Blogging Roller

I am happy to report that I have some positive news about CQHost.  A human finally responded to my over-a-week old trouble ticket and informed me that CQHost will be upgading to Resin 2.1.1 tomorrow.  I hope this is going to work out.  If it does then CQHost will be the least expensive and possibly the best option for hosting a Roller weblog.

If you know of another inexpensive, Servlet 2.3 capable, and MySQL ready ISP then I would like to hear from you. I've been combing the list at Servlets.COM and I have not found anything that looks reasonable.

[rebelutionary] -> I was thinking about what John Robb said today. Knowing how few Java / J2EE focussed weblogs there are, I decided to create a page listing to all that I have found. Hopefully this list will get larger in time and will help Java bloggers find other Java bloggers! See Java and J2EE Weblogs.

I've been using the commercial Resin 2.1.1 server for all my Roller work for about a week. I have found Resin to be noticably faster than Tomcat 4.0.1, but I have not done any benchmarks.  I also found Resin to be easy to setup, just like Tomcat: unzip the files and run the start-up script. Right now, I have no reason so switch back to Tomcat.  I'll stick with Resin at least until I have time to take a look at the Tomcat 4.1 release candidate.

Resin implements the Servlet 2.3 specification, but Resin also offers some nice non-standard ease-of-use enhancements. For example, if you put Java files in your webapp's /WEB-INF/classes directory, Resin will watch them and compile them when they change. I won't use that, but it sounds kind of nice. Another example: when Resin detects that my webapp's classes or jars have changed it will reload the webapp - with Tomcat 4.0.1, I had to restart the whole server when my webapp's jars changed.
 
Resin allows you to include Servlet Context configuration properties inside your webapp's web.xml file, using non-standard (proprietary) XML tags. For example, you can configure Servlet Authentication by putting a Resin-specific <authenticator> tag within the standard <login-config> tag. This is convenient for developers, but as you write your build and install scripts, you'll need to be aware that non-standard web.xml stuff like that will cause porting problems and will have to be stripped out before deployment on other servers.  Instead of adding new XML tags to web.xml, I'd would rather see them add a separate web-resin.xml file for their stuff.

Maybe it is normal to wait 7 days for your hosting service's tech support department to respond.  Maybe I'm just an impatient jack-ass.  I'm not going to mention this CQHost thing again until I have something positive to say (or I give up on CQHost).

The battle to get a Roller based weblog online continues... It has now been 5 days and I still have not gotten any response at all from CQHost about my trouble ticket (except for automated message receipts).  I just sent an email to their ceo, support, and sales email addresses in an attempt to escalate this problem. Hopefully, I will have something to report tomorrow. 

Happy birthday to you Joe!  My birthday was the day after the last RTP bloggers lunch, but I'm not saying how old I am.

Update on CQHost problems: I must admit, I am starting to get a little irritated with CQHost. I'm still waiting for them to respond to my trouble-ticket and upgrade to a stable release of Resin 2.1 instead of the "experimental snapshot" that they are running.  I've been waiting since Saturday and have not gotten anything other than automated replies.

I've posted a response to the Is Tomcat Crap? story.

Rebelutionary provides some interesting, and somewhat depressing for a Tomcat booster like me, benchmark numbers.  He says Orion and Resin opened up a can of whoop-ass on Tomcat.  Ouch!

CQHost has been responsing to my trouble tickets within 24 hours, fixing my problems, etc. Their ServerManager is sufficient, and they use the Resin servlet engine.  This is all good.

Unfortunately, I am still not able to get Roller going on CQHost.  If I try to run a simple Struts example, Resin seems to choke - halfway through Servlet generation.  For some odd reason CQHost is using the "experimental snapshot 040302" version of Resin.  I suspect that my problems are cause by a bug in that snapshot and have asked CQHost to upgrade to the latest stable version of Resin 2.1.1.

