Blogging Roller

One of the appealing things about Webwork is that Webwork actions are not tied to the web (i.e. the Servlet API) in the way that Struts actions are. You can use Webwork as a generic action framework, implement your business APIs as actions, and then re-use those APIs behind any UI technology: web, Swing, AWT, command-line, etc. You've probably heard WebWork advocates tout this genericity as a major advantage of Webwork over Struts. According to Anders Hovmoeller, writing to the WebWork mailing list, it is the key advantage of WebWork over Struts:

Anders Hovmoeller In my opinion, the only really solid argument for using WW over say Struts is that we are not locked up in a certain environment. I firmly believe that the core parts of XW can easily avoid being tied up to servlets, as WW does now.

But this is opinion is not shared by all WebWorkers. Rickard Oberg, the original architect of Webwork (who recently resigned from his position as architect of the project), does not see it that way. This is from a Jan 13, 2003 post on the Webwork mailing list:

Rickard Oberg That WebWork turned out to be a generic command pattern was more of an accident then by design. Because of this genericity WebWork is not optimally designed for doing web work. Some of the "plumbing" needs to be done by actions themselves, instead of having it be done by the framework. I want to make WebWork/XWork *better* suited for the web, because that is what *I* *need*. I want to get more for less. I don't give a damn about making it work well in Swing. If it does, then whaddyaknow, cool. If it doesn't, shit happens. If there's ever a point where I need to decide between "keeping genericity, or making it work better for the web", the latter is a given.

If you are considering using Webwork instead of Struts for your webapp, you might want to follow along on the Webwork mailing list to see where it is heading. Is it continuing along the generic "XWork" framework path or will it turn and become even more web-friendly?

The Automatic Linkbacks feature still needs some work. In addition to title and excerpt, I need to extract a permalink for the refering entry. I also need to add a linkback editor so that linkback URLs, titles, and excerpts may be edited. Right now, linkbacks can be shown or hidden via the Roller Editor UI but that's all - other edits require SQL.

As you can see below under the "For further reading on today's posts" heading, I have completed work on Automatic Linkbacks. I'll tell you a little bit more about the implementation later, but right now is pizza time.

Sam Ruby: Matt Croydon: Translating that into an XML-RPC call hurts my head. That's because the MetaWeblog API doesn't specify how to deal with required attributes.  Or with namespaces.  Or with nested XML elements...  Of couse, one could one by one address these items, and in the process reinvent XML.

It hurts my head too. I'd rather see a SOAP interface where everything is specified by WSDL, or a RESTLog-like interface where everything is drop-dead simple.

Saimon Moore describes how to setup HEP for RSS aggregation as as a blogging client to Roller via Roller's Blogger API support. Thanks Saimon.

Found via Andy Oliver's blog. Is this to be followed closely by Roller's first court-ordered restraining order or a long-distance blogging relationship?

The LinkbackExtractor that I posted yesterday uses the Swing HTML parser, which is built into Java, but there are other Java-based HTML parsers available. Erik Hatcher suggested the JTidy HTML parser and there is also the HTMLParser project on SourceForge. Know of any others?

These guys are referer spammers: phplabs.com, openproxies.com, and lahostnet.com.

<a href= "http://www.freeroller.net/page/chiara/20030110#way_too_weird">Chiara: I put a long blog last night after reading Rickard's response to Ted Neward's AOP!=Interception blog. but, hey, when i finished it, and click on publish, it took me out to the "login" screen. And this morning, I see that my blog is gone.

Chiara, sorry to hear you lost your post. Did you enter your username and password and procede to login? If you had, then your post should have been saved. That always works for me. BTW, welcome to blogging and welcome to Roller.

Looks like a very interesting talk this month at the RTP Websphere Users Group meeting. Shakeel Mahate will talk about Struts in general, and Thomas Roche will talk about the Struts tooling that IBM has cooked-up for Websphere Application Dev Studio (i.e. the high-end version of Eclipse). I'll be there, deadlines be damned!

