Blogging Roller

<a href= "http://www.rollerweblogger.org/page/roller/20020920#weblogger_com_update">That post cannot be the last post in the Weblogger.com vs. Roller story.  Erin apologized.  I need to say this: I accept Erin's apology.  We all make mistakes.  Erin is proud of his business and is overprotective, generally speaking that is a very good thing.  From all accounts I have read, Weblogger.com is a great company and deserves the support of the weblogging community.

Howard Kistler, you rock! Howard shares his toys and this toy is the coolest of all. This Ekit editor applet is a dramatic improvement over the previous Roller editor which was just <input type="text" ... > . This is my first post using Ekit.

The Ekit WYSIWYG HTML editor applet is coming soon in Roller 0.9.6. Thanks Howard and thanks hexicode codex!

Ok, so I just discovered that there are some problems with images. I think we are going to need some sort of macros or hotwords for including images in post. Anyhow, now that I've switched back to the plain old text editor, I can show you a screenshot:

<img alt="Ekit applet screenshot" src="/resources/roller/ekitthumbnail.jpg">

Weblogger.com/Erin Clerico has officially recinded the threat of lawsuit, apologized on Sam Ruby's site, apologized on Erin Clerico's site, and I have added a disclaimer to the main Roller Weblogger page. Thanks to the good and courageous people who came to my defence, even through some may have gone a little overboard with the language ;-)

I do not need a registered trademark to sue you. Ask your attorney. I take it by your attitude here you are ready for a fight. You will hear from my attorney next. -Erin

Below is the email that Weblogger.COM sent to me.  As far as I can tell, these guys do not own the word 'weblogger' and therefore do not have a case, but I am still researching this and looking into free legal resources.

Hello, my name is Erin Clerico and I own Weblogger:
http://www.weblogger.com

You have selected a name for your product, 'RollerWeblogger', which is too close to our Copyrighted name: 'Weblogger.' Since your product closely resembles our service offerings I must ask you to stop using this name immediately.

We have used this name to market our services for years, I would be more than happy to have our attorney contact you if you have any questions about our rights to this name in this market space.

I look forward to your prompt reply on this matter.

Respectfully yours

Erin Clerico

Erin Clerico and the folks over at Weblogger.COM are upset about the name RollerWeblogger and have asked me to change it.  Now, I don't think that RollerWeblogger is the best name in the world, and it certainly does not roll (no pun intended) off the tongue - but it is the name that I chose.  If I change it, not only will I make it more difficult for people to find Roller, but I will also break all of the links out there that point to the articles on my personal weblog. As a weblogger (can I still call myself that?), this is pretty upsetting to me.

I was under the impression that weblogger is a generic term meaning "one who weblogs." Erin claims they own the copyright on the word, but from a couple of Google searches I get the impression that you cannot copyright a word, you can only trademark a word.  And the USPTO says that the trademark on the word "weblogger" is dead and abandoned.  But, what do I know: I am not a lawyer.

Neither Roller nor the Roller name endangers Erin's current or future business in any way, shape, or form. The names and the purposes of our two sites are very different.  I really don't think RollerWeblogger.ORG is confusingly similar to Weblogger.COM at all.  Here is how I would summarize the two entities:

The guys at SnipSnap want me to clarify that SnipSnap is not planning on going commercial. I guess that saying an open source project may go commercial is the open source world's equivalent of FUD. I do not want to spread FUD, so here is what they say:

you wrote that SnipSnap may go commercial. Thats only halfway right. The current SnipSnap and the current features will stay GPL, but there might be a SnipSnapXL version with enterprise features like TopicMaps, LDAP mapping and data mining, which will be commercial

<a href= "http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/index.jsp?date=20020918#123035"> Signing the Ekit applet might be the proper way to get copy-and-paste to work for most users, but the quick-and-dirty way is to drop the ekitapplet.jar into the trusted extensions directory of your JRE ( <jre>/lib/ext ).

I propose starting an opensource project to do RSS aggregation. I think the Radio model of viewing it through a web page is nice, so I'm thinking we build it using WebWork. Storage of RSS feed subscriptions can be as easy as saving them in an XML file. Scheduling of feed updates could be done with Quartz. This could be very simple at first (all jobs are synch'd on the same schedule), then made more and more advanced (allowing individual schedules per feed, etc.) [Jason Carreira]

During the editing, I've created a ghost bookmark folder. When I go into bookmarks I saw two Blog folders. Once I deleted this folder I had two News folders. When I deleted News, all was right again. Hmmm.... sounds like a bug. Another possible bug I was trying to grab the RSS/XML link to Anthony's blog. I kept getting my RSS feed. [Jeff Duska - A cup of joe]

<a href= "http://indiago.blogspot.com">Bala Murali has posted some of <a href= "http://indiago.blogspot.com/2002_09_15_indiago_archive.html#81711245"> his thoughts on the future of Roller.

We have permission to distribute the Ekit HTML Editor applet from hexidec.com with Roller.  Ekit is distributed under the GPL, so it cannot be used in commercial applications or even in non-GPL open source apps such as Roller.  Fortunately, Howard Kistler the author of Ekit has given us permission to distribute Ekit with Roller.  He is considering a switch to a less restrictive open source license.  

