Blogging Roller

I'm still working through my backlog of Latest Links posts. First up, the OpenSocial links. I'm following OpenSocial closely because OpenSocial support is one of the key features of the new project I'm working on (Project SocialSite).

There were a bunch of OpenSocial related sessions at Google's I/O conference and they're all online. I especially like this one, OpenSocial: A Standard for the Social Web, which includes Google's Pat Chanezon discussing Project SocialSite, starting at 43:07 and on slides 70 and 71:

Here are the links:

• Google I/O Sessions
  Speaker videos and slides for each. Lots of OpenSocial sessions
• OpenSocial Summit Presentations, Notes, & Videos
  Very nice summary of summit via links
• AOL Joins OpenSocial
  "AOL’s first steps will be to implement Gadgets on myAOL.com."

I'm also following Google's FriendConnect pretty closely, which is a model similar to Project SocialSite -- but, and this is my opinion, for smaller sites that do not want to build and manage their own social graph. It's conceivable that Project SocialSite could one day implement FriendConnect, thereby allowing folks from a Project SocialSite-backed site to join into FriendConnect based sites. At any rate, here's what I've read about Friend Connect so far:

• Google Code Blog: How Google Friend Connect Works
  "how it works on the Friend Connect side with respect to users' information."
• Marc Cantor on Friend Connect, et. al. - I do not compromise
  "They’re all keeping their member’s data on their servers, while sending out tentacles to mesh in with as many outside sites as they can."
• Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Some Thoughts on Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect and...
  "Recently there were three vaporware announcements by Facebook, Google and MySpace"
• A Few Thoughts on How to Improve Google Friend Connect
  "Once people begin using it, gain the ability to add gadgets from other networks or build gadgets based on friend connect, and it catches on — then the show will begin."
• Gigya Socialize Goes Up Against Google Friend Connect
  "a startup known for distributing widgets across social networks, blogs and other social media platforms, is getting into the mix"

Here's another link blog post. In this one I'll explain why my del.icio.us feed is full of guitar tabs. I've been spending some time Away From Keyboard and near to fretboard. Since my 11 year old son Alex is learning guitar I've been doing the same and making some good progress. I've noodled around on bass for years, but never spent much time with guitar. I've always known the basic chords, but that's about it. Now I've finally learned how to string and "sing" at the same time and so I've been looking for good, fun and easy songs to play. Here are the ones I've found so far, straight from my bookmarks feed:

• Animals – (House of the Rising Sun tab)
  
• Connells – 74-75 tab
  
• Connells – Fun & Games tab
  
• Costello, Elvis – (What's So Funny tab)
  
• Creedence Clearwater Revival – (Who'll Stop the Rain tab)
  
• Creedence Clearwater Revival – (Lodi tab)
  
• Creedence Clearwater Revival – (Have You Ever Seen the Rain tab)
  
• Cure – (Love Song tab)
  
• Diamond, Neil – (Solitary Man tab)
  
• <a href= "http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/tabs/g/grateful_dead/friend_of_the_devil_ver2_tab.htm"> Grateful Dead - (Friend Of The Devil tab)
  
• Grateful Dead - (Ripple tab)
  
• REM – (Driver 8 tab)
  

You can probably guess my age now

Here are a couple more kinda sorta related links from the feed.

• Interactive Guitar chord explorer
  Very nice Flash interface for viewing chords, playing them, etc.
• Live review: R.E.M. drives the past into the present
  REM "has come full circle, treating the old and new with the same vigor and precision"
• YouTube - Connells @ Borders: 74-75
  2000 or 2001, in Chapel Hill, NC

I bookmarked that REM review because we attended that show last week. We took a bunch of kids and had a blast. REM played a bunch of their very early songs like 7 Chinese Brothers and Pretty Persuasion. The kids (from 5 to 11 years old) danced like fools on pogo-sticks the whole time.

And finally, here's something here's something not in my bookmarks feed; the Epiphone G-310 I bought for about $230 last weekend.

It's time to catch up on blogging and I'm going to start by going through my backlog of links and adding some commentary, but not in this post; these are miscellaneous links that don't fit nicely into my other posts.

• Slashdot | Why Google Should Embrace OpenOffice.org
  "If Google really wanted to deliver a knockout punch to Microsoft, it would integrate OpenOffice with Google Docs" -- and pump some money into OOo development
• Headius: The Power of the JVM
  "And while JRuby and Groovy will probably spend the next few months one-upping each other, we've both proven something far more important: the JVM is an *excellent* platform for dynamic languages. Don't let anyone tell you it's not."
• SpringSource Blog - Open Source, Open Strategy
  My 141 char summary: open source good, but we need money. we won't relicense existing parts, but we'll GPL the full-stack so we alone can ride it to the bank
• Kohsuke Kawaguchi: GlassFish v3 just got embeddable
  "GlassFish glassfish = new GlassFish(); glassfish.minimallyConfigure(8080);"
• Derby: Using the bulk import and export procedures
  closest thing to mysqldump in Derby land
• Core team statement on replication in PostgreSQL
  "it is time to include a simple, reliable basic replication feature in the core system"
• Distributed Caching with Memcached
  Nice how-it-works article on memcached.