Hi Mike, nice to meet you.  Mike says that Tomcat is crap.  His earlier comments on WebSphere and Weblogic seem to be right on the money, so I wonder what his specific reasons are for bashing the cat. 

The only two open source Servlet 2.3 servers that I know about are Tomcat and Jetty, so I wonder how they compare.  Tomcat is totally embeddable too.  A quick google search did not turn up anything useful.

CQHost just scored a point.  They fixed my MySQL account. Now, on to the business of intalling Roller.

I've been looking for weblogs that cover Java and J2EE and not finding much.  So, I was happy to find out about Rebelutionary and even happier to find the rebel talking about J2EE weblogging software.  Here is what the he had to say:

Sam Ruby pointed to me and advised checking out Roller. It looks light a good start, and I might try hacking on it. I like client side blogs though, and it seems very server side. Perhaps embedding Jetty in Roller, and communicating via XML-RPC with Charles Miller's RCS implementation would be an interesting project (basically we could recreate Radio using Open Source Java technologies). I wonder if Dave Winer would like that very much.

Rebelutionary is right, all the parts for building a pure-Java Radio knockoff are out there.  For example, you could start with the Netbeans Platform (just the framework, not the IDE), embed the Tomcat Servlet-engine/web-server to run Roller, integrate the JOE Outline editor, add Jython scripting, add the Hypersonic SQL database, throw in the Xindice XML database for good measure, and include the all-important ability to publish a static site via FTP. Sounds like fun.  The type of fun that would make my beautiful wife want to kill me.

Still can't get into MySQL at CQHost.  I wonder if 24 hour tech support means they'll be working this weekend.  Somehow I doubt it.  Maybe I should take a break too. Seeya.

I just heard from CQHost.  They have finally activated JSP support and I've tested it and found it to be working.  Great.  But, the username and password they gave me for the MySQL admin (phpMyadmin) do not seem to be working.  Time to write up trouble ticket #2.

This is my first experience with a hosting service, so I don't know what to expect.  I'm not ready to say I am unhappy with CQHost yet, but I will say this: they do not follow the underpromise and overdeliver philosophy.

Now my MySQL account has been activated, but I am still waiting for JSP support to be activated.  Why this was not activated when my account was created is beyond me.  CQHost is located in NYC, so I suppose that they have already gone home for the day and I will have to wait for tomorrow.

OK, about 32 hours after applying for a CQHost account I now have that account and I can login to the CQHost admin interface for my site.  Unfortunately, I still have to register my rollerweblogger.org domain name, request activication of JSP support, and request a MySQL account before I can really get going with my Roller install. 

In the meantime, I guess I need to figure out how to convert my old Radio weblog entries over to Roller.  I think XSLT might be the ticket.

Yesterday, I signed up for an account with CQHost Web Hosting to host this weblog on Roller.  So, with luck I will be eating my own dogfood in a matter of days.  As I mentioned before, they use Resin instead of Tomcat, but that should be no problem for Roller. 

If you need to develop custom JSP tags, you should take a look at Gregory Gerard's article on Accelerating JSP Tag Development with Jakarta Velocity. What a cool idea.

Here is the deal. Typically, in JSP tag development folks use out.println() calls to emit HTML.  This can result in messy and hard to maintain code.  Gregory describes a better approach: use Velocity templates to emit the HTML.  I'm using this technique to develop a nice configurable Amazon-style tabbed-menu tag for the Roller editor UI (but it will be generic enough for use in any JSP or Struts application).

Jeff Duska wrote in to tell me about CQhost Web hosting.  It looks like they might have what I need too: Servlet 2.3 support, MySQL, and domain name registration all for $19.95.  They include the domain name thing, but they don't offer a dedicated Java VM and they use Caucho Resin instead of Tomcat.  Tomcat is the butta-bomb of course, but Resin supports the Servlet 2.3 API so, in theory, it should work fine with Roller.  Jeff plans on running a Roller-based weblog at CQHost, so maybe I should just lurk and learn.