Blogging Roller

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.

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'

• Roy Fielding [ogb-discuss]: please dissolve the Desktop Community
  "there is absolutely no reason for this organization to exist if all decisions are going to be made by Sun."
• Ian Murdock [ogb-discuss]: re: please dissolve the Desktop Community
  "You have to be joking? I don't even know where to begin.. This is like Robert's Rules of Order run amok"
• Jim Grisanzio: Two Great Linus Quotes
  "(1) one person or company shouldn't control the entire community, and (2) the real value of community development comes over the long term and results from many small contributions, not one big one."


• Ed Burnette: Sun/Google Android “fight” overblown
  "I’m here to tell you, it’s all bunk"..."However Google did make one big mistake with Android"
• Slashdot: Google, Sun Headed for Showdown Over Android
  Pure FUDtastic speculation based on Stefano's blog post
• robilad: QOTD: Google's license for the Android SDK
  "you may not extract the source code or create a derivative work of the SDK"
• Javalobby: Is Google the New Microsoft?
  Dalibor's comment: "Google will keep Android as proprietary as they can for as long as they can, while letting people believe something else"


• David Heffelfinger: Eclipse Veteran Switches To NetBeans
  "NetBeans has now surpassed Eclipse in usability. Count me in as a new convert."
• Stuck in the middle : Weblog
  Rickard Oberg is blogging at JRoller.com again
• Alan Burlison's Blog: How to leave Facebook
  "try mailing them, quoting the clear precedent they have set by closing my account"
• Symphonious » Why Support OpenSocial?
  "However, if OpenSocial gets support outside social networks it has the possibility of attracting developers who actually care about their users, not just their advertising profits and install count"
• ZDNet: Firefox 3 Beta 1 has landed
  "Improved performance with more than 300 memory leak fixes."

thanksgiving-2007
Originally uploaded by snoopdave

Happy Thanksgiving, turkeys.

I spent last week at the ApacheCon US 2007 conference in Atlanta, Georgia. Here's a write up of some of my experiences there. [Read More]

I just posted the slides for my ApacheCon US 2007 talk on the ApacheCon wiki. It's basically the same talk that I gave at ApacheCon EU earlier this year, but I spent some time tweaking the slides, simplifying removing unnecessary bits and adding a little Abdera coverage. That, and the fact that the power did not fail, seemed to make the talk go more smoothly this morning. Here are the slides:

Apache Roller and blogs as a web development platform (2MB PDF)

Apache member Brian McAllister, who works for Ning, has proposed a new project for Apache called Shindig. Here's an excerpt from the proposal:

OpenSocial provides a common set of APIs for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create social applications that use a social network's friends and update feeds. A social application, in this context, is an application run by a third party provider and embedded in a web page, or web application, which consumes services provided by the container and by the application host. This is very similar to Portal/Portlet technology, but is based on client-side compositing, rather than server. More information can be found about OpenSocial at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial.

Shindig is an implementation of an emerging set of APIs for client-side composited web applications. The Apache Software Foundation has proven to have developed a strong system and set of mores for building community-centric, open standards based systems with a wide variety of participants. A robust, community-developed implementation of these APIs will encourage compatibility between service providers, ensure an excellent implementation is available to everyone, and enable faster and easier application development for users.

. . .

Ning, Inc. intends to donate code based on their implementation of OpenSocial. The backend systems will be replaced with more generic equivalents in order to not bind the implementation to specifics of the Ning platform.

Brian is pretty excited about OpenSocial as a light-weight client-side alternative to Portal/Portlet technology, not just for social apps but for webapps of all kind. He'd like to see both Apache Roller and Apache JSPWIki (incubating) become OpenSocial containers, despite the fact that neither product stores the social graph of user/friend relationships. Blogs and wikis are already great platforms for web development, OpenSocial could make them even stronger. Very interesting stuff.

I hadn't planned on talking OpenSocial during my session tomorrow, but I might have to add a slide or two to illustrate the possibilities.

I'm off to ApacheCon US in Atlanta this morning. Here's where you can find me.

