Blogging Roller

• Placating people with options [dive into mark]
  "Google Project Hosting is and has always been a tool to fight license proliferation. It is only incidentally useful"
• tecosystems - Google Code vs License Proliferation
  "There is room in my philosophy for file based reciprocal licenses such as the CDDL, EPL, and MPL. While they may create islands of code, some of those islands are very large indeed"
• Launchpad, by Canonical
  Speaking of FOSS project hosting, LaunchPad looks very cool. Take the tour.
• JavaFX, are we there yet? [kirk.blog-city.com]
  "With this in mind, I'm pretty optimistic that JavaFX, being free and open, will become the preferred choice for building rich clients if..."
• OpenJFX: Open Source sidebar
  "Sun is committed to delivering enhancements to the JavaFX platform and to this end will continue internal development -- hmm... I don't understand the logic here
• Open Source and Cloud Computing - O'Reilly Radar
  "almost all of the software stacks running on cloud computing platforms are open source, for the simple reason that proprietary software licenses have no provisions for cloud deployment"
• Patent Law Blog (Patently-O): The Death of Google's Patents?
  "The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents"

I'm not a fan of sports that require balls, but I had a great time at the Red Sox game Tuesday night. It was my first major league game and a doozy with an apparent rout, rain but no delay, a nail biter and finally victory. Here are a couple of snaps from my iPhone. All thanks to my buddy and co-worker with the season tickets (and a serious case of Red Soxoholism) Bobby Bissett. Thanks Bobby!

Here's a diagram I worked up over the weekend to explain Shindig REST API internals to my team mates. See the Project SocialSite blog for the full story.

I'll be traveling up to the Boston area this week and specifically Burlington, MA to meet with my Project SocialSite team mates, my boss, his boss and who knows who else -- working on a such a distributed team, sometimes I don't know who works where.

I'm going to a Red Sox game Tuesday night (thanks to Bobby) and Thursday night I'm getting together with an old friend, but Wednesday night looks to be open. So, if any blog buddies, twitter followers and/or Roller fans want to meet-up then send me an email (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org).

JSF spec lead Ed Burns just pointed out that some of my Sun-internal comments about JSF have made it outside the firewall and into an issue on the JSF specification project:

On Wed, 19 Mar 2008, David M Johnson said:

I think the goal should be to make JSF applications RESTful by default, with proper use of GET and POST, i.e. only use POST when application data is changing, not for component state. Another goal should be clean, book-markable URLs that only carry path-info and parameters needed by the application logic.

That's easy and the default situation with Rails, Grails, Struts, etc. How hard would it be to redesign JSF along those lines? Would it require EJB2 -> EJB3 level changes to JSF?

I suspect work on JSF 2.0 is too far along for this kind of change now, but it's nice to hear that the idea of a truly RESTful JSF is at least under consideration.

My teammates and I have started a new blog over at blogs.sun.com to cover Project SocialSite and to break the big news: we're open!

We are very pleased to announce that source code is now available for Project SocialSite (under a CDDL/GPL license) and the project is now operating as an open source project following the Glassfish governance policy. We're working in the open and welcome contributors of all stripes. Read more...

BarCamp RDU was great fun this year and I'll probably blog a bit more about it later, but for now here's my favorite picture from the event; taken by Fred Stutzman, who led the event in 2007 and 2008. It's my son Alex (11), using Wayne Sutton's cell-phone to stream video of me giving the opening intro:

Alex really enjoyed helping out and he attended sessions on his own including iPhone development and file system encryption, and he got to play werewolf for the first time.

I've been meaning to blog about this for a while now: thanks to Alejandro Abdelnur, the long awaited ROME v1.0 RC1 is now available for testing.

I've already updated ROME Propono (changes in CVS only) to work with the new release and I've done some testing, but more is needed. I hope to test with Roller and with Blogapps once BarCamp RDU is over.

Links: ROME 1.0 RC1 downloads and change notes

Joe Gregorio: Wow, the local area is really hopping these days, check out the 14 upcoming conferences, camps, workshops and events. Here's some video from the just passed RTP Startup Weekend, we've got coworking sites popping up, and of course a blog to cover it all.

That blog that Joe mentioned is new, NBC 17's 30threads.com, which launched last night at a very well attended blogger, beer and BBQ bash in the Edge Office coworking space in downtown Raleigh. The site is both a community aggregator and a blog authored by local/social media superheros Wayne Sutton and Ginny Skalski. Congrats to Ginny, Wayne and NBC 17 on a great launch and what looks to be a great new community site like no other in the Triangle.

