Blogging Roller

When I lived in Jamaica, there was one TV station and on this one TV station there was one weekly Reggae show. The show was called Reggae Strong. In the canned intro to the show, the announcer would always explain that "a weekly show about Reggae could be called Reggae Week, but reggae nah weak: Reggae Strong!"

Roller is certainly going strong. At the start of the week I forked 0.9.6 off into it's own branch in case we need to do a bug fix release. Since then, Lance has checked in two great new features: support for <a href= "http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/page/lance/20021109#andy_oliver_wants">comments on weblog entries and a <a href= "http://www.brainopolis.com/roller/page/lance/20021114#s_p_e_l_l">spelling checker for the weblog editor. Great stuff. Matt Raible has kindly opened up a <a href= "http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd/20021114#wanna_try_roller">demo account on his Roller install so you can try the new features.

The Roller-driven weblogs over a FreeRoller are also going strong. There are some great weblogs and some real bona fide Java gurus writing over there. They are bringing in lots of readers. Roller is going strong, but I don't think it is strong enough withstand getting slashdotted. Thank goodness Rickard posted his J2EE-vs-DotNet review on a real webserver.

I've been trying to take it easy with Roller, but I have been doing a little work. I did some work reduce the per-session memory usage in Roller and I thought I had eliminated all leakage. Unfortuntely, the leak remains, but it is a much slower leak. I've also been trying to figure out why old stories show up as new in aggregators such as Aggie and Feedreader.

With the cool new comments and spell checking features checked in, I think we need to start thinking about a 0.9.7 release (after we plug the memory leak of course).

28% of the attendees were Roller users ;-)

The RTP Bloggers' November Lunch was held today at El Dorado and attended by John Beimler, Joe Gregorio, Dave Johnson, Bruce Loebrich, Andy Oliver, Mark Pilgrim and Sam Ruby. It would have been a gold mine of ideas for Scott Adams, as conversation quickly gravitated around past work experiences. There was surprisingly little talk of weblogs, standards or even the internet until late in the lunch when discussion turned to topics such as the whats and whys of aggregation, why or even if RSS standards matter. Radio backups to RSS and referrer spam. As always, if you live in the Triangle area of North Carolina, have a blog and think this sounds at all interesting, just send an email to get an invite for next month. [Bruce Loebrich]

One other observation, is that IDEA can be more innovative on the GUI side, that's because Swing is definitely more maleable than SWT. SWT may be fast, however Swing is more agile, and just possibly with all these 2Ghz machines and up, it just won't matter.[Carlos Perez on SWT vs. Swing and IDEA 3.0]

This is a good point. I'm a GUI guy at heart and I've worked extensively with Swing. I really like it and Carlos is right, it is very flexible and extensible. With faster and faster processors and more and more memory, the performance problems with Swing will become less and less apparent.

I really missed the point of that <a href= "http://www.internetwk.com/shared/printableArticle?doc_id=INW20021112S0009">InternetWeek article yesterday. Oracle is not ready to ditch JDeveloper. They are joining Eclipse.ORG because they want to push their new Java Specification Request (JSR-198) that standardizes the way that tools plug-in to an IDE.

Oracle sees the possibility of the Eclipse dominates scenario and wants to try to ensure that Eclipse does not become the universal tools platform. JSR-198 attempts to level the playing field for IDEs in the plugin tools space.

I made a couple of changes in the Roller 0.9.7-dev codebase to address memory usage:

1. There is now one and only one instance of the Roller business-tier implementation object RollerImpl instead of one per session.
2. Many calls to getSession(true) were removed and now the RssServlet no longer creates a session.
3. Velocity template caching has been turned back on, but I'm really not sure why leaving it off (apparently) ate so much memory.

#1 and #3 can be easily backported to Roller 0.9.6.X so FreeRoller can take advantage of them. My site now seems to be using memory at a much more reasonable pace now and I've survived 24 hours with max heap size set to -Xmx64m.

Relations between young Alex and Linus today were strained to the breaking point when parental authorities determined that Jack Stone Legos from the smaller Linus collection had become mixed in with the larger Alex collection. To further complicate matters, authorities charged Alex with kidnapping several Lego people from the Linus collection and hiding them around his personal residence.