• Monday afternoon: hackathon
• Tuesday: hackathon
• Wednesday 10AM: my session Roller and blogs as a web development platform
• Wednesday 8:30PM: joint Roller/Struts 2 bird-of-a feather session, Room Atlanta E-F
• Thursday 11 - 12AM, 12:30 - 1:30PM: Sun booth
• And you can follow me on Twitter

• Sound Opinions from Chicago Public Radio and American Public Media
  Best podcast ever


• The Aquarium: GlassFish Interim Governance Board - Now Complete
  "The complete roster is Tony, Greg Luck (Wotif.com) and Pierre Delisle (Google), and Simon and myself (Sun)"
• Bistro!: GlassFish/SJS AS in production - which bundle, which profile, ...?
  Explains differences between developer, cluster and enterprise profiles
• GlassFish Podcast: The GlassFish Podcast
  Finally, a Glassfish podcast! Props to Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine
• Apple - Downloads - UNIX & Open Source - GlassFish
  Download Glassfish V2 directly from Apple
• Red Hat and Sun Collaborate to Advance Open Source Java Technology
  "Red Hat has signed Sun's broad contributor agreement that covers participation in all Sun-led open source projects."


• Megginson: First looks at OpenSocial: part 1 (URLs)
  Lists the URIs for the AtomPub collections available in OpenSocial
• Megginson: First looks at OpenSocial: part 2 (members and friends)
  How OpenSocial members and friends are represented in Atom format
• Megginson: First looks at OpenSocial: part 3 (activities)
  How OpenSocial activities are represented in Atom format and manipulated via AtomPub protocol
• Megginson: First looks at OpenSocial: part 4 (persistence data)
  How OpenSocial persistence is implemented via AtomPub protocol
• Google: OpenSocial Container Sample
  Shows "basic demonstration-level OpenSocial container can be implemented"
• Dare Obasanjo: OpenSocial Tech. Overview and Critique
  "Despite these misgivings, I think this is a step in the right direction. Web widget and social graph APIs need to be standardized across the Web."


• snellspace.com: Notes, Part 2
  "lots and lots of things that can be modeled as collections of web resources"
• netzooid: Building Services with AtomPub
  "While APP is not the one true protocol, I think I?m hooked"

Tri-LUG announcement: Pat Patterson from Sun Microsystems will provide us with a developer perspective on digital identity, starting from the emergence of LDAP in the 90s, through single sign-on, SAML and the Liberty Alliance protocols to recent developments such as OpenID, Cardspace and OAuth. The emphasis will be on understanding the protocols and how they are implemented in the real world, with a particular focus on deciding which (if any!) approach to select for a given project.

Pat Patterson is a federation architect at Sun Microsystems, focusing on federation, identity-enabled Web services and OpenSSO, Sun's open-source implementation of those technologies. Pat's blog centers on identity-related topics.

Looks like a great talk and I've always wanted to meet SuperPat, so I'll be there.

Here are the details:

Speaker:   Pat Patterson
Title:     Digital Identity from LDAP to SAML and beyond
Date/time: 7PM Thursday Nov. 8, 2007
Location:  Red Hat HQ (map)
           1801 Varsity Drive
           Raleigh, North Carolina 27606
           Tel: +1-919-754-3700

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/peachtree-westin-atlanta.jpg" hspace="7px" align="right" title="ApacheCon US 2007 venue" alt="Peachtree Westin Hotel, Atlanta, GA" />

Matt Raible, Don Brown and I will be doing at "Roller and Struts 2" birds-of-a-feather (BOF) session on Wednesday night at ApacheCon at 8:30PM. Thanks to Atlassian for sponsoring the beer-of-freeness (BOF). The sign-up is here:

http://wiki.apache.org/apachecon/BirdsOfaFeatherUs07

There are already handful of people signed up, so I guess I better work on some preso materials. I'll be prepared to talk about Roller status, future plans and Roller's recent migration from Struts 1 to 2.

Are there any specific Roller issues you'd like to discuss in the BOF?

Another batch of social software related links today, but today it's all about Google's new OpenSocial APIs (link to go live tomorrow). I waded through 20 or so posts today and the links below are my favorites. Gotta say, I'm really looking forward to getting the details tomorrow, understanding how Roller can play and seeing how AtomPub fits into the picture -- and I'm assuming it does since GData has been mentioned (see the Brady Forrest link below). After reading Marc Andreessen's post, which is the first link below, I think it's possible that Roller could act as both a Container and as a provider of Apps for other Containers. I wonder, could OpenSocial provide the UI widget API that Roller needs? And, will Roller's rather limited user profile data be enough to allow Roller to act as a Container? If so, I might be doing some late night hacking this weekend.