If you are one of the 250 lucky folks registered for BarCamp RDU 2008, then you are invited to a party! BarCamp RDU attendees, please join us at Tyler's Tap Room (map) in Durham's American Tobacco Historic District this Friday night to meet, greet and celebrate BarCamp eve with us. We'll be providing beverages (beer, wine, sodas, etc.) and light snacks (chips and salsa). See you there!

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/tylers-durham.png" alt="tylers logo" />

BarCamp RDU Pre-party
Friday August 1, 2008 from 7:30 - 9:00PM
Tyler's Tap Room
324 Blackwell St
Durham, NC 27701

And of course, the party would not be possible without the generous support of our most excellent sponsors: BlueStripe Software, Canonical, Carborro Creative Coworking, Design Hammer, Edge Office, IBM developerWorks, iContact, Lulu.com, Montie Design, OpenNMS.org, Red Hat, rPath and Viget Labs.

BarCamp RDU 2008 is one week from today and it's shaping up the be the biggest and I hope the best BarCamp RDU so far.

Here are a couple of notes for attendees:

Check the attendee list! On July 21, we decided we had budget and space to register everybody on the waiting list. If you were on the waiting list you are now registered to attend.

Remove yourself if you can't attend. If you registered but cannot make it, please remove your name from the list. For planning purposes, we need to have as accurate a count as is possible.

Propose sessions in advance. If you are interested in initiating or attending a session on a specific topic, then go right ahead and add your topic to the Proposed Sessions list.

Oh, and if you are interested in helping out with preparations or on the day of the event, then please let us know (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org or wayne at wayne-sutton.com)

And one final note. BarCamp RDU would not be possible without the very generous financial support of our sponsors and our host. So...

Thanks to the BarCamp RDU 2008 sponsors!

• BlueStripe Software
• Canonical
• Carborro Creative Coworking
• Design Hammer
• Edge Office
• IBM developerWorks
• iContact
• Lulu.com
• Montie Design
• OpenNMS.org
• Red Hat (BarCamp RDU 2006, 2007 and 2008 host)
• rPath
• Viget Labs

See you next Saturday at BarCamp RDU 2008!

After spending a couple of hours with iUI this week, I've put together the beginnings of an iPhone style interface to Roller. So far, I've been able to do everything I need to do by making a couple of changes in Roller's struts.xml and adding two new JSP pages -- no Java code required (yet). This screenshot shows two of the three screens I have created so far.

I wrote and illustrated a detailed reference card covering RSS 2.0, Atom, AtomPub and the MetaWeblog API for the DZone RefCardz project. The six page "card" includes diagrams of the elements in the feeds, a synopsis of AtomPub protocol and coverage of ROME -- the same stuff you'll find in my book RSS and Atom in Action.

It's a free download, but you have to register with DZone.com to get it. While you're there check out the other reference cards they have. They've got some great ones, including great one for Glassfish.

Here's the link:
http://refcardz.dzone.com/refcardz/rss-and-atom

Via Roller web UI. It's not the most pleasant experience, pinching and scrolling around to move from title to content and then down the page to find the post button, but you can post to Roller from an iPhone. Seems like you could throw together a pretty nice iPhone interface for Roller using iUI. Who needs Android, J2ME, etc. when you can just use the web?

Just a gentle reminder that BarCamp RDU 2008 is coming soon. And one request. We've got 209 people registered and 31 on the waiting list so please help us out and if you registered but cannot make it, please remove your name from the list.

If you are interested in helping out with preparations or on the day of the event, then please let us know (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org or wayne at wayne-sutton.com)

I'm sorry to say that I participated in the iPhone launch debacle yesterday. I wrote up the frustrating and somewhat embarrassing timeline for a buddy of mine. You might find it interesting, so here it is:

Friday, July 11, 2008

6:45AM I arrive at AT&T store at Triangle Town Center mall (Raleigh, NC)
7:50AM 33 people ahead of me, ~150 people behind me in line
7:55AM AT&T rep tells us that they have 15 iPhones, but they'll take orders
8:00AM I leave for Apple store at Crabtee Valley Mall
8:20AM I arrive at said store, line looks to be greater than 200 people
9:00AM The line moves and is making slow progress
10:00AM line stops moving for over an hour because "activation servers are down"
10:05AM I've got my laptop, so I sit down and start coding (w/free Apple WIFI)
11:30AM The line starts moving again. scoot, code, scoot, code...
12:50PM I stop coding because laptop battery power is dead
1:00PM I attend a half-hour meeting via telecon
1:40PM I finally get into store, Apple rep helps me
1:50PM Apple rep helps me, gets "IRU account not supported error message"

I call AT&T, they tell me that I have a special "flag" on my line and they are not allowed to remove it via phone, and I MUST to upgrade my iPhone at the AT&T store -- i.e. wait 5-7 days for delivery from AT&T.