Nick Lothian tweeted about this JavaOne presentation on LinkedIn because it mentions the ROME RSS/Atom feed parser. I'm really sorry I missed it at JavaOne. What's particularly interesting to me are the diagrams that explain how the LinkedIn architecture has evolved to scale up to 22 million users. Here's an example:

After attending two great BarCamps here in Raleigh, I'm just as pleased as punch to be helping out on the BarCamp RDU organizing committee this year.

We put out the call for sponsors a couple of weeks ago and thanks to some generous sponsors including iContact, Canonical, rPath, Brian Russell, OpenNMS and Montie Design we quickly met 65% of our small budget. Now we need to wrap things up, money-wise. If you'd like to get some great positive exposure among the best and brightest in the local tech community by sponsoring, here's your chance.

If you're interested in sponsoring or helping out as a volunteer, contact me via email for more info (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org). If you're interested in attending, you'll have to add your name to the waiting list -- at this point we're sold out.

Looks like we made it to the final round of the Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad competition and so Project SocialSite will be one of the five projects that will "present their ideas in front of an audience of creators, evangelists and adopters of cutting edge technologies who will provide feedback in real-time and decide the winner." Thanks to all who voted for SocialSite.

And in other news, Arun Gupta has put together a very nice ten minute screencast that shows Project SocialSite in action.

As Arun notes in his post, Project SocialSite made it to round #2 of the Enterprise 2.0 conference Lauchpad and so we made another short video. This time we got some help from Sun internal TV studio folks and added a little extra polish. Check it out and rate it up

There will be a OpenSocial Summit: May 14th, at the Googleplex covering the new v0.8 spec changes and all sorts of other interesting things. Wish I could make it, but I'll be happily back home in the old north state. Hopefully, somebody from the SocialSite team will be able to attend.

Struts 2 is my favorite Java web framework these days; it's REST-friendly, simple, easy to use, very flexible and the only thing it has with its creaky old Struts 1.x parent is the fact that it's an action framework rather than a component framework like JSF. As most of my readers probably already know, Struts 2 is based on WebWork/XWork the framework that powers JIRA and Confluence, two of the coolest Java webapps around.

Apparently, I'm not alone in this thinking -- I keep on running into folks at JavaOne who feel the same way. But unfortunately, Struts 2 docs are lacking, so I was very happy to see two new books on Struts 2 at the JavaOne bookstore. There's Struts 2 in Action, a rewrite of the classic Manning book, and <a href= "http://www.apress.com/book/view/1590599039">Practical Apache Struts 2 Web 2.0 Projects from Apress.

I picked up a copy of Struts 2 in Action on Monday and it looks great so far, but I've only skimmed it. I'll let you know what I think once I dig-in on the flight home.

If you're at JavaOne, check out TS-5739 - Hands-on Struts2 by Ian Roughley (author of the Apress book) today at 10:50 AM in Esplanade 307/310.

One more thing to mention before I hit the JavaOne opening reception: Bobby Bissett submitted a short and to-the-point <a href= "http://launchpad.enterprise2conf.com/node/18">video on Project SocialSite to the Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad. Please check it out and help us vote it up

Jamey Wood and I presented our Introduction to Project SocialSite yesterday. We had a much larger crowd than I expected, given the number of concurrent talks -- I'm guessing there were close to 300 people in the room. I hope to be able to post a link to the slides at some point in the near future because right now we've got almost no information on Project SocialSite on the web. Now that we've got permission to talk about the project, I'm going to try to change that.

I spent most of the day in the Sun booth answering questions about SocialSite and demonstrating our widgets and web services in Roller and MediaWiki and talking through some key slides in our deck. At this point, we only have a handful of our widgets implemented and they're pretty bare bones, but folks seemed to "get it" and liked the idea of adding social networking features to existing web applications.

If you're at JavaOne, then please stop by the Sun both and say hi. Look for us under the banner Social Networking for Glassfish. And if you want the full scoop then check out our Birds of a Feather (BOF) session:

Jamey and I will be ready with slides and demos and answers to (almost) all of your questions and you'll have plenty of time to make it to the After Dark shindig.

As promised, here's some more information about the talk I and my co-speaker Jamey Wood are giving tomorrow at CommunityOne (2:35 PM in Moscone Hall E 135).

Below is the official title and blurb.

Perhaps a better title would have been, "make your webapps social with Project SocialSite" but we didn't have permission to talk about our project until very recently. Now, we're ready to talk about the Project SocialSite widgets and web services and how you can use them to add Social Networking features to your existing Java, PHP and Ruby webapps. We're not ready to talk about product plans, features or schedules but we are ready to demonstrate our work in Netbeans, MediaWiki, Portal, Roller and possibly some other apps as the JavaOne week progresses.