Here is my cut of <a href= "http://www.rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/LinkbackExtractor.java.txt">LinkbackExtractor.java. Compare this to <a href= "http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/10/11.html#further_reading_upgrades">Mark Pilgrim's linkbackparser.py

As I've been working on Roller's further-reading feature for the 0.9.7 release, which is essentially the same as Mark Pilgim's automatic backlinks and further reading implementation, I've been trying to learn more about other weblog entry linking mechanisms such as Movable Type's Trackback feature and Ian Hickson's Pingback.

Luckily for me, Ted Neward, Simon Fell, and Sam Ruby have been blogging about this recently. Ted wonders which technique is most popular, Simon says trackback is the leader, and Sam explains some of the differences between Trackback, Pingback, and harvesting backlinks from referer logs (a.k.a. automatic linkbacks).

In an earlier post, Sam suggested a very interesting WIBNI enhancement to Trackback: "Wouldn't It Be Nice If instead of URL encoded parameters, one could simply POST the RSS item that contains all the yummy goodies that one could imagine and let the server decide what pieces it wanted to keep and what pieces it chooses to ignore? This is how the RESTLog API works today..."

Edgar Sanchez: We are not programmers to defend and protect Java (or Visual Basic, C#, Cobol, Lisp, etc., etc.), we are not programmers to defend and protect object orientation (or relational databases, AOP, etc.), hell, we are not programmers to defend and protect Sun (or Microsoft, IBM, ...) We are programmers to create software solutions for problems that people have (those people could be programmers also, of course) and we use the better tools of the bench.

Lance points out another free Roller service. Awesome! That brings the total to three: FreeRoller, blogs.application-server.com, and the newest Kalixia.

Shawn A. Van Ness quoted by Brad Wilson: The biggest single thing that killed hungarian within MS, for .NET, is the lack of consistency with which it's been used. That's the one thing that both the proponents *and* opponents of hungarian could agree on: the single worst variable naming convention in the world is "inconsistent hungarian". And so, nobody could come up with a perfectly consistent (yet reasonably consice) system for applying hungarian notation to such a richly typed world as .NET (viz. what's the prefix for ApplicationException?). So it's gone. End of story.

RIP.

This was one of the comments on my Eclipse 2.1 M4 out of memory! story:

Ted Stockwell: Yep. And the more third-party plugins you use the worse the problem will get. You can thank SWT for that. Java developers aren't used to dealing with the mindless drudgery of explicity releasing any and all resources that they use. It's back to the bad ole days of C++ resource management for SWT developers.

I don't know enough about this to refute it, but I never noticed any memory problems with Eclipse before M4 and I am using the same plugins now as I did before.

The other comment on the story was from a person named 'gizmo' who recommends that I start Eclipse like so: eclipse.exe -vmargs -Xmx256m.

Ben Simpson: As for javablog.com, I see a minimalist approach forming.  The minimalist approach rules out hungry Struts or greedy EJBs floating around in my 32mb of ram container. I was thinking of running the whole thing from a cached set of small html pages.

To each, his own. Ben, see my previous post. Sounds like Robert might have your blogging software. Also, javablogs.com is not based on Roller.

Erik Hatcher is not the only one with a Java port of the minimalist Perl-based Blosxom blogger software; Robert Rasmussen has one too. He says he will be moving over to it, and posting the code, soon.

Bob Lee: Roller has a class org.roller.business.castor.Import that can import Roller and Radio exports. The Roller build.xml "import" target demonstrates its usage. Wish I'd found this yesterday. Oh well.

There are a number of little undocumented nuggets like that in Roller. Want to contribute some docs?

By the way Bob, your site looks very cool but it looks less cool when linked to via permalink as I did in the block-quote above. Could some Roller template magic fix that or is a due to a limitation of Roller that you have discovered?

Elliotte Rusty Harold: JavaWorld has announced that they're going to start charging $49.99 for access to back issues, which they define as anything more than a week old.

Good thing I didn't publish the Roller article on JavaWorld.