Parental authorities were unable to determine the ownership of the individual Legos in the combined collection and quickly advised both parties of this dire situation. During the tense negotiations that followed, Linus suggested that the Lego collection be evenly split between the two parties. Alex then protested loudly and suggested that the combined Lego collection be put into storage until such time that both parties could learn to share and play together in peace. Linus countered by suggesting that peace is possible now and that perhaps the Legos should immediately become community property to be shared equally by all members of the household except those to which Legos pose a choking hazard. After further negotiations, a time-sharing arrangement was put into effect and Linus was randomly selected to take ownership of the Lego collection for week one.

<a href= "http://brainopolis.dnsalias.com/roller/page/lance/20021112#fear_newsmonster_br">Like <a href= "http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/index.jsp?date=20021112#212618">the <a href= "http://www.dominicdasilva.com/index.do?date=20021112#092011">others, I tried NewsMonster and got nowhere. It does look cool, but I am enjoying Aggie too much now to put much effort into working through the pre-release NewsMonster quirks.

<a href= "http://www.internetwk.com/shared/printableArticle?doc_id=INW20021112S0009">InternetWeek reports that "Oracle also today reportedly joined Eclipse.org". An Eclipse zealot might take this to mean that Oracle is going to ditch <a href= "http://otn.oracle.com/products/jdev">JDeveloper and switch over to Eclipse, but it is more likely that Oracle just wants to get the inside scoop on Eclipse direction. I'm not an Eclipse zealot. Nooooo, not me.

Lance checked in support for Weblog Entry Comments and has comments up and running on his site. I've started working on referer trackback for Roller 0.9.7, but apart from that, I'm not sure what is next.

There are lots of little problems with Roller's UI, lots of room for improvements, and lots of missing weblogging features. Make sure the issues that are bugging you get into Roller's JIRA issue tracker. Look at the list of issues that are <a href= "http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&mode=hide&sorter/order=ASC&sorter/field=priority&resolutionIds=-1&pid=10000&fixfor=-1">not yet assigned to a release and vote on the ones that are most important to you. You can also view the <a href= "http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller/BrowseProject.jspa?id=10000&report=popular">currently most popular issues.

Looks like FreeRoller may have been bitten by the OutOfMemory bug. I'm looking for possible leaks and experimenting with ways to reduce per-session memory use.

FreeRoller has been up and running fine for almost a week now, but Matt Raible and I have been having some problems. Both of our Roller sites have been crashing about once a day with OutOfMemory errors. We are using essentially the same codebase as FreeRoller so we are looking for other differences that might explain the crashes.

Now that Andy Oliver has his own <a href= "http://freeroller.net/page/acoliver">blog, I won't have to <a href= "http://www.rollerweblogger.org/page/roller/20021104#the_andy_oliver_report">blogstalk him anymore. More importantly, now you can permalink to his "oh, and by the way, your favorite technology sucks" software development briefings.

Andy suggested a couple of good Roller enhancements. He asked for comments, which Lance just checked in. He also asked for some docs, here is the <a href= "http://rollerweblogger.org/userguide/roller-ug.html">User Guide.

The main Roller page now runs on Roller. The weblog portion of the page is in the right column under news.

Lots of Struts articles and books swirling around the blogs and sites and bookstores and etc. OnJava has two articles: 1) <a href= "http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/10/30/jakarta.html">Lessons from the Trenches by Chuck Cavaness author of O'Reilly's <a href= "http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0596003285-0">Programming Jakarta Struts and 2) <a href= "http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/pub/a/2002/11/06/struts1.html">Learning the New Struts 1.1, Part One by Sue Speilman author of <a href= "http://www.switchbacksoftware.com/struts.htm">The Struts Framework. The Server Side recently posted <a href= "http://www2.theserverside.com/resources/articles/StrutsFastTrack/StrutsFastTrack.pdf">The Fast Track to Struts (PDF).  And finally, looking at Powells I see that <a href= "http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0471213020-0">Goodwill, <a href= "http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-1930110502-0">Husted, and <a href= "http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0672324725-0">Turner all have Struts books coming out as well. I haven't read any of them yet so please read them for me and tell me which ones are best.