Here are the slides: socialsite-j1-2008.pdf (1MB PDF file)

And here's an outline of the talk:

Look for Project SocialSite in the CommunityOne demo area and at the Sun booth in the JavaOne pavillion all week.

I remember how freaked-out I was to see the referrer hits start rolling in (pun fully intended) from http://blogs.sun.com/roller. I can't believe it's been four years already. Thanks to Linda for the reminder.

BarCamp RDU 2008 is on!

The date is Saturday August 2, 2008 and, like last year and the year before, the event will be held in Red Hat's offices at the N.C. State University Centennial Campus. Sign-up is already open and the limited space is filling-up quickly, so if you're interested then please go ahead a sign up on the BarCamp RDU wiki.

• Skrocki's Blog: WOOHOO Sun Blogs sees its 100,000th blog post!!!
  Pat Chanezon made the first post, not sure who made the 100,000th
• Mark Fortner: how to publish to Roller via Google Docs
  "Google Docs 'publish' feature allows you to publish a doc as a blog entry."
• Chandra Chan: Using wbloggar 4 with JRoller version 3
  "using the new version of w.bloggar version 4.03"


• Jean-Francois Arcand: Jersey 0.7 released...with a tiny taste of Grizzly Comet Support
  "gives us a couple weeks and we gonna have something really amazing"
• Earthly Powers: Jersey 0.7 released
  "many additions and clarifications to the API" plus Comet support
• NetBeans 6.1 RC2: Let the IDE Do The Web Services Plumbing For You
  "brings support for web services from Google, Amazon, Facebook and others"


• ZDNet: Social networking will be biggest enterprise 2.0 priority by 2013
  "smaller businesses aren’t even considering, while the giants are diving in head first"
• Move Over Lotus Notes, SharePoint is Filling Yer Shoes
  "What Microsoft makes look easy — can quickly become a nightmare in the making"
• Joshua Marinacci: know of any good forum software?
  Comments suggest JForum, LifeRay message board and other Java options


• colmmacc: AWS, AppEngine and the future of data
  coping with the "fallout of using a planet instead of a hard-disk"
• Search Guy: Minion open source search engine from Sun Labs
  search "engine that ships with the Portal Server and Web Server"
• Unit Structures: Introducing Freedom
  "I find myself desperately searching out places where I can be network-free"

The Apache Abdera (incubating) project has released a new version of its Atom parser/generator, client library and all new AtomPub Server Framework. Here's the new feature list:

• A simplified server side framework and API for implementing services.
• Server side filter API for intercepting requests and impl. concerns such as security.
• A collection of pre-bundled AtomPub adapters for JDBC, JCR, filesystems, and CouchDB.
• An improved JSON serialization mechanism.
• New extensions such as OAuth support.
• New StreamWriter interface for fast Atom document serialization
• Improved Unicode performance for IRI implementation
• URI Template Support
• HTML Parser
• Many API improvements and bug fixes!

In related news, there's a proposal to use Abdera for the reference implementation of the OpenSocial REST APIs, which are under development by the Apache Shindig (incubating) project.

I'm making final preparations for my trip to Amsterdam tomorrow for ApacheCon EU. I've been packing my bags with warm clothes and rehearsing my all-new talk Advanced Roller talk. Below are the details including the abstract and an outline of the slide deck.

Advanced Apache Roller

Apache Roller is a popular open source blog server designed to serve the needs of large multi-user blogging sites and typically used by large corporations, universities and government organizations. This session for managers, sysadmins and developers will goes beyond the Roller installation guide and explores the advanced issues of planning and executing a Roller deployment, including deployment architecture and configuration options as well as options for customization and automation.

• Introduction
  • Goals and Agenda
  • Caveats and disclaimers
  • RTFM
• Advanced Installation
  • Installs now easy
  • Perhaps too easy?
  • Using container managed resources
• TIP: customize the default blogroll
• Caching
  • Page and feed caching
  • Built-in cache implementations
  • Roller's four caches
  • Default cache settings
• TIP: choose themes carefully
• Authentication
  • Authentication options
  • But what about CMA?
  • Authentication limitations
  • User management changes coming in 4.1
• TIP: separate themes directory
• Deployment options
  • Deployment architecture: small
  • Deployment architecture: large
  • Sizing
• TIP: check the Roller Support project
• Caching with Memcached
  • Setting up Memcached
  • Configuring Roller Memcached plugin
• TIP: enable debug logging
• Scripting and automation options
  • AtomPub, RAP and calling Roller's Java API
  • Scripting RAP with Groovy
  • Scripting Roller's Java API with Groovy
• TIP: create your own Roller build
• Plugging in new functionality
  • Ten types of Roller plugins
  • Implementing a Page Model
• TIP: create your own Roller themes
• Questions and Answers

My talk is at 3PM Friday, April 11 and I'll post the final slides then.

The slides are available here:

http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/presentations/advanced-roller-aceu2008.pdf

Fred Stutzman: Most of us are not internet celebrities, but the social software we use assumes we are (or want to be). It's time to rethink this, to build closets and spaces for whispering into social software.