I will probably make Ekit optional because applets are fairly heavy and because, as Russell points out, applets don't support cut-and-paste from other apps.  Thanks to some JSP and JavaScript code from Russell, I've almost finished integrating Ekit into Roller's edit-weblog page.  Hopefully, I'll commit my changes later on today.

I had to do some grueling work on the Roller persistence layer this weekend, the kind that requires lots of searching, replacing, trial-and-error experimenting, testing, and debugging.  I decided to make the job fun by trying something new: Eclipse.  Normally, I use WinCVS and VIM for my development.  Sometimes I use JBuilder when I need to throw together a quick Swing UI or Netbeans when I need to do some debugging.  Here is the story of my first real experience with Eclipse:

Sun: "Due to a miscommunication, the community published version of the JavaServerFaces Specification was inadvertently released as the "Public Review Draft." It was not the intent of the Expert Group to enter the Public Review portion of the JCP process at this time." [via The Server Side]

I've almost conquered the deadline that I've been fighting, but I am not quite there yet.  So, here is a quick update for you.  

Jeremy Allaire now has a weblog and has pointed out some very cool Flash based text editors.

Congrats to Russell Beattie on his new job offer.  

Matt Raible has put together a interesting list of web builder blogs that he learned about from the Web Builder Conference he is attending in Vegas (lucky dog!).

Lance Lavandowska says he in on a mental vacation but don't believe it, he is knocking Roller features off the Roller TODO list at an alarming rate and making Roller enhancements on demand.

Lance's site seems to be down at the moment. I hope that is not due to Roller.  Speaking of outages, my site was down today for the first time in about a month with out-of-memory errors.  Anthony Eden's site also seemed to be experiencing some difficulties yesterday and today.  These outages make me wonder a little about Roller's stability and scalability.

My Dad is giving a talk out in Breckenridge and I cannot even understand the title.

I have read the JSF spec.  I now understand that JSF is a UI component framework that is protocol and markup independent, but aimed at HTML-based webapps.  Now I need to play around with the Early Access implementation to really get a grip on JSF.  

I decided to first do some googling and mail-list searches to see what others have said about JSF. None of the major Java magazines have written about JSF yet, but I did have some luck.  I found couple of quotes from Craig McClanahan:

In general terms, I look at JavaServer Faces (and the JSP Standard Tag Library) as "mainstream" efforts that will, ultimately, supplant the use of the majority of the Struts custom tag libraries. We'll continue to support the existing libraries (there are *way* too many apps using them to consider deprecating them :-)
...
Happily, the Struts controller doesn't care what technology was used to create the user interface -- it deals with request parameters and request dispatcher forwards. We may need to do a little bit of glue work to emulate some of the "automatic" interactions between form beans and the UI components, but I don't anticipate any significant hurdles in this respect. [Craig McClanahan, Struts-dev mailing list, 1/14/2002]

Another way to think of Faces is this: Take the Struts html tags and rewrite them so that instead of producing html directly, the tags delegate to a component that produces HTML. And you can plug your own custom components into those tags for a different markup language (although you'll want to change the html prefix to something else, like faces). Finally, you can create a new tag and a corresponding component to implement something wild like a WAP calendar. [David Geary, Struts-dev mailing list, 9/6/2002]

Inside the spec, I see a bunch of standard UI components, but I don't see any complex ones like Table or Tree, everything looks pretty basic, that's just too bad, I was hoping that they would do something like Swing.

Aha, looks like there's some mention of creating components recursively. Events, that are independent of HTTP, unlike Struts. Now, that they've defined a new Event framework, I'm not sure if this is compatible with Struts.

So, where's the beef? My quick browse of the spec tells me that there are only a few new things that are in this. The newest thing is some kind of standardization of UI components, something completely lacking in the Java world. As far as a toolkit I can leverage, well I don't think I'll find it here. [ceperez, ::Manageability:: weblog]

The reason you see no complex UI components is that JSF is supposed to be a framework and not a toolkit.  Sure, JSF includes some concrete UI Components, but just the basics - without those the JSF  Reference Implemenation would be useless.

So far, I like what I see of JSF.

It is rare that you hear anybody question the suitability of MVC for the web, so cheers to <a href= "http://www.beblogging.com/blog/20020910-150241">Ugo and <a href= "http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=xml-cocoon-dev&m=102494541728419&w=2">Stephano for doing just that. I'm not saying that I agree with them, but I do like Stephano's point that MVC is not the end of the road in terms of webapp architecture.

Ugo says that webapps are based on a stateless protocol. That is true, but in practice essentially all webapps are stateful thanks to cookies and URL rewriting. So, saying MVC is not suitable for the web because webapps are stateless does not make sense to me.

In addition to the recently posted Java Server Faces Spec, Sun has also posted on the JSF homepage a Tutorial, an Early Access Implementation and a FAQ. I'm still trying to digest this stuff. I do not understand enough to comment on it yet.