I've been helping a co-worker and 4 year veteran of <a href= "http://www.borland.com/jbuilder/">JBuilder get started with <a href= "http://www.eclipse.org/">Eclipse. He decided to make the switch after the Eclipse presentation at the RTP-WUG . His first impressions were that Eclipse does everything that JBuilder does and that Eclipse will kill all other IDEs. I was not at all surprised by his reaction.

After seeing that presentation, it is pretty easy for me to imagine a scenario in which there are two dominant IDEs in the world: Microsoft Visual Studio and Eclipse. In this scenario all IDEs other than Visual Studio will either wither and die or rehost their best parts as plugins inside Eclipse. Eclipse is extensible and pluggable to the core. It is not an IDE and it is not just an <a href= "http://radio.weblogs.com/0107789/2002/11/06.html#a1002">experience either, it is a universal and multi-progamming language tools platform. On top of that it is open source (you can't get more pluggable than having the source ;-).

This scenario explains why both Borland and TogetherSoft are on the Eclipse <a href= "http://www.eclipse.org/org/index.html">board of stewards. They see the wave coming. Board member Rational has already released an Eclipse based product (which supports both Java and .Net) and even old school programmer's editor maker and board member SlickEdit, Inc. is considering hosting inside Eclipse.

If you look at the volume on the Eclipse newsgroups and the rapidly growing number of plugins, you can see the momentum.  For the moment, the IDEA guys may have a better IDE, I really don't know, but they've got to be worried about and planning for the Eclipse dominates scenario.

I knew there was something up when I saw no posts yesterday. Matt and Julie are now the proud parents of a <a href= "http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd/20021106#out_little_girl_has_arrived">truly beautiful little baby girl. Big welcome to Abigail Grace Raible! I'm wishing y'all a baby who cries little and sleeps a lot. My wife's advice to you is to enjoy these first weeks and months because they seem to go so quickly. She also advises you to do whatever your wife tells you to do quickly and without complaint.

It is funny how the (hopefully) final release of Roller 0.9.6 today coincided with the release I've been working on at my day job. I really did not want these things to happen at the same time, but as they say when it rains it pours. Either nothing happens, or everything happens all at once.

Both releases took longer than expected and stretched out over a busy and stressful two month period. During that time I lost some wonderful co-workers to a "reduction in force," moved into a cramped new office, moved again into a larger new office, was threatened with a law-suit, got a promotion, and lost my favorite boss to Microsoft.

I really can't complain. I still have a job, I still enjoy it, and I would much rather be busy than bored. On top of that, I have an awesome family and a wife that understands my geekly obsessions - as long as I have a baby in my lap. I'm not going to complain. I'm going to take some time to regroup, think about what I have learned, and hope for some more busy months.

A new bug-fix release of Roller is now available on <a href= "http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=47722">Roller's SourceForge download site. No new features have been introduced since the original <a href= "http://www.rollerweblogger.org/page/roller/20021022#roller_0_9_6">Roller 0.9.6 release, but a <a href= "http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller/BrowseProject.jspa?id=10000&report=changelog">bunch of bugs have been fixed.

FreeRoller seems to have stabilized, we've fixed a bunch of <a href= "http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller/IssueNavigator.jspa?reset=true&decorator=printable&pid=10000&fixfor=10013&mode=hide&start=0&tempMax=1000">bugs, and I've branched Roller 0.9.6 so we can start with Roller 0.9.7 dev in the main line. I'm planning on releasing Roller 0.9.6.3 tomorrow.

Sam Gentile announced the release of Rotor 1.0 today. Rotor is a Microsoft implementation of the Dot-Net Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) and C# that is released in source code form for Windows XP, Mac OSX, and FreeBSD. Note that the Rotor <a href= "http://msdn.microsoft.com/MSDN-FILES/027/002/097/ShSourceCLILicense.htm">license is NOT open source. If you want an open source implementation of the Dot-Net technologies, look at Mono which is licensed under GPL and LGPL.