Blogging Roller

Yes this is my obligatory Glassfish V2 post but listen, for me V2 is a pretty big big deal. Like Eclipse, which was the IDE that pulled me away from VIM, Glassfish V2 is the app server that finally pulled me away from Tomcat.

You see, I've been using Tomcat every day for a very long time. I started back in 2000 when I worked at HAHT Software and I was working on the new "Rocketsled" J2EE version of the HAHTsite app server. We were ripping out the old proprietary page engine and plugging in Tomcat. It was a pleasure to work with and I learned a hell of a lot from the code-base. After joining Sun and switching from Eclipse to Netbeans because Sun-on-Sun matters, I still stuck with Tomcat. It's what we were using for blogs.sun.com and Glassfish was just too bulky and slow. I grew to love Netbeans, but I couldn't stomach Glassfish, until now.

Now that Glassfish V2 is out I'm switching from Tomcat to Glassfish for all of my development. It's more than fast enough. With Glassfish on my MacBook Pro, Roller restart time is about 8 seconds compared to 16 with Tomcat. And the quality is high; the admin console, the asadmin command-line utility and the docs are all excellent. The dog food is surprisingly tasty ;-)

Congrats to the Glassfish team!

I bought a new 3rd generation iPod Nano (4GB) yesterday to replace the armband radio that I wear on my daily runs and to complement my old 3rd generation iPod classic. As you can see, the Nano is tiny so it should work perfectly for me once I get an armband.

Here's old and new together.

I was happy to find that the new Nano fits in the old iPod cradle:

So far, I really like the Nano. It's the right size for me, it looks great and the UI works wonderfully. There's just one problem. It's flakey. I've had to reboot the thing four times in the 24 hours that I've owned it. I never had to do that for my old iPod and in fact, I don't even know how. To figure out how to reset my Nano I had to download the Features Guide (PDF). Here's how you do it:

1. Toggle the Hold switch on and off (slide it to HOLD and then back again).
2. Press and hold the Menu and Center buttons for at least 6 seconds, 
   until the Apple logo appears.

If iPod nano won't turn on or respond
   * Make sure the Hold switch isn't set to HOLD.
   * The iPod nano battery might need to be recharged. Connect iPod nano to your
     computer or to an Apple USB Power Adapter and let the battery recharge. Look for
     the lightning bolt icon on the iPod nano screen to verify that iPod nano is
     receiving a charge.

I also bought a Nano as a birthday present for my brother (that's today so Happy Birthday Dan!), so I really hope a software update will fix this irritating problem and soon. I'd hate to have to return these slick little gadgets.

ApacheCon is coming up fast. I just faxed in my speaker's agreement and I'm starting to update my talk to cover the latest changes in the upcoming Apache Roller 4.0 and 4.1 releases.

I've been four times now and ApacheCon is always a great conference. It's small and cozy enough, but almost all of the Apache projects are represented. So it's easy to find the experts, make new friends and get all of your questions answered. The session line-up looks great this year; here are ones that caught my eye:

• Hacking Atom with Apache Abdera - Garret Rooney
• A little REST and Relaxation - Roy Fielding
• WS-* vs. REST: Facts, Myths and Lies - Sanjiva Weerawarana
• Go Light with Apache Struts 2 and REST - Don Brown
• How to Run a Business Around The ASF - Sanjiva Weerawarana
• Open Source Community Anti-Patterns - Ted Leung
• RIAs using Apache Derby and Comet - Jeanfrancois Arcand & Francois Orsini
• Apache Derby - Saucer Separation - Rick Hillegas
• JCR in Action - Content-based Applications with Apache Jackrabbit - Carsten Ziegeler

Want to go? There's still time to shave a couple of hundred dollars off the conference fees by registering early. Early bird pricing has been extended to Sept. 22, 2007.