So, I call AT&T again and get another rep who tells me that they CAN remove the flag over the phone, mumble, mumble and then my cell phone connection drops.

2:20PM Apple puts me in a special AT&T problem line
2:40PM Apple rep calls AT&T, gets them to remove flag
2:50PM Apple rep will hold my iPhone until AT&T calls me to confirm flag removal
2:55PM Cheers erupt as the customer who was 1st in line at 8AM finally gets activated
3:00PM I leave empty handed but with a promise that AT&T will call within 24 hours

I'm not going to try to analyze this; I'll leave that up to you, dear reader.

Update: Saturday, July 12, 2008

10:00AM Call AT&T to ask about status, they blame Apple for problem saying only Apple stores had problems yesterday.
10:25AM AT&T tells me they are now issuing a "billing ticket" to ensure that all flags were dropped from my account. They say I'll have to wait up to 4 hours before it has taken effect.
2:25PM Apple store won't test the activation process over the phone so I make the half-hour drive to store only to get the same "IRU account" error.
2:45PM Call AT&T from parking lot, they tell me sorry things are taking longer than expected, we'll call you ASAP. I drive home empty handed again.
5:00PM Call AT&T to complain to a manager about the broken 24 and 4 hour promises. He tells me problem is on Apple side and if I ordered a phone at the AT&T store everything would be fine (in 5-7 days). He says there is no telling when they'll finally clear the flag on my account, so just keep on waiting.

Update: Sunday, July 13, 2008

11:30AM Still no word from AT&T so I called them and they said the flag problem had been resolved. I asked how I could be compensated for all the wasted time they caused me, misdirection and multiple broken commitments they said "we're not offering any compensation for iPhone problems." The AT&T rep also blamed Apple for all problems and said I should have bought from the AT&T store
12:20PM Arrived at Apple store, got my phones

Check out Tim Bray's Atomic Monday post for a summary of recent developments in the world of AtomPub protocol and Atom format. With the uptick in interest in Atom and especially AtomPub protocol's usage in mainstream APIs from Google and Microsoft, I wonder if if would make sense to update RSS and Atom in Action.

The bulk of the book is up-to-date, for what it covers. RSS and Atom haven't really changed and, though the book came out before the spec was finalized, the AtomPub material is basically sound. The ROME material is still current too.

What's missing are all of the new developments: a dozen or more new AtomPub based APIs from Google (GData and OpenSocial) and Microsoft (Live and Astoria) and new tools like Apache Abdera (incubating). Not to mention Windows RSS Platform 2.0 and ROME 1.0 (which is coming soon). Updating the book to cover all of those topics would be quite an endeavor and I'm not sure it's the right approach to covering AtomPub. What do you think?

• InfoWorld 2008-07-07 Lab test: Climb aboard Ruby on Rails
  Interesting that the best rated Ruby-on-Rails IDE is the one that is free & opensource. Go Netbeans!
• ongoin · Atomic Monday
  "Herewith some evidence, for the general tech public, that Atompub is a big deal"
• InfoQ: AtomServer – The Power of Publishing for Data Distribution
  "a distributed, publish-subscribe service is a great way to address resiliency and loose coupling of subsystems"
• blog.reddit -- what's new on reddit: reddit goes open source
  "Until now, the only portion of reddit that wasn't freely available is reddit itself"
• OAuth for Google Data APIs
  "we're proud to announce that all of the Google Data APIs support OAuth"
• Google Code Blog: Protocol Buffers released as Open Source
  "think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler"


• Daily Kos: Cars After The Age of Oil
  "We can switch to a new tech that is older and simpler than the Internal Combustion Engine - the electric horseless carriage was first created in 1830"
• Wired.com: Laugh at High Gas Prices With a 282-MPG VW
  "VW has approved a plan to build a limited number of One-Liters in 2010"
• SAS Solar Farm | New Raleigh, NC
  "Our local 500 pound software gorilla is building a five acre, one megawatt photovoltaic solar farm"

via <a href= "http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/jspwiki_and_xwiki_evaluations">Jim Grisanzio: Chris Phelan has done evaluations of <a href= "http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=64619&tstart=0">JSPWiki and XWiki for use on the OpenSolaris.org site. Based on his 32 requirements, XWiki came out on top.

On balance, XWiki wins by virtue of having better support for management, searching, page taxonomies, virtual servers, content export and language translation/localization support.

JSPWiki has slightly better support for identifying orphaned pages and accesskey support (XWiki 1.4 will have support for access keys).

Confluence was not considered because requirement #0 is "the software must be free and open source," which seems like a reasonable request when selecting software for an open source community site.