Blogging Roller

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.

• 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