And the Weston looks like a pretty nice place for a conference:

I was playing around with the new flight simulator in Google Earth and flying over Raleigh when I noticed the extensive and very detailed set of 3D models for the NCSU campus. Here's an overview that shows the brickyard, D.H. Hill library and Harrelson Hall:

The details are pretty amazing, with signage and steps and hand-rails. Here's an example that shows the stairs on the side of Reynolds the old basketball coliseum:

The work was done by students competing in Google's Build Your Campus in 3D competition. Follow that link for a (tiny) video and you can also find a catalog of all the student's work on the Google Earth site.

Congratulations to the Apache OpenJPA team on making their first official release since graduation. I wish I'd paid closer attention to the OpenJPA mailing lists and tested the release candidates. Oh well. I'll download and test the final 1.0 release and maybe we can get it into Apache Roller 4.0 RC2.

Sam Ruby reports that AtomPub support in Wordpress is coming along well and he posts a much more concise set of setup instructions for the Atom Protocol Exerciser (Ape) than those I previously posted.

Tim Bray: Java still remains by far the largest development ecosystem, and the selection and quality of libraries put pretty well any other language’s to shame, and it’s really fucking fast, and has superb tooling, and we know how to run it securely, and it’s Open-Source. So, if you want to move the state of the art along, a smart idea would be to work with, not against, Java.

Finally, something I can agree with on the topic.

This morning I woke up a little earlier than usual so that I could run, shower and look presentable by 8:40AM because today's the big day that Leo goes off to kindergarden. It's a bittersweet milestone both because Leo's our youngest and because I've seen so much of him for the past three years. Ever since I joined Sun and started working at home three years ago, he's been only a couple of rooms away. All day every day. I'm going to miss that. I'm going to miss taking little breaks and eating lunch with him and shooing him out of my office when I forget to lock the door. I would go on, but I'll get all teary eyed and I'm the strong one who doesn't do that. That's why I was the one who got to walk him to school today, check him in and sit him down at his little desk.

Atom protocol "features" extension

I try to follow the Atom community pretty closely, but sometimes I fall out of the loop. For example, I missed the discussion on James "Mr. Atom" Snell's important new extension proposal for Atom protocol features, which will enable blog servers to declare what features they support. For example, Roller could inform blog clients that you can enable/disable comments for each post, limit comments to N days on, "pin" a blog entry to to site's main page (if you are an admin) and more. Hopefully, we can get blog server developers to agree on a common set of features and blog client developers to support that set.

Publishing critical info with Atom

And I had to bookmark James Snell's excellent and important article Publish critical public warnings on the Web, with the sub-title "Atom publishing can provide a powerful and flexible way to distribute critical, life-saving information."

Sun Portal's blog porlet, powered by Atom protocol

This next Atom link comes from docs.sun.com. It's some documentation for the Sun Portal Server 7.1 - Blog Portlet. I did not realize that the Sun Portal blog portlet uses Atom protocol to enable publishing to Roller. It was developed and tested against Roller 3.1, so it probably does not conform to the final Atom protocol.

What to call Atom protocol?

And finally, folks are wondering what to call Atom Publishing Protocol. Is it APP or Atompub or Atom protocol? Ian Bicking says I’ve decided to make a conscious effort to call it Atompub from now on." I don't have a strong opinion, but I do think APP is to vague to be useful.

Lightweight image editors for Mac

I've got a copy of Photoshop Elements for the Mac, but I really hate to have to start it up when I want to crop or resize an image. So I twittered about it. Ryan Irelan pointed out ImageWell "the Free and Lean Image Editor". Rich Sharples recommended Skitch, a Web 2.0-ish desktop app that makes it easy to snap, draw and share images from your desktop. I'm on the waiting list for an invite. On my own, I found Seashore, which is a Gimp based open source image editor Mac, one that does not need X11, and it's pretty light-weight. I'm not ashamed to admit, I love the Gimp.

Whew! I've got a couple more links but my lunch break is over so there you go.

