Blogging Roller

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.

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.

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.

RSS advistory board: The RSS Profile makes it easier for feed publishers and programmers to implement RSS 2.0, offering advice on issues that arise as you develop software that employs the format. For 18 months, the board worked with the RSS community on interoperability issues, receiving help from representatives at Bloglines, FeedBurner, Google, Microsoft, Netscape, Six Apart and Yahoo. The profile tackles the most frequently asked questions posed by developers:

1. How many enclosures can an item contain?
2. Are relative URLs OK in item descriptions?
3. Is it OK to use HTML in elements other than an item's description?

For the answers, read the sections on enclosures, item descriptions and character data, respectively. Sam Ruby announced this morning that the Feed Validator now tests for conformance to the profile, offering 11 new checks for improving interoperability.

Kudos to the RSS Advistory Board. The RSS Profile is an excellent guide to publishing RSS. Plus, it's very nice to see the confusing parts of RSS clarified and to see those clarifications linked to from the RSS spec.

Just got it today to replace my old handed-down '91 Honda Accord. Favorite features: 49 MPG and an audio jack for my iPod. As far as I can tell, my employer Sun offers no incentive for buying a hybrid but the IRS offers a $2100 tax credit for the Civic Hybrid which is not bad at all.

Joe Cheng: I’m starting a (hopefully short) series of blog posts documenting the specifics of how the upcoming AtomPub-enabled release of Windows Live Writer will behave, and what AtomPub-enabled blog* servers can do to ensure the best interop with us. I also hope other blog client implementers can learn from our experience and consider using the same rules and behaviors we do when implementing their own AtomPub support.

Very nice. I'll be watching this one closely, looking for ways to improve Roller's and ROME's AtomPub support.

Google Blog Search turned up this nice article on creating custom modules with ROME by Sujit Pal, and a nice mini-review of my book:

Sujit Pal: "However, Dave Johnson's book provides a lot of background information and a lot of nice examples in Java and C#. I would highly recommend it to anyone who needs to get up to speed quickly with ROME and RSS/Atom."

It's good to see people are still buying and finding the book useful. It's been out for over a year now, but I don't think it's really out of date at all. I've been keeping the examples up-to-date as part of the Blogapps project and even enhancing them: the example Atom protocol client code from the book is now part of the ROME Propono project.

I just made the files for Apache Roller 4.0 RC8 available for testing and called for a 2nd release vote (RC7 as the first). If we can get a couple more committers to test and sign-off on the release, we could possibly get it out this week, which would be nice. I've been spinning RCs since August 13.

We spent most of the day today at the state fair. Kids loved it. Parents endured it. We saw the bunnies, roosters, cows and pigs. We avoided the fried-thing of the year. We used up a fist-full of pre-purchased ride tickets and learned that the dubious safety factor makes the rides much more exciting than the big sturdy ones at the theme parks.

In June Peter Reiser blogged about a Social Networking application developed by Sun's Customer Engineering group in Community equity - a way to measure Social Capital for an enterprise. This past week at Sun's Customer Engineering Conference in Vegas (tag: cec2007), the application went live for the 4,000 conference attendees. Check out Peter's latest blog Community equity in action for the details and some screen-shots like this:

For more recent posts about enterprise social networking, check Ed Cone's CIO Insight article Social Networks at Work Promise Bottom-Line Results and Brian Russell's post on the same topic.

ZDNet - IBM forging developerWorks: IBM is quietly transforming its developerWorks site into something more like Sourceforge, with more public-facing features aimed at expanding its reach to all open source developers.

I haven't heard about this one before. The quote is from an ZDNet blog post about IBM striking deals with Krugle and Koders, open source code search/annotation engines.

I just happened to be looking for air show opportunities this morning and found out about the Pope AFB Airshow and Open House, which is happening today and tomorrow. What luck! So I packed up the kids and drove the 1.5 hours from Raleigh down to Fayetteville.

