Blogging Roller

So far, the most worthwhile application that I have found for my Roller weblogging software has been the DaveAndi weblog. DaveAndi is a password protected weblog for family and friends who are intested in knowing what is going on with new baby Leo. I'm not going to share the password with you because 1) you'd be bored to tears and 2) it ain't none of your business.

While fixing my little RSS bug, I started looking for an alternative to the Jakarta Commons Digester RSS classes. I did not find an alternative, but I did find this nice little write-up of RSS and RSS 0.9.1 vs. RSS 1.0 by Elliote Rusty Harold. Now, why can't I find Rusty's RSS feed?

In light of the current economic conditions and layoffs in the Triangle area, I have a shorter wish list for my company. I want my company to be...

• One that continues to pay my salary

I'm going to hold off on Roller 0.9.4 for now. I want to fix a couple of bugs before I do another release and I want to enjoy the 4th.

Surely you remember our national motto: E Pluribus Unum. "Out of many, one." Beautiful, isn't it? Its origins go back to that magical day -- July 4, 1776 -- when Congress not only approved the Declaration of Independence, but also commissioned John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin to design an official seal for the new country. Their first design included the famous phrase that became our official motto.

There is just one small problem, however.

E Pluribus Unum isn't our national motto anymore.

Todd "Monkey Time" Mormon, Godless Capitalists, Patrick Henry and Politics as Distraction, Spectator Online. Somebody get that man a weblog.

Another glitch was found in Roller 0.9.3, so I will have to release a Roller 0.9.4 later on today.

I made a mistake in Step 5 of the Roller Installation Guide. The Jakarta Commons jars and the MM.MySQL JDBC driver jar need to go into the Tomcat common/lib directory, not the server/lib directory. I have updated online version of the Roller Installation Guide, but I'm not going to do a 0.9.4 release just for this.

Due to the openness of Microsoft in respect to .NET, one can speculate that Microsoft strategy involves a successive retreat from being the dominant platform supplier with the plan to be a dominant supplier of high-quality network applications and content. Harold W. Lawson, Rebirth of the Computer Industry, June 2002 Communications of the ACM.

Very interesting article, but I don't think it is available on the web.

Ugo, on first glance OSCache does appear to be JSP centric but it really does not require JSP. I would not have been able to use OSCache if it required JSP, because Roller weblog pages are not JSP pages - they are generated by Velocity templates.

OSCache includes a caching Servlet Filter. The CacheFilter automatically generates a cache-key based on incoming request parameters and either pulls the corresponding entry from the cache or runs the request. So, adding OSCache to your webapp can be as simple as dropping the OSCache jar in your classpath and adding a Servlet Filter entry to your web.xml.

I had to do a little more work than that because I need to cache on a per user basis and the auto-generated cache-key does not consider request.getUserPrincipal(). So, I had to write my own Servlet Filter based on CacheFilter. Also, CacheFilter is not very well documented, so I had to look at the source to figure it out.

Roller 0.9.3 is ready
Download it today. Here are the new features.

• Blogger API Support: contributed by Shawn Dahlen (dahlen at mitre.org). See the Roller User Guide for details.
• Database configuration via JNDI DataSources: Roller now looks up datasources in JNDI (using java:comp/env/jdbc/rollerdb).
• Database connection pooling: if you follow the instructions in the Roller Installation Guide, Roller will use database connection pooling.
• Results caching for weblog pages: Roller now uses OSCache for caching all weblog pages. This results in a dramatic improvement in performance.
• Three new themes: Roller now includes three new themes, adapted from free themes found on blogskins.com.
• Lots of bug fixes: too numerous to list.

This post was made via the Blogger API using the w:bloggar client.

I have a new Servlet ISP that is quite simply awesome: Kattare. I'll talk more about Kattare and the new Roller 0.9.3 release later. Right now, I need to get outside for a while.

Spotted JState which looks interesting. It could be useful when putting together an open source workflow system. James Strachan

JState does look nice. JState is currently at Revision 0.2.1 and licensed under the LGPL.

Sometimes you just won't feel like writing tests, especially at first. Don't. However, pay attention to how much more trouble you get into, how much more time you spend debugging, and how much more stress you feel when you don't have tests. We have been amazed at how much more fun programming is and how much more aggressive we are willing to be and how much less stress we feel when we are supported by tests. The difference is dramatic enough to keep us writing tests even when we don't feel like it. JUnitTest Infected : Programmers Love Writing Tests

I really like this idea of using unit tests as a safety net for development, so I guess I need to learn more about JUnit and the Extreme Programming ideas behind it. Up until now, Roller development was done without a net.

Red Hat CMS [Content Management System] is delivered with the source code and is J2EE compliant, allowing easy extensibility and customization of the implementation by Red Hat, or by the organization's own developers.

Excellent! I'll add that to <a href= "http://rollerweblogger.org/page/roller/20020618#a_href_http_radio_weblogs2"> my list of open source Java CMS sofware. The license sure looks like open source. Via BeBlogging via Rebelutionary via rc3.org

I'm very happy to announce the birth of Leo Michael Johnson - our third son. Leo was born at 1:45pm on Friday June 21, 2002, weighed 9 pounds 11 ounces, and measured 22 inches long. Leo will join the Roller project as the VP of Human Resources and has already started a major new personnel initiative. He wants to push back project schedules across the board so that all Roller team members can enjoy more family time. He has my full support!

Mike's post about open source Java workflow engines highlights a trend I've noticed recently. You've heard a lot about open source Java software at the tools level - class libraries, appservers, IDEs, code generators, and build tools. But recently, open source Java has been moving up the chain - towards the business application area. You won't find a complete and ready for deployment open source Java e-biz solution yet, but you will find some key components.  Here are some of the pieces:

<table cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" border="0" width="80%" align="center"> Business Processflow/Workflow
OSWorkflow
Powerfolder
Open Business Engine
OFBiz Workflow Engine

e-Business software suite
Open For Business Project
Content Management Systems
RedHat CMS (added June 21)
Cofax
Slide

Portal servers, search engines
Jetspeed
Lucine

After keeping their Servlet engine up for a record 4 days, CQHost (the ISP that hosts rollerweblogger.org) went down again yesterday and stayed down for about 20 hours.

I can understand that it might be difficult for CQHost to provide anything near 99% uptime for only $12.50 per month. What I cannot understand is their complete refusal to provide any Servlet engine status information on their Server Manager web page. They don't even give you access to your logs in the Server Manager. When the Servlet engine goes down, it would be very reassuring to read "JSP support is down now, we are working to restore service" or something like that. I guess they prefer to wade through piles of "SERVER DOWN!" trouble tickets.

Other ISPs provide detailed status information. How nice. I wish those other ISPs also offered Servlet support.

you need to decide whether you want an object model for your application or not. If not, use JDBC, if you do, consider JDO.

David Jordan of Object Identity following-up his talk on the Triangle Java User's Group mailing list. FYI: Roller uses Castor JDO, which is quite different from Sun's JDO.

I just enjoyed a nice lunch with fellow Triangle area bloggers Rafe Colburn, Joe Gregorio, Mark Pilgrim, and Sam Ruby, at Fortune Garden in RTP.

Here is that Roller Roadmap that I mentioned yesteday. If you have some suggestions about the roadmap, or (more importantly) if you'd like to help out - please let me know.