Todays news that Sun's stock ticker will change from SUNW to JAVA was met with pretty mixed reactions both inside and outside of Sun. On the day of the announcement, the more than 170 comments on Jonathan Schwartz's blog announcement were mostly negative and though there are some positive reactions in the interblogonet, they come mostly from Sun employees.

Below are the posts that I've seen in my feed reader so far.

• Barton George (Sun): "bold move"
• David Van Couvering (Sun): "Wow. Bold, audacious, wild."
• BlogBridge blog: "That’s good news for us" - reaction from a Java ISV
• Nick Wooler (Sun): "reinforces the brand"
• Jonathan Hawkins (Sun): "good idea"
• Bruce Hill (Sun): "certainly a cooler name"
• Glynn Foster (Sun): "massively supportive"
• Jason Beloro (Sun) "already a success"
• Fake Schwartz: "we're open sourcing the stock as well!"
• Marc Kossa (Sun): "I like it !"
• Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine (Sun): "turning out to be a very good communication strategy"

• Evil Geir (ASF): "brilliant" (with extreme sarcasm)
• Geoff Arnold (formerly Sun): "This is simply silly"
• Sam Ruby (ASF): JCP (JCP with the C for Community crossed out)
• Shawn Ferry (Sun): "I preferred SUNW" via Twitter
• Dan Latcher (Sun): "don't see the point"
• Murphee's Rant: "Run for the hills, folks! "
• Dion Almer: "Oh momma"
• Paul Krill, InfoWorld: "likely to cause confusion"
• C. G. Walters: "army of hamsters" (sorry, that's my favorite part)
• Sanjiva Weerawarana (ASF): "incredibly bad idea"
• James Robertson: "dilutes Sun's brand"
• Daring Fireball: "shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic"
• Catherine Helzerman: "Java isn’t just Sun"
• Tim Bray (Sun): "I hate it."

• James Gosling (Sun): "totally bizarre"
• James Duncan Davidson: "something not to be done lightly" (good story, don't miss it)
• Kevin Chu (Sun): "In light of our change..."
• Jim Jagielski : "The next several months will be very telling indeed."
• Garbage Collection blog (Sun): "Maybe it might work"
• Madhan Kumar Balasubramanian (Sun): "What is this?"
• C. Enrique Ortiz: "[Sun] is very committed to Java"

What do I think? I'm not sure what I think of the change. The ticker SUNW was out of date because "workstations" are so 80s man, so it's a good thing to update it. And Java ISVs like BlogBridge should like the vote of confidence in Java. On the negative side, it's easy to search for SUNW to get Sun news and that won't work as well with the new ticker. And Java's not all Sun does. One more point. I'm not sure most folks really care what the ticker name is. If they did, don't you think Sun would have changed it years ago?

By the way. I didn't mean the hit the post button on this entry so soon, but it's out there now so I might as well let it stand. I'll update over the next day or two as reactions roll in.

UPDATE: Ed Burnette has a positive, neutral, negative and funny breakdown of his 25 favorite comments from Jonathan's blog post. He says that "Stockholders and employees are among the most vocal critics." of the change.

Just learned from Tim's blog that Greg Borenstein just came up with a cute logo for the Atom Protocol Exerciser (Ape), which, in case you don't know, is the closest thing we have to a compatibility test for Atom servers. The logo is featured on the Ape's home page.

I attended Greensboro's ConvergeSouth back in 2005 and it was a great experience. So I'm glad that this year, I'll be able to attend again. Looks like they've lined-up a great set of sessions covering blogging, podcasting, social networking, new media and Web 2.0 (Friday and Saturday schedules are on-line).

I just signed up and you ought to do the same here: http://convergesouth.com/register/index.php.

It's been a couple of weeks since the last Roller Strong because I've been very busy with 4.0 and some other new projects. Plus, I was getting a little tired of saying "we're still working on 4.0." So now I'm happy to report that release candidates have been made available for upcoming Apache Roller 4.0 release.

