Dave Johnson on open web technologies, social software and software development
First, some social software links.
And second, some feel-good PHP, Rails and Linux links.
Dave Johnson in Links
05:39PM Jan 03, 2008
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linux
php
ruby
socialsoftware
Over the holidays I avoided doing anything directly related to my current set of work tasks. Sun went quiet, which helped, and I ignored the messages that piled-up in the Roller user and dev lists. It was so quiet that I had time for a fun little project: a JMaki plugin for Roller.
JMaki makes it easy to use JavaScript widgets (Dojo, Google, YUI, etc.) from PHP, JSP, JSF and now Roller. To use a widget, all you have to do is call a method or include a tag and JMaki takes care of including the right JavaScript files and generating the right HTML for you. That's not all JMaki does, there's also a pub/sub facility to make it easy to wire widgets together via events, there's a proxy for fetching remote resources common table and tree data models. The theme is cool widgets with ease-of-development and that's what I'd like to see in Roller. You can read more about the JMaki value proposition on the Why Use JMaki page.
Here's an example. Below is a Roller page template that uses two JavaScript widgest, the Dojo Clock and the YUI Data Table. All it takes is a single line of template code to include each widget, and one widget is dynamic i.e. the table is populated via an RSS feed.
<html> <head><title>JMaki test page</title></head> <body> <h1>JMaki test: dojo.clock</h1> $jmaki.addWidget("dojo.clock") <h1>JMaki test: yahoo.dataTable</h1> $jmaki.addWidget("yahoo.dataTable", "/roller/xhp?id=rss","","") </body> </html>
And here's what that page looks like when displayed by Roller:
I'll write more about the plugin once I install it on this site. If you want some details about how the plugin was developed, you can read the email that I sent to the JMaki dev list: JMaki for Roller issues and suggestions. It links to the Java source code for the plugin.
Dave Johnson in Java
08:12AM Jan 02, 2008
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java
javascript
jmaki
roller
Happy New Year to all the readers of this blog and all the folks who happen to have arrived here via one of the various planets, spam blogs and Google search result pages that include it. I hope you all have a prosperous and pleasant year ahead. I'm hoping for the same. It's nice to start the new year with some good news and I've got some; check this out:
RSS and Atom in Action has been out for over a year now and just as the phenomenal sales are starting to drop off, something wonderful has happened. The book has been nominated for the prestigious Stephen T. Colbert Award for Literary Excellence. As you can see in the photo above, at least one copy of the book is already carrying the Colbert nominee seal. Avoid the rush and buy your copy of RSS and Atom in Action now.
Those who have read Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!) will understand the significance of this important award and understand the impact on future sales of the book. To learn more about the nomination process and criteria, buy yourself a copy of Colbert's book and then flip to page 214½. Cheers!
Dave Johnson in General
06:54PM Jan 01, 2008
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atom
feeds
rss
I'm supposed to be on vacation today and I'm doing my best, but I just wanted to point out that something interesting has quietly appeared in the Glassfish Update Center. Why so quiet? Well, it's an EA2 release and the emphasis is definitely on the E. I'll post some more details later, perhaps after winter break. I've still got shopping to do now and I'm supposed to be on vacation.
Interested? If you haven't done so already grab yourself a copy of the new Glassfish V2 UR1 release. Run the updatetool and install the latest EA2 release of Social Software for GlassFish.
See also: Something fishy.
Dave Johnson in Sun
08:26AM Dec 21, 2007
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glassfish
roller
socialsoftware
Dave Johnson in Links
09:00AM Dec 18, 2007
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opensocial
opensource
roller
I'm off to the NC mountains and away from internet access so you won't see a blog, link, photo or tweet from me for a couple of days. Have a nice weekend. Over and out.
Dave Johnson in General
11:24AM Dec 13, 2007
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vacation
Dave Johnson in Roller
08:14AM Dec 13, 2007
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Tags:
blogging
roller
Anne Zelenka, Gigaom: Could open-source blogging platform WordPress serve as your next social networking profile? Chris Messina, co-founder of Citizen Agency, thinks so. Heâs started a project called DiSo, for distributed social networking, that aims to âbuild a social network with its skin inside out.â DiSo will first look to WordPress as its foundation.
This could be the next step towards the unified social graph that some technologists wish for. WordPress suits the purpose because it provides a person-centric way of coming online, offers an extensible architecture, and already has some features â such as an OpenID and a blogroll plugin â that can be pressed into social networking service. And its users represent exactly the sort of audience that might appreciate the permanent, relatively public identity that DiSo aims to offer.
Interesting. I think that blogs should be the corner-stone of social networking and I'd much rather have my blog be my social network profile rather than some page inside somebody else's container. Then again, as a blog server developer I'm pretty biased.
Dave Johnson in Blogging
02:39PM Dec 11, 2007
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Tags:
blogging
socialnetworking
socialsoftware
Dave Johnson in Roller
11:58AM Dec 10, 2007
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Tags:
blogging
roller
velocity
Dave Johnson in Links
09:00AM Dec 06, 2007
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Tags:
atom
atompub
opensocial
socialsoftware
Dave Johnson in Roller
08:16AM Dec 05, 2007
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blogging
java
roller
I'm always happy to see Roller used in new sites, projects and products. Here's an interesting new example that I've been meaning to blog for a while now. Phillip Rhodes is working on building what he calls OpenQabal a "social software operating system." The project integrates a set of social software applications, including Roller and JavaBB, via Single Sign-On (SSO), a common look-and-feel and Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities (SIOC). He explains it all in an lengthy and informative blog post on the project's JRoller.com blog.
