Blogging Roller

Mike's right, it sounds like WebGain is just throwing Visual Cafe over the wall to the open source community. But, I don't see anything wrong with that. I'd rather see old software products released as open source than see them disappear into oblivion.

Java trivia: some consider Visual Cafe to be the first Java IDE, but I think that distinction belongs to Rogue Wave's JFactory - which was introduced in January 1996 and has since disappeared into oblivion (along with the zApp C++ GUI library).

The deal will also means WebGain will halt all development and sales of its market-leading IDEs Visual Café and WebGain Studio - the latest version of which is currently in beta. WebGain hopes the IDEs will be picked-up by the open source community, carrying the product forward.

From The Register's May 6th article WebGain to exit tools, Oracle to buy TopLink. If the above quote is true, it means there will be three major open source IDEs (I'm assuming that Visual Cafe and Webgain Studio are really the same thing): Netbeans, Eclipse, and Visual Cafe. And four if you count jEdit.

It's true that SWT is not yet available everywhere. But Eclipse 2.0 works with Windows, Motif, and GTK+ (Gimp Toolkit) 2, and operability on Mac OS X seems imminent. Unlike Swing-based software, Eclipse works immediately with native features such as Windows XP skinning. "Microsoft has lots of programmers and so does Gnome/GTK," Grindstaff says. "So why not leverage that?"

From a very interesting InfoWorld article on Eclipse via Sam Ruby. I prefer Swing, but if the Eclipse SWT approach means that vim could be embedded into the Eclipse IDE then Eclipse will be the IDE for me. I need to download the Eclipse 2.0 beta and take it for a spin.

Shawn Dahlin and I have been working on a roadmap of future Roller features. I just sent it out to the Roller dev list and I will probably post a link to it here later today.

I've enjoyed Mark Pilgrim's accessibility writings so far. Today he finally explained what he is doing. Some say he is being too preachy. I don't agree, but even if he is being preachy - this is a topic that needs some serious preaching.

Most of the work is already done and in CVS, so I'm hoping I can package this up in the next couple of weeks. Here are the new features:

• New tabbed menu in editor interface (already in CVS)
• Better day and entry permalinks (already in CVS)
• Blogger API support (almost done - some of it in CVS)
• New website setting: Enable Blogger API
• New website setting: Category for Blogger API posts
• Add Resin servlet engine to installation guide (to be done)
• Add javax.sql.ConnectionPooledDataSource setup to installation guide (to be done)
• Three nice themes (to be done)

Rendering a weblog page at rollerweblogger.org (an Intel-based Linux box) seems 4-5 times slower than rendering that same page on my homebox (an AMD Athlon 1600 box running Windows XP). I wonder why that is. I wonder if I can improve this situation by using database connection pooling. If that does not help, I'm going to have to do some kind of page caching. 10 seconds to load a page is just not acceptible.

The Server Side is reporting that Intalio will stop support for all of its OSS projects, except for Castor. I'm not sure what this means, but it does not give me any warm fuzzies about Castor. But, the fact that a new release of Castor v0.9.3.19 is now available for download is somewhat reassuring.

to the Roller project! Shawn contributed Blogger API support and a bunch of cool ideas for building up Roller in the "community server" area. Among other things, he suggested adding meta-data to each Roller website to help workgroups categorize and build directories of Roller websites, improving the very primitive newsfeed aggregation features, adding better access control, and supporting editor, guest, and administrator roles.

In case you are wondering, the artwork on this page comes from a bookcase that I painted for my 5 year old son Alex. I also painted an armoire for my mom using the same theme - the $1.69, doll-house variety armoire, that is.

CQHost took me down for a while because I had misconfigured my web.xml and Resin was trying to write log files to the wrong place. It took a while to get back up and running, but now I'm back.

During the downtime, I configured connection pooling for Roller by using the MM MySQL JDBC driver's MySQLConnectionPoolDataSource and by configuring Castor and Velocity to look up their datasources via JNDI. The performance improvement is wonderful - I've gone from 15-20 second page loads to 2-5 second loads on rollerweblogger.org and down to 1 second page load on my homebox.

CQHost is back up and running now. In other news, I removed the calendar and blogroll components from my page templates because they were too damn slow. Now I have 3-5 second page loads. Those components will be back once I figure out connection pooling and/or page caching.

It looks like Mike subscribed to the Roller RSS feed using Radio, and then did a post. The URLs in his post are all screwed up and it looks like Roller is to blame. Sorry folks. I'll have to work on that.

Mike mentions that OSCache can solve my performance problems in 30 seconds. Yes, that looks like the ticket.

Things are definitely looking up for rollerweblogger.org.  CQHost has completed the Resin 2.1.1 upgrade and now Roller is running smoothly there.  However, I've still got a little work to do before I can go live.  Stay tuned.

Roller goes live! rollerweblogger.org is up and running now and so is Roller.

Still waiting on CQHost...  CQHost said they would upgrade to Resin 2.1.1 on Tuesday. It is now Thursday morning and they are still running production servers on the Resin 2.1.s020430 experimental snapshot. I feel just like Charlie Brown.  I have until June 20 to ask for my money back, I wonder if they will fix this in time.

Shawn Dahlen has implemented the Blogger API for Roller and he tested his implementation by using the w.bloggar blogger client to post to Roller.  Shawn used Apache XML-RPC to do this work. What an awesome new feature for the upcoming 0.9.3 release - this is great!

Now, on to CQHost.  For a brief time yesterday, I was able to run Roller on CQHost.  There were some glitches but things seemed to work, for a while.  Then everything became slow, then the server appeared to crash.  Now I can't run any Servlets or JSPs at all.  So, I'm stuck again. 

Great news: CQHost has finally upgraded to Resin 2.1.1 and my simple Struts example works fine.  Now it is time to deploy Roller.  Wish me luck.

While waiting for CQHost, I've been doing some work on Roller. I'm not ready to make a new (0.9.3) release of Roller just yet, but I am just about ready to go live at rollerweblogger.org. Here is what is in the works.  I've been working on adding support for day and item permalinks, building an import facility for Radio weblog entries, and finishing the editor GUI by adding an XML driven tabbed-menu component (a custom JSP tag).  Somebody else has been working on Blogger API support, so that may also make it into the Roller 0.9.3 release.