We parked at the Ft. Bragg fairgrounds, took a bus over to the base and despite the waiting in line and the heat, we really enjoyed ourselves. We saw several aerobatic displays, T-33, F-15, F-18 fly-overs and a Heritage Flight* with a F-15 and P-15 flying side-by-side (see below). We got to walk through several C5A and C130 transports and check out tanks and other armored fighting vehicles. There were also some vintage planes on display: a B-25, a Japanese torpedo bomber, P-40 Tomahawk, Hawker Hurricane and others. Very cool stuff (yes, I'm one of those pacifists who is fascinated with military history and hardware, kinda like this guy).

I wasn't able to get many good pictures because of my crummy little camera, which seems to be going bad. I uploaded some of best shots to my Flickr account and tagged them with airshow. Here are a couple of my favorite war birds, a P-51 Mustang and an F-15 Eagle:

* There's a nice gallery of previous Heritage Flights here.

Linda Skrocki: I find it interesting that although trust is a two way street, the focus in the blogoshpere is often on companies going out on a limb by trusting employees to blog on a corporate sponsored site, but the fact is, employees also go out on a limb for companies when they contribute content to the company blog site (whether it's personal or not).

Solaris back in the race: Last week, I wrote about us discarding Solaris for a new project. Most large companies will not care and not listen to their customers. Many of us have dealt with Verizon, Time Warner, Creative Labs, etc and know what I mean. After all, when you have so many customers, it is cheaper to lose a bunch of them and provide overall bad service than it is to fix real problems. After my short experience with Sun, I assumed it was the same:I WAS WRONG. They do listen!

That's my experience too. Folks at Sun are very tuned into the blogs, forums and other sites where our products might be discussed. We subscribe to RSS/Atom keyword search feeds so we can find out who is talking about our products, we join the conversations and we try our best to make things right when they go wrong. Critical blog posts about us almost always set off a flurry of activities on our internal bloggers mailing list. It's nice to see when those "inbound messaging" efforts pay off.

The next releases that I'd like to announce are the Blogapps 2.1 Examples and the Blogapps 2.1 Server.

If you'd like to learn more about the Blogapps examples and server then read The Blogapps Project article at Java.net. Here's a quick summary:

The Blogapps project hosts a collection of useful RSS and Atom utilities and examples from RSS and Atom In Action by Dave Johnson. They're designed to be useful even if you haven't read the book and they're available under the Apache License 2.0 so you can use the code in your applications and you can modify and redistribute them as you wish.

What's changed since 2.0? The examples have been updated to include the latest version of ROME Propono, which means that most of them now support the final Atom protcol spec. The server has been updated to include Roller 4.0 RC5, which also includes Atom protocol support and JSPWiki 2.4. And of course, various bugs have been fixed. Here are the release files, installation instructions and release notes.

• Blogapps server install instructions
• Blogapps Server-2.1.tar.gz
• Blogapps-Server-2.1.zip

• Blopapps example release notes
• Blogapps-Examples-2.1.tar.gz
• Blogapps Examples-2.1.zip

This blog entry was posted via Atom protocol and the MatisseBlogger blog-client, which you can see in the screen-shot below (which was also posted via Atom.

What's next? Not sure at this point, but I will do another Blogapps release once ROME 1.0 is released.

The first release to discuss is ROME Propono, which includes a ROME based Atom protocol client library, Atom protocol server framework and an Blog Client library abstraction that supports both Atom protocol and the MetaWeblog API.

I've been working on Propono 0.6 off-and-on since May, keeping it in sync with the latest version of the Atom protocol, testing it against Tim Bray's APE and adding various improvements needed in my other projects. Over the weekend I finally had enough time to get a release out. You can find the full-details at the link below but basically this release adds support for the final Atom Publishing Protocol specification and better support for relative URIs.

• ROME Propono 0.6 release notes / change list
• API documentation
• Propono 0.6 Binary tar.gz
• Propono 0.6 Binary zip
• Propono 0.6 Source tar.gz
• Propono 0.6 Source zip

What's next? Once ROME 1.0 is released Real Soon Now, I'll get a another release out and I'll probably call it ROME Propono 1.0.