Blogging Roller

I've been neglecting my Blogging Roller duties, no doubt, but Roller work continues albeit at a slower pace. If you want the official word on Apache Roller status and progress then check the project's reports to the ASF board. I just added links to the most recent three reports to the Roller project blog. Here's a summary of those reports lifted right from the blog:

Below are some of my photos from my trip to the Open Source Days conference conference in Copenhagen. I only had a little time to explore Copenhagen, but I managed to see a lot of the city. I took a number of very long walks and explored most of the downtown and the Christiana area.

As you can see from the photos, the city is beautiful with lots of big squares, pedestrian-only streets, canals and beautiful architecture. The mass transit system is great and you see a lot of folks getting around by pedal power; I wish my city was so bicycle friendly. At the conference and in my travels around the city, I found that the people are very friendly and eager to be helpful. All in all, a very nice experience and I hope it's not too long before I get to visit again.

If you want to learn more about SocialSite, here's your chance. I'll be doing a SocialSite webinar tomorrow (Thursday, Oct. 9) at 11:15am PT. Here's the summary.

Project SocialSite is taking a new approach to social networking. Instead of replacing your existing web site with a Social Networking system, SocialSite allows you make your existing blogs, wikis, forums and portals social and all backed by the same Social Graph of users. It doesn't matter whether your existing applications are Java, Ruby, PHP or blog/CMS template driven, you can easily add the SocialSite Widgets and and give your users a complete Social Networking experience right in the pages of your existing site. You'll be able to provide Personal Profile and Group Profile pages, a Dashboard for your users to manage their groups and connections and allow your users to install standard OpenSocial Gadgets that operate against their network of friends. Your applications can manage the social graph via the SocialSite web services and via standard OpenSocial Gadget technology.

In this webinar we'll explain the reasoning behind Project SocialSite, the basics of OpenSocial and what SocialSite adds, the SocialSite architecture and its Widgets and Web Services.

You can find the dial-in details on wikis.sun.com.

My talk went pretty well yesterday and I'm definitely enjoying both the conference, which is still in progress, and my stay in Copenhagen. I'll post more photos later, but for now here is a shot of the conference setup at ITU Copenhagen.

I'm just gonna steal this straight from Simon's blog 'cause I'm lazy.

Simon Phipps: I got the chance to speak with Dave Johnson last week and catch up on his work building Project SocialSite, a social graph framework exposed as widgets and web services for use by websites wanting to build collaborative communities. Both technically interesting and destined to be an important part of the social media scene, I'll be looking forward to seeing SocialSite in action.

[ MP3 | Ogg ]

If you want more on Shindig/Java internals, then check this out. Rajdeep Dua has written a very detailed article on the topic and he is asking for feedback: Overview of REST Implementation in Shindig - Java Version.

A lot has changed since I did my first and even my second "how does Shindig/Java work" diagram. Believe it or not, there are now two separate web services protocols in OpenSocial and thus in Shindig. How did that happen you wonder, well read on...

If you need help with Roller, please do not write to me directly. Please write to the Roller user mailing list instead so that everybody has a chance to answer and benefit from the answer to your questions. Of course, there is no guarantee that your questions will be answered on the mailing lists. If you're willing to pay for an assurance of support, then look to Covalent, a company that offers commercial Roller support. Unfortunately, they're still stuck on the old and out-of-date Roller 3.x release.

Oh and by the way, I have not given up on that Delicious.com Blog Posting tool that I wrote about in August. I've got the feed fetching, entry composing parts done now and I'm currently working on the blog posting code. I hope to have something ready to blog about this week.

I mentioned this back in August and now it's just one week away. Guess I better wrap up my slides quick.

I'll be speaking at the Open Source Days in Copenhagen, Denmark Oct. 3-4, 2008 and the topics will be Roller and SocialSite. So, if you're coming then don't miss me at 1:30PM on Friday and if you're not, there's still time to register.

My talk is titled Once and Future Roller, which is a silly title and coincidentally the same title that gave the first talk I gave at Sun when I joined in 2004. My new talk is similar to that old 2004 talk in that it comes at something of a turning point for Roller. Then, I had just joined Sun and started to work on Roller full time and now as I'm working full time on SocialSite and doing what I can to move Roller forward and mentor new developers.