It should be very easy to try out the new release because we spent a lot of time focusing on a new easy-install process, plus there is no need to download a separate bundle of Hibernate files as Roller no longer uses Hibernate. With the new easy-install, installation should be as easy as editing four settings in a small configuration file and dropping the WAR into Tomcat or Glassfish.

Below are some links to the 4.0 RC1 release files.

• apache-roller-4.0-rc1.tar.gz (key)
• apache-roller-4.0-rc1.zip (key)
• What's new in Roller 4.0
• Roller 4.0 Change list in JIRA
• Roller 4.0 Installation Guide (PDF)
• Roller 4.0 User Guide (PDF)
• Roller 4.0 Template Guide (PDF)

Keep in mind that 4.0 RC1 is not an official Apache release and is meant for testing only. Even so, this is probably a pretty solid release. The .Sun Engineering team put the code into production at at blogs.sun.com over a month ago and my coworkers on the Sun App Platform team just put the code through a couple weeks of testing.

rollerthemes.com

Big thanks to Gene Strokine! As seen on raibledesigns.com, Gene has been busy with Roller theme development and has started a new site rollerthemes.com to promote his work. Gene is also the newest committer on the Roller Support project at Java.net and has committed many of his themes there (they still need to be upgraded to work with 4.0 though).

Notes on Roller and JA-SIG CAS SSO

And Phillip Rhodes reports success integrating Roller and JavaBB with single-sign on via JA-SIG CAS and has plans for additional identity related work. He has posted his notes on Roller and CAS/SSO to the Roller dev list.

JRoller.com troubles

In the "OK, so maybe Roller ain't so strong" department, JRoller.com has been having problems with Roller 3.1. Matt Schmidt upgraded JRoller.com from Roller 2.0 to Roller 3.1 a couple of weeks back and ran into database connection pool problems, which were resolved by switching back from Tomcat to Resin. Now he's dealing with some explosive memory usage and asking for help from the Javalobby community.

Coming soon: a Geronimo plugin for Roller

Our Geronimo friends David Jencks and Peter Peterssen stopped by the Roller-dev list this month to contribute some code to make it easier for Roller to work in Apache Geronimo. They're cookin' up a Geronimo plugin for Roller and I'm looking forward to seeing it in action.

In other news...

One final note. We've made a bunch of fixes to 3.1 so we also have a new RC available for the upcoming Apache Roller 3.1.1 fix release. You can find the RC files for 3.1.1 in my Apache site and the change list in JIRA.

• Dare Obasanjo: A Proposal for Social Network Interop. via OpenID
  "This is where OpenID Attribute Exchange can be put to use" and "Why This Will Never Happen"
• The Open Road: Free versus paid support in open source
  Matt Asay: "you're better off paying a little money for professional support"
• The Unix Guardian--Q and A: Sun's Top Operating System Brass Talk OS Strategy
  "mass customization of operating systems is going to be possible for those operating systems that are open source and repository driven"
• Miles to go: First JRuby on Rails App in GlassFish V3
  "the exact steps to deploy your first JRuby application in GlassFish V3"
• SourceKibitzer - Interview w/Lars Trieloff of Mindquarry
  e.g. "Who are the main competitors of Mindquarry and why are you different?"
• Jonathan Schwartz: The Internet vs. Stone Tablets
  "I'd love it if we one day eliminated the term "blogging" from the web lexicon"
• Sam Ruby: WordPress, AtomPub, and PHP5
  Sam says he'll help Wordpress implement APP, but only for PHP5
• Atomojo: complete Atom Publishing Protocol stack
  APP server based on Restlet API and APP client for Firefox
• snellspace.com: URI Template Update
  Looking pretty dang useful, w/Java implementation too
• Progress on Redhat's IcedTea OpenJDK project
  "I hit a major milestone today as Swing & Java2D work!"
• The limitations of JSON
  Interetsing JSON vs. XML vs. RDF post with plenty of comments
• MPX: The Multi-Pointer X Server w/multi-touch
  "Now I've gone one step further and added support for multi-touch displays"
• Google Pack Adds StarOffice
  "The software normally costs $70, but it's available for free in Google Pack"

Anil Dash: The only tools that succeed in an enterprise situation are those which are so compelling that people choose to use them in their free time.