I'd never heard of SIOC before. Here's the executive summary:
Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities SIOC or is a framework aimed at connecting online community sites and internet-based discussions. Currently, online communities (boards, blogs, etc.) are like islands - they contain valuable information but are not well connected. SIOC allows us to interlink these sites, and enables the extraction of richer information from various discussion services.
Sounds like it could be pretty darn useful. But then again, I spent a little time exploring the list of SIOC enabled sites with the SIOC Firefox plugin and didn't really find any examples of interlinked communities or conversations. Am I missing something?
Dave Johnson in Open Source
08:56AM Dec 04, 2007
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Tags:
java
opensource
roller
socialsoftware
We've got the votes to release our tenth release candidate as Apache Roller 4.0. I'll make formal announcements after I've put files in place and updated the various release and docs pages.
Dave Johnson in Roller
08:35AM Dec 03, 2007
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roller
One of my five ApacheCon EU 2008 proposals was accepted. I submitted a couple of proposals for customizing Roller, one for advanced Roller and one on RSS/Atom. The advanced Roller talk was accepted. Here's the abstract:
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.
Dave Johnson in Roller
08:33AM Dec 03, 2007
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apachecon
conferences
roller
I just registered for the 2008 NC Science Blogging Conference and I'm really looking forward to another excellent BlogTogether production. I attended the first edition of the conference last year and learned a lot about how scientists are using blogs, how they'd like to use them and the issues they're facing with both the medium and the software tools, very useful stuff for a blog software developer like me. I'm itchin' to learn more, and to get another chance to hang with the BlogTogether folks and science bloggers from far and wide.
If you're interested in science or blogging, check it out.
Here's the conference wiki
Here's the conference registration page.
And here's the conference sponsorship page.
Dave Johnson in General 07:12AM Dec 02, 2007 Comments [0]
Here's a sampling of governance docs from some of Sun's many open source projects. I've listed them in order of what I feel to be, the most progressive (i.e. community governance) to least progressive (i.e. corporate control). I've also listed a key quote from each doc and made a brief comment about each.
Looks to me like the trend is towards community governance and the most important projects are the ones getting the most attention and the most progressive governance. That's good and I sincerely hope the trend continues.
Dave Johnson in Sun
08:57AM Dec 01, 2007
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java
opensource
sun
I wrote about Shindig before, it's a new open source project to implement the Google OpenSocial APIs. Well, now the official voting to accept the Shindig project into the Apache Incubator is in progress and some interesting details have emerged in the latest version of the proposal. First, as you can see by the initial list of committers in the proposal Google has joined the Shindig effort in force. Second, the proposal says that Shindig will be the reference implementation of the OpenSocial APIs. And third, Shindig will not only include the client-side JavaScript container but also a Java back-end. Brian McAllister has already made some "gnarly" initial client-side container code available, I can't wait to see the Google contribution.
Dave Johnson in Open Source
07:48AM Nov 30, 2007
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asf
java
ning
opensocial
Hadn't heard about this one until today, but Netbeans 6.1 will have plugin support for creating, editing, deploying to Apache HTTPD, running and even debugging PHP projects. Check out the details and screenshots on the Phantom Reference blog.
Here's a sceenshot from the Netbeans Wiki page on PHP:
Dave Johnson in Java
11:55AM Nov 28, 2007
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netbeans
php
After going missing in NB 5.5, Groovy support is back in Netbeans. Basic Groovy support with syntax coloring and support for running scripts from the IDE is available in plugin form (download page) for Netbeans 6.0 (starting with RC2), read about it on Geertjan's blog.
Here's what's coming after Netbeans 6.0, Groovy project support:>
After Netbeans 6.0, the story gets better. Geertjan writes that a brand new Groovy plugin will be available in the post-6.0 builds that adds support for three types of Groovy projects: applications, class libraries and Grails webapps.
Dave Johnson in Java
04:05AM Nov 28, 2007
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groovy
java
netbeans
I've got a couple of Roller related items to blog about, so why not just call it Roller Strong #11.
First, Lars Trieloff responds to some of the questions I raised about JCR and Roller in my ApacheCon wrap-up post. I left a comment on his blog in response. Personally, I think a JCR back-end is a very interesting idea and I wish I had some more time to explore it.
Manchi Leung AKA Thinkboy posted the code for a new Textile plugin to the Roller dev list, using Textile-J. Thinkboy says "it supports almost all of the Textile syntax. very much the same as Confluence wiki. Now I can easily sync or copy working notes from Confluence wiki to my personal Roller blog." Nice. Note to self: I need to fix up some of our existing entry plugins -- I think some of them (e.g. Ekit) still haven't been updated for Roller 3.1.
Arun Gupta blogged recently about Backing up your Roller entries and explained how to use the Grabber example (now known as BlogBackup in Blogapps 2) from the Blogapps project to backup your Roller blog. Backing-up your entries, but backing up your uploads is not. Hopefully, blogs.sun,com will turn on Atom protocol someday and that'll will make it easy for a tool like Grabber backup both entries and uploads.
We're still waiting on Roller 4.0, but I sense our wait is soon over. Roller 4.0 RC10 was released one week ago with just a couple of bug fixes. And so far, no critical issues have been found. We've got only one +1 vote (thanks Anil!) so far so committers please test and vote.
And finally, I have to mention MarkMail because I've been using it throughout this blog post. MarkMail provides a slick interface and excellent facilities for mailing lists of all kinds. They're indexing all of the Apache mailing lists and providing statis and charts for each. Check the Roller page at MarkMail for example.
That's all I've got for this go-round. Keep on rollin'
Dave Johnson in Roller
04:04PM Nov 27, 2007
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Tags:
java
opensource
roller
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