Blogging Roller

We have all recovered from the tummy bug and have resumed holiday fun. Now we are off to my parents house for a Christmas eve dinner. Alex (6) and Linus (4) are so excited that their feet rarely touch the ground and when they do, only tippy toes come in contact with carpet. We are off. I hope to post a picture of our little Santa later tonight or tomorrow. Until then, Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!

Rest in peace, Joe.

Until yesterday, I was enjoying my time off, finishing up Christmas shopping, and spending time with friends back in town for the holidays. I had no time for blogging. Now the whole family and I are suffering from a <a href= "http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=godawful">godawful and <a title="you can't even sail close to NC without getting sick" href= "http://www.pilotonline.com/military/ml1220sic.html">highly contagious stomach bug. Little Leo spent his 6th month birthday going in and out of fever with hives. Thankfully, he has been able to keep his mommy milk down, he has avoided dehidration, and he remains <a href= "http://www.quinion.com/words/qa/qa-hap1.htm">happy as a clam.

I have not been so lucky. I spent most of the night tossing and turning, with an emphasis on tossing. What a drag. Now you know why I have not been posting and why I had to miss the <a href= "http://radio.weblogs.com/0104308/2002/12/23.html#a2858">RTP bloggers lunch today.

Here is my review: awesome, spectacular, beautiful, and a great movie. Ebert gave it three out of four stars.

Apparently the trick to getting a large number of hits from java.blogs is to mention an IDE, especially Eclipse, or, if that fails, insult <a href=" http://www.freeroller.net/page/acoliver">Andy Oliver. Don't worry, I will use this new found power for good.

I'll tell you about a new blog on my java.blogroll: Erik Hatcher. As Matt Raible <a href= "http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd/20021218#erik_hatcher_s_blog">pointed out the other day, Erik is an Ant guru, author, and speaker. As Sam Ruby pointed out, Erik is rewriting Rael Dornfest's minimalistic <a href= "http://www.raelity.org/apps/blosxom/">Blosxum (pronounced "blossom") blogger in Java. Erik is using the <a href= "http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/docs/index.html">Lucene search engine for blog entry storage, thus the name Blogscene. Cool stuff.

I also added Matt Croydon, whom I know less about but have reading regularly for a couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to meeting Matt at the next RTP bloggers lunch on Monday. He is driving down from the D.C. area.

Speaking of RTP bloggers, Mark Pilgrim now has a monthly column on O'Reilly's XML.com site called Dive into XML. Check out his first column What is RSS?. Congratulations Mark!

Is .Net the right Choice? - PC Magazine compares .Net Server 2003 with Linux.

WIRED says Microsoft is The New Electric Company

An IBM-backed Java tools initiative could be yanked back into Sun Microsystems Inc's sphere of influence, to heal a potential community rift, through efforts lead by Oracle Corp, <a href= "http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/53/28615.html">writes Gavin Clarke [The Register].

Despite the ridiculous sounding introduction, the article in fairly interesting. As I have mentioned <a href= "http://www.rollerweblogger.org/page/roller/20021113#i_really_missed_the_point">before, Oracle is pushing for a standard IDE plugin-API so that Eclipse does not become the universal standard tools platform. However, this doesn't line up with that effort:

"[Members] want to drag Eclipse back in-line with Sun... SWT versus Swing has put some tension in the organization." [Ted Farrel, Oracle]

He can't be suggesting that IBM rewrite Eclipse using Swing, that would be crazy, so he must be suggesting that SWT becomes part of Java.

I wrapped up my first draft of 'Data Access with JDBC' last week and tonight I submitted 'Performance and Debugging' to WROX. Overall, I am pretty happy with the two chapters. I was able to apply what I learned while working on the application server development team at my current job and what I learned from developing, deploying, and supporting Roller. Writing the chapters was a hell of a lot of work and I really had to lock myself away from family and friends to get the job done, but it was also a lot of fun.

Tomorrow is my last day of work until January 6th and I have no big travel or vacation plans this Christmas. I bet WROX won't get back to me until after the new year and so I'll have lots of free time to spend with the trio of little tikes, hack around with Roller, and think about new directions for 2003.

According to Patrick Chanezon, BEA Workshop is ready for butter and jam and there only three IDE players left:

IBM builds momentum around Eclipse. New members sign on to program, but not Sun or BEA [InfoWorld: Web Services]

There are 3 players left in the java IDE game: Sun, IBM and BEA.

With IBM having bought Rational, I think BEA Workshop is toast. Too bad it looked real nice. How long before they port it to the Eclipse platform :-)

What about IDEA IntelliJ?

What about Borland, who now owns both JBuilder and the Together Control Center?

I don't think you can write them off just yet.

Speaking of that "real nice" BEA Workshop GUI: last night at the TriJUG meeting, Chris Garrett of TogetherSoft demonstrated the Together Control Center BEA Workshop Accelerator.  The Accerator allows you to build web services for the Weblogic server in a graphical manner using a UML-like notation. These web services use the Weblogic Workshop's server-side framework, but the Weblogic Workshop GUI is not involved in the process in any way.