• Marc Andreessen: Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web
  "An open web API that can be supported by two kinds of developers: Containers -- social networking systems and... Apps -- applications that want to be embedded within containers"
• Brady Forrest: Google Announces the OpenSocial API
  "The open API will have three parts People, Storage [and] Activity stream. All of these calls will have a GData counterparts"
• Fred Stutzman: On OpenSocial
  "It's unfortunate that Google, rather than a standards body, is at the center, but perhaps this will outline a standard way forward"
• Danny Ayers: Google's OpenSocial coming tomorrow
  "Will this stuff be truly open, usable as linked data (with appropriate authentication) or will it still be hogtied within those partners' environments?"
• Valley Wag: What OpenSocial will look like on LinkedIn
  "Here are screen shots detailing how one such partner, LinkedIn, plans to incorporate apps"

Some reading on Facebook and enterprise social software from my del.icio.us bookmarks collection:

• Tim Bray: The Intimate Internet
  Bray on Facebook: "Twitter hits that 80/20 point, bringing me that news without all the Facebook bullshit and lame groups and dorky apps and stupid ads and data lock-in. "
  
• Fred Stutzman: The Directionality of Social Network Platforms
  Stutzman on Facebook: "the ecosystem needs more than fluff, especially if we're going to start talking about the "social operating system."
• Phil Windley: What's wrong with Facebook
  Windley on Facebook: "social Webs will require similar attention to the structure that emerges from social activity, not nagging people about it";
• Doc Searls: Too much face(book) time
  Searls on Facebook: "If you're waiting for me to respond to a poke or an invitation, or a burp or any of that other stuff, don't hold your breath."
• Read/Write Web: Big Vendors Scrap for Enterprise 2.0 Supremacy
  "The [products] remain complex and broad in scope - which in many respects goes against the grain of simple and easy-to-use web 2.0 products."
• Personal InfoCloud: The State of Enterprise Social Software
  "Nearly all of the enterprise software product companies are claiming understanding of Web 2.0, but none execute well on it"

It's been over a month since the last Roller Strong, so now I'm really glad I didn't call this thing Roller Week. Anyhow, in this installment I've got news about including new releases, a big new Roller customer and upcoming Roller-related events. I'll start with the release news. [Read More]

That was the only complaint the kids had about the They Might Be Giants show last night, their first "real rock concert" as they called it. Otherwise they loved it. My brother and I took Alex (10) and Linus (9) to the show at the Carolina Theater in Durham. They had a great time, pogoed around like the rest of the crowd and didn't get to bed until after 1AM.

I loved the show too. The last time I saw TMBG was probably before you were born; just the two Johns with a guitar, accordion, saxophone and a jam-box playing a drum tape. This time they had a full rock band with an amazing guitar player but unfortunately, no horns. They put on a solid show, played a wide variety of songs not weighted too heavily to their latest release, The Else, which was good and bad. Good because they've got a giant back catalog of kick ass jams. Bad because we've been listening to The Else and the boys really dig Bee of the Bird of the Moth -- guess they needed the horns for that one.

Here are some related links: There are still about 20 shows left in the TMBG tour. David Menconi of the Raleigh N&O blogged about TBMG and scored an interview. And Pat Mueller remarks on the nerd-fest that is the TMBG audience.

Matt Raible gave a talk today at the Colorado Software Summit on integrating Roller with LDAP and CAS. He also has provided some nice notes on that and running Roller on Geronimo:

• Roller 4.0 with LDAP and CAS
• Roller 4.0 on Geronimo

Matt had to make a couple of tweaks to get thing going with Roller 4.0 RC8 and a couple other problems have been found, so you can expect RC9 shortly.

<img align="left" hspace="10px" src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/acus2007_125x125.png">

ApacheCon US 2007 is only about 20 days away. I'm getting psyched up to do my Roller and blogs as a web development platform talk again (and thinking about topics for ApacheCon EU 2008). There's still plenty of time for you to register and attend. And Apache fans, please grab a banner and help promote ApacheCon on your project site and blogs.

I'm back from ConvergeSouth 2007 now and caching up on email, blogs, etc. I enjoyed day two as much as day one. Here are my notes, quotes and paraphrased thoughts from two of my favorites sessions on Saturday, Social Networking and Corporate Wikis. [Read More]

Joe Cheng posted another entry in his series explaining the details of AtomPub support in Windows Live Writer (WLM), titled WLW+AtomPub, Part 2: Authentication.

Wondering what WLM looks like? Travelin' Librarian has a nice set of screen-shots of WLM on Flickr including shots of the installation process, HTML mode, preview mode and more. Looks pretty sweet.

<img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1321/1366689098_8323af9281.jpg" alt="Screen-shot of Windows Live Writer" />

I'm in Greensboro today, a couple of hours away from home, attending ConvergeSouth 2007 -- "the annual tech users' conference in Greensboro, North Carolina. A combination of a blogger-con and a creativity center." Here's a summary of notes and quotes I scribbled in my notebook on day #1. [Read More]