favorite features of this new release, JIRA’s new REST API. JIRA has supported remote APIs for many years with SOAP, XML-RPC, and JSON-RPC. However, telling developers that you support SOAP (and only SOAP) is like saying that you like writing applications with COBOL — it’s out of style. Today’s cool kids gravitate towards REST. It’s clean, simple, and highly portable across languages and frameworks.

And checkout the nice looking API docs, which look like they were generated by WADL-to-HTML.

An alternative to Atlassian's new API is the recently release Rational OSLC Adapter for JIRA, which allows you to do more sophisticated integrations with JIRA including delegated UIs for issue creation and selection.

This is the fifth in my series of Web Integration Patterns. Check out the intro at this URL http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/entry/web_integration_patterns

Synopsis

Allow other web sites and applications to integrate your site into their web pages by providing an embeddable user interface, commonly known as a Gadget or Widget, which allows users to view and interact with your site in the context of other sites.

Motivations

• By embedding Widgets in your site, you can make your site more useful and informative to your users. Users can access relevant information from other sites in the context of your web site.
• By allow other sites to embed your Widgets, you can give your site and the services that it offers wider reach. Your users can access and interact with your services in the context of other sites.

This is such good news for the web that it gets its own blog entry. According to Dan Web, an engineer at Twitter:

@timhaines plus, now I'm in charge of undoing twitters hashbang URLs I can 

    confirm that all the issues in that article are very real.

@danwrong x months from now (when your project completes) Twitter will no 

    longer use hashbangs?

@timhaines correct. All gone. It was a mistake for several reasons. 

    PushState or bust.

The whole conversation is here:
http://storify.com/timhaines/hashbang-conversation

Here's an excellent chapter on HTML 5 history and PushState: http://diveintohtml5.info/history.html

And in case you've forgotten, here's why hashbangs suck.

far as I can tell, clicking theFacebook "Like" button means "please spam me endlessly"

— Dave Johnson (@snoopdave) February 5, 2012

Worth a read and related to my Web Integration Patterns post on Embedded Properties in HTML:

HTML5 Microdata and Schema.org:HTML5 Microdata and Schema.org On June 2, 2011, Bing, Google, and Yahoo! announced the joint effort Schema.org. When the big search engines talk, Web site authors listen. This article is an introduction to Microdata and Schema.org. The first section describes what HTML5, Microdata and Schema.org are, and the problems they have been designed to solve. With this foundation in place section 2 provides a practical tutorial of how to use Microdata and Schema.org using a real life example from the cultural heritage sector. Along the way some tools for implementers will also be introduced. Issues with applying these technologies to cultural heritage materials will crop up along with opportunities to improve the situation.

Worth a read:

Understanding Google's new privacy policy: When Google changed its privacy policy last week, they made a strong effort to ensure that everyone knew that a change had occurred, but if you tried to figure out what had actually changed, you had to wade through a lot of buzzwords and legalese. Now the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Rainey Reitman explains it in simple language.

A reasonable check-list for selecting an open source project:

How I select Open Source projects: An Open Source project is more than its set of tools. But this post is not about what is better, github or ASF. Much has been said already about it (and too much bullshit). What really bugs me is that people seem to choose Open Source projects after the tools the projects use. Here is my personal list after which I choose projects.

Apparently 2001 called and asked for its office suite back.

IBM to close down Symphony, its OpenOffice fork | ZDNet : This move can’t come as too much of a surprise. In July 2011, IBM started donating its Symphony code to the Apache Foundation, which is now overseeing the remains of the OpenOffice project. I say “remains” because most of the development energy in the OpenOffice family has been going to the LibreOffice fork. Many users and Linux distributors, such as Ubuntu, have replaced OpenOffice with LibreOffice.

Nice coverage of Wayin in CNN Money:

Scott McNealy's Wayin weighs in on the election - Fortune Tech: Nearly 30 years after he co-founded Sun, and two years after the company sold to Oracle (ORCL), one of the tech industry's most outspoken and colorful executives is back. Only instead of selling servers and software to businesses, he's trying to get consumers, sports teams, and corporations -- and politicians -- to embrace a social media tool that's a little hard to define: It is part polling app, part interactive media tool (think Twitter), and part enterprise service.

The polling software at the heart of Wayin is super easy to use. It allows you to create basic questionnaires, on the web or using a mobile app, by selecting an image and asking a question. Pick a photo of the Fab Four, ask Who is your favorite Beatle?, and bingo, the answers from your followers will start trickling in immediately.

Good information on a bad API. The comments are good too:

HttpURLConnection's Dark Secrets: If you’re programming in the Java language and want to talk to a Web server, there are several libraries you can choose from. HttpURLConnection is one popular choice, and for Android programming, the engineering team has now officially suggested that you use it where possible.

Great analysis, as usual, from Stephen O'Grady of Redmonk. Here's the part about Dynamo that concerns me, the lock-in:

Amazon DynamoDB: First Look: Like the initial wave of PaaS platforms, however, DynamoDB is available only through a single provider. Unlike Amazon’s RDS, which is essentially compatible with MySQL, DynamoDB users will be unable to migrate off of the service seamlessly. The featureset can be replicated using externally available code – via those projects that were originally inspired by DynamoDB, for example – but you cannot at this time download, install and run DynamoDB locally.