TogetherSoft may have no need for the BEA Workshop GUI, but BEA has not given up on the Workshop at all.  According to this InfoWorld article, BEA is "expanding [the Workshop] into a full-blown development environment for not only Web services but also for pages, for server-side components, for visual controls, visual interfaces, the whole nine yards"

This might be interesting:

Next on my plate: I'm digging *back* into Struts, so I can compare how Struts and WebWork compare directly. [epesh]

It should be a good one too. Chris Garrett of TogetherSoft Borland will be discussing how WebLogic Workshop (formerly known by the codename Cajun) and Together Control Center may be used together to consume 100% of your CPU cycles create web services. I'm just joking, of course. I love playing with those cool GUI dev-tools. Too bad I can never afford to use them past the end of the evaluation period. Thank goodness for my whiteboard, Ant, and Axis.

It is not often that there is a cool conference that I can actually afford to attend. Sounds like this (or these?) could be one(s):

Symbiotic conference planning ideas. Imagine a caravan full of <a href= "http://radio.weblogs.com/0104308/2002/11/14.html#a2823">RTP bloggers descending on Washington DC in June... [Sam Ruby]

Humano-Tech Weblogging Conference - East? Ed Cone has some <a href= "http://radio.weblogs.com/0107946/2002/12/15.html#a270">suggestions for RTP conference locations. Perhaps <a href= "http://postneo.com/2002/12/14.html#a1469">Matt Croydon would consider driving down. [Sam Ruby]

Anthony Eden and Thomas Wheeler are working to compare the many web application frameworks out there and the are off to a nice start with this <a href= "http://waferproject.org/feature-matrix2.html">feature matrix. Currently, they are focusing only on Java frameworks. I had no idea that there were so many. Published books are an important form of documentation, so the documentation column should indicate the number of books on each framework. In terms of books on bookstore shelves, Cocoon and Struts are probably the best documented frameworks on the list.

I'm pretty sure that I first heard the term "brute force debugging" from my mom, who is also a programmer. I was writing about debugging this weekend, so I tried to find the origin of the term via Google. I didn't find the origin, but I did find some interesting <a href= "http://www.cs.colorado.edu/%7Ehendrixs/classes/lectures/lecture_10.pdf">lecture notes on debugging by Susan Hendrix of the <a href= "http://www.cs.colorado.edu/">Univ. of Colorado, Boulder. I really like Hendrix's guidelines for debugging. The first two are think and sleep on it. Great advice, wouldn't you agree? I really need to do more of both, whether I am involved in debugging or not.

Hendrix really doesn't like brute force debugging. She says that there are three brute force debugging techniques: 1) use of dumps, 2) scattering print statements randomly, and 3) over-reliance on debuggers. That doesn't sound quite right. My mom taught me that brute force debugging was the practice of placing well positioned print statements in code to locate where a bug is occuring. I like that definition better, but it is my mom's definition so what do you expect? If my mom was still programming today, I bet she'd be using Log4J, or something similar, instead of brute force debugging, no matter how you define it.

Blogging Roller is an example of what's wrong with the world...[Bob McWhirter]

OK, Ok, ok... listen to Phish. Just be aware that Phish can be a gateway to more serious jams.

Don't forget, Al Gore kicking off his presidential campaign by hosting Saturday Night Live tonight and Phish is the musical guest. Either he will completely dork-out and blow all of his remaining political capital, or he will roll up a big fat spliff, smoke it on stage with Phish, and win back the hearts and minds of all of us tree-hugging, jam-band lovin', bleeding-heart liberals. We'll take him all the way to the White House baby, all he has to do is inhale.

As things stand right now I'm voting for Senator McCain in 2004, based entirely on his October SNL performance.

Please do not interpret the above statements as an indication that I condone Phish.

Congratulations to Matt on his <a href= "http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd/20021214#new_job_struts_testing_frameworks">new job.

Hierarchical categories. <a href= "http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=1420154&forum_id=9297">Matt mentioned the idea of hierarchical categories on the roller-dev list the other day. Scott Switzer mentioned this <a href= "http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=1256114&forum_id=9297">back in October and <a href= "http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller/ViewIssue.jspa?key=ROL-57">put it into JIRA. A hierachical categories feature seems a little complicated and maybe a little confusing. Maybe with the right UI, hierarchical catagories would work. Is it overkill?

Multiple categories. Right now, each weblog entry has one and only one category. Most blogging software allows you to assign multiple categies per entry, I think Roller needs this too.

Selective display of categories. It would be nice if the Roller page macros allowed you to specify which categories are to be displayed on each page and in each newsfeed. That way, you can have a developer oriented page that includes your Java, C#, and AOP categories; and you cab have a family oriented page that includes your Personal, Cat, and Look-At-My-Cute-Little-Baby categories. As Matt suggested, we could also use hierarchical categoes to achieve the same goal.

The French Application-Servers.com website is experimenting with using Roller-based <a href= "http://blogs.application-servers.com">weblogs to complement and possibly to replace message-board based forums, which often erupt into flame wars. Tres cool!