[...]

When I talk to companies about blogging, I ask them how their Knowledge Management or Enterprise Content Management deployments have succeeded. And they almost invariably mumble a bit about "it's sort of underperforming...". This is the dark outcome of people trying to draw a line between who we are at work and who we are at home. You end up with shoddy, compromised products like KM or groupware. And the folks in IT aren't unfeeling, tyrannical monsters; When I tell them "well, we'll give you LDAP integration, but it'll also have a UI that's easy enough that people choose to use these tools in their free time as a hobby", their eyes light up. They want to delight people, too.

A great post by Anil Dash, VP and chief evangelist at blog software vendor SixApart. There are counter examples. I mean, who really spends a delightful and inspiring Friday evening with SAP? But generally I agree. Those of us who make enterprise software have a lot to learn from the consumer market.

And it reminds me of my old Dave on software post.

Apache JSPWiki Manifesto: This idea has been brought up before, but so far it has not really been an issue. However, this looks like the time when it would be possible to accomplish this.

JSPWiki code base is old, and it needs some refactoring. This refactoring includes things like moving to Java 5, fixing the metadata engine, replacing the backend with something scalable, and in general removing all the cruft that has been accumulated over time. This requires that we break compatibility with existing plugins and other components. Not badly, but to some degree.

Also, JSPWiki as an open source software project is growing slowly but steadily. However, the wiki world is moving rapidly, and wikis have been adopted widely. JSPWiki has become a tool for a great many companies, who are relying on it in their daily business. This is a lot for a hobby project lead by a "benevolent dictator" -model. Therefore, it is time for JSPWiki to mature to a "real" open source software project to be a serious contender in the wiki world.

To accomplish both of these goals needs a major shift in how JSPWiki is managed and who "owns" it, in a sense. Therefore, we (the people who have been committing source code) think that Apache would be a good choice, and have decided that we will try to submit JSPWiki into the Apache incubation process, with the goal of graduating as a top-level project.

I've been a JSPWiki (and Janne Jalkanen) fan for years now. It's my favorite Java-based wiki so I'm pretty excited that the dev team is preparing a proposal to move the project to Apache. I think this will be a great move and will ensure that the project continues to grow and continues to be a strong contender in the enterprise wiki space. I'm more than willing to help with that proposal and to help out in the Incubator.

I wasn't paying attention and this one snuck-up on me. Today at noon Pacific Time there will be an online Atom Publishing Protocol interop event. The location is IRC on the Freenode network in the #atom channel: irc://irc.freenode.net/atom.

I'm really glad I didn't miss this announcement because I spent much of the last two weekends updating the ROME Propono and Apache Roller 4.0 implementations to work with the final version of APP (draft #17). I've got both implementations online now and ready for interop.

And in kinda sorta related news, one of the founders of the Atom effort Joe Gregorio is leaving IBM and heading over to Google. Congratulations Joe! I hope this doesn't mean you'll be leaving the Triangle behind.

My brother Dan is a great writer with an encyclopedic knowledge of films, rock and pop music in general, and he's blogging, so it's only natural that folks start to notice. This weekend he got another boost, this time it's a mention in New York Magazine: The week in Woody Allen on Ingmar Bergman.

I've been waiting years for this one. As Roumen Strobl points out, the Netbeans 6.0 nightly builds finally include a "go to file" feature, much like CTRL-SHIFT-R in Eclipse (but in Netbeans 6.0 it's CTRL-SHIFT-O).

I'm diggin' 6.0 and it's starting to look pretty stable in advance of beta1, which is coming out this month. Grab a nightly build and check it out. According to Tor on the Java Posse the nightly builds are likely to be more stable than the most recent M10 milestone release.