As you can see in the abstract, I'm going to tell the story of Roller, at Sun, at Apache and up to today. I'll try to sum up some of the open source lessons learned along the way. I'll explain the current status of the project and ongoing work. And in the 2nd half of the talk I'll talk about the future and what you can expect from Roller, from SocialSite and how the two can work together.

Thanks to one hard working student and the Google Summer of Code, we now have a patch for OpenID support in Roller and its ready to commit to trunk. Here's a teaser screenshot:

If you want to know more, the proposal for OpenID support is on our wiki and the patch is attached to issue ROL-1733 in our bug tracking system.

The delicious.com Blog Posting tool is an "experimental feature creates a daily post of your latest bookmarks to your blog." Lately, folks have been complaining that it is completely broken. Personally, I never could get the thing to work consistently and for the past couple of years I've been using the Feed Poster Blogapp to do my link postings. Now, I'm thinking about fixing Feed Poster up a bit, making it easier to run from the command-line or a cron-job and re-releasing it for those folks who can't get the delicious.com tool to work.

What follows is a synopsis of how I think the tool should work.

delposter - Synopsis

You run the tool by entering something like this 'java -jar delpost.jar [parameters]' on your favorite command-line. The tool will connect with delicious.com, grab all of your bookmarks since the last time the tool was run, create a post that lists all of them and publish that post on your blog (via AtomPub or MetaWeblog API). Here are the parameters you can specify on the command line.

• username - (required) your delicious.com username
• blogusername - (required) username for blog API
• blogpassword - (required) password for blog API
• blogposturl - (required) blog API endpoint URL
• blogid - ID of blog (required if you have more than one)
• blogapitype - either 'metaweblog' or 'atompub'
• title - format of title, can include ${date}
• dateformat - date format to be used in title
• includetags - include only bookmarks with these tags
• excludetags - exclude bookmarks with these tags
• since - number of hours back to go looking for posts (ignoring last run time)
• postdraft - post entry as draft
• appenddraft - if last post is still in draft mode, then delete it and add its contents to the new post being created.

Is that what you'd like to see in a delicious.com Blog Posting tool?

Of course, a command-line tool is not the most friendly way to do things, so perhaps I should provide an installer that sets up a cronjob or a Windows Schedule Task. Or maybe I'll reserve that as an outer-ring feature.

My old Sun w2100z workstation died a couple of weeks ago. So I ordered a brand new Sun Ultra 24 and installed a whole heap'o Sun software on it -- everything I need for SocialSite and Roller development. Here's a rundown of my initial experiences with my new primary development system.

• First Blog (Apache Roller) : Gerry's View
  "I would like to complement Apache Roller on its ease of use, excellent documentation and low set up time."
• Groovy Grails and Webby Things : Apache Roller 4.0 supports Groovy
  Groovy folks finally discover support in Roller
• Sun on list of 15 Companies That Really Get Corporate Blogging
  "That's 110,000 posts of promotional gold for Sun and they know it"
• August 2008 Board Report - Apache Roller
  Covers community health, status of our most recent release, work that has been done in the trunk and plans for new work
• Introduction to Apache Roller
  Presentation by Matt Raible on Slideshare
• number 9: see me rollin, they hatin
  Guidelines for running Roller 4 in a cluster
• Using DTrace to Troubleshoot Roller (Japanese) - Jim Grisanzio
  Wish I could read Japanese
• GitHub repository search
  Happy to find a couple of Roller plugin projects on Github

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.

I'm happy to report that I'll be traveling to Copenhagen, Denmark to talk about Roller and Project SocialSite at the Open Source Days 2008 conference on Oct. 3-4 this year. I'm going to tell the story of Roller and lessons learned along the way and then talk about blogging in the age of social networks and how to social-enable Roller with the SocialSite widgets. The session is called titled The once and future Roller.

If you want the lowdown on what's going on with Roller community health, ongoing work and upcoming releases then check out the Apache Roller August 2008 Board Report.