Blogging Roller

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.

Another great in-depth post from Film Babble Dan: Ingmar Bergman - The Woody Allen Angle. Dan made the IMDB front page again.

InfoWorld In addition, the report found that the perceived business value of different Web 2.0 tools varies widely, with instant messaging and RSS noted as being the most valuable for organizations while blogging is at the bottom of the list. Only 11 percent of those surveyed said blogging had substantial benefits, while 48 percent said blogging had moderate benefits to the company.

Nearly one in four of those surveyed said RSS is the highest-value technology, Young added. Most frequently, RSS is used for corporate communication or content aggregation, the report said. It also allows many other Web 2.0 technologies to work more efficiently with its publish and subscribe mechanism, Young added.

The report also noted that companies with more Web 2.0 technology in place get a higher business value than those using fewer tools. Those enterprises with blogs, podcasts, wikis, RSS, and social networks in place get the most ROI, the report noted.

However, those surveyed noted there is no "killer combination" of the tools, although RSS was most strongly correlated with high-value combinations.

That seems to imply that Spikesource/Intel's SuiteTwo product is on the right track with its combination of blog, wiki and RSS/Atom technologies.

<img src="http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1331/956292591_e6daedd8b2_m.jpg" width="240" height="176" alt="Throwing stones" />

We had another short but nice weekend in the N.C. mountains thanks to our friend Mark. We enjoyed good food, homemade wine, playing pool and a nice slow canoe ride down the New River. The kids got a break from Lego Bionicles and Runescape and enjoyed more simple things like playing in the river, throwing stones and catching crickets.

Russell Beattie was one of the bloggers I started reading regularly, way back when he was a "Java blogger" and developing his own blog software (sound familiar?). I love his long-winded anything-goes style and his encyclopedic knowledge of mobile tech. Welcome back Russell!

Good news today from Tim Bray: Atom protocol has been finalized. The final version of the spec is going to be Atom protocol draft #17.

Instead of staying up until the dawn hours (not naming names) reading the final Harry Potter book, I spent most of the weekend working on bringing Propono in-line with the draft #17 and in particular adding support for out-of-line categories and relative URIs. I've got code ready to commit that passes Tim's Ape tests, so hopefully we'll have a new Propono 0.6 release ready very soon that supports the final spec.

Roller's Atom protocol implementation is already up to date and passing Ape tests, so Roller 4.0 will be Atom protocol ready. I still need to do a little work to document the setup.

The Raleigh Bloggers meet-up has morphed into a more inclusive RTP/Triangle-wide gathering, not just for bloggers and not just for Raleigh. We're still meeting on the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays, but we've moved the location from Raleigh Times Bar to the more centrally located Serena, a nice restaurant/bar with free WIFI. And we've established a community page at Ning. Our first meet-up in this new configuration is tonight so come on down and join us at 6:30PM tonight.

Hold your tongue, Mike says it's a river of goodness.

Mike Levin: Remember the JRoller aggregator filling up with soulmates that are now this vibrant community? Hasn't it been a blast meeting kinfolk around the globe that share the common ideal of faster, better, simpler, continuously improving, shared software that feeds your thoughts and projects with reusable code? Well, keep remembering. Remind yourself we all have a life and priorities change. As things like software change, so does the level of complexity. As opportunities open up, people move on. And, change becomes a little harder to implement. History becomes blurred. We have to strain to remember all the details that are so important to continuity and reliability. How much have you paid for your JRoller hosting? You contributed your most valuable asset: your thoughts. Well, remember who took you to the party. If you find another dance partner, don't kiss and tell. Be a code hero. Remember your partner, "Nada". Smile demurely and set an example. And, if you hang in there while the boat rocks, think of the good times and the better ones to come. Be a part of the solution. Be a code hero.

I'm not totally sure what to make of that, especially the don't kiss and tell part, but I do like the sentiment. The JRoller.com guys have been struggling to upgrade the site to Roller 3.1 this week and experiencing some downtime, so long-time Roller fan Mike is encouraging folks to stick with it -- or at least not bitch too much on the way out the door (maybe that's the don't kiss and tell part).

There have been some ads here and there but Developer Zone's JRoller.com is still primarily a volunteer site, a labor of love ever since Anthony Eden started the site and handed it off to the Javalobby. So Matt, Rick and the rest of the Javalobby/Developer Zone crew definitely deserve our thanks. And Mike too ;-)

And a note for those who don't understand the difference between Roller and JRoller: Apache Roller is an open source blog server, developed and supported by the Apache Software Foundation. JRoller.com is a free blog service for Java developers (mostly) that uses the Apache Roller software, but is run by Developer Zone.

Today Simon and Eduardo point out the cool new front-page at blogs.sun.com, which features a site-wide tag-cloud and a display of the newest blogs on the site. By the way, everything you see on the front-page there is possible with the stock release of Apache Roller 3.1 a some tweaks to the front-page theme.

More of the same news this week as work continues on Roller 4.0, testing and bug fixing. Allen made some comment formatting related changes and introduced what I hope is the last database schema modification we'll make in 4.0. Davis Nguyen is testing and finding problem, some of which may be caused by bugs in the new JPA back-end so I'll have more debugging work this week.

As you can see from the road roller graphic on the right, we're making progress with 4.0. We've gone from a wobbly pen and colored pencil drawing to a snazzy Gimp-powered image with gradients and drop-shadows.

Looking forward to getting started with post-4.0 work, I started two new 4.1 proposals to externalize <a href= "http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/Proposal+Externalize+User+Management">user management and <a href= "http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/Proposal+Externalize+User+Permissions">permssions to make it easier to hook Roller into directory servers and permissions systems.

In other news, the Roller 3.1.1 RC1 release has been out for a about a week now. We haven't gotten much feedback on it yet, but we have been getting some feedback on Roller 3.1 in general from Websphere and Weblogic users as they're having problems getting Roller up and running. If you work for IBM/Websphere or BEA/Weblogic you might want to stop by and help us figure out what's going wrong, maybe there's something we can fix in 3.1.1 to getting Roller running better on your platforms.

Also on the 3.1 front, Matt Schmidt is working on upgrading JRoller.com to Roller 3.1 and has plans to move to 4.0 after that. Roller 3.1 will bring better performance/stability and new features to the DZone network's Java blogging site.

That's it for this weeks episode. Please tune in next week for more...

Quick links to previous episodes: #6, #5, #4, #3, #2 and #1.

• Upgrading Jamaica's Cultural Shareware: Trojan Records at 40
  "There's never really been any stigma associated with sharing or using the works of others [...] If anything, to most it's regarded as a compliment."
• The GPL and Software as a Service
  Closing the SaaS loophole "would have been a death blow for GPLv3, making it impossible to adopt"
• Since when the the 'P' in POJO come to stand for "Pretend"
  Interesting article, but in my opinion POJO is a loose colloquial term
• Diary of a CrazyFrench: CUPS sell out
  "I'd recommend starting to mirror everything just in case Apple pull the plugs"
• Pete Rowley: Free IPA
  "an effort to shore up the existing identity infrastructure such as kerberos, LDAP, Samba and RADIUS"
• Tom Daly: Sun pushes price/perf boundaries w/SPECjAppServer2004
  "The price/performance of this result using open source is compelling"
• Scott Oaks: Glassfish V2 posts new SPECjAppServer 2004
  "We used to be content with having a good result in terms of price/performance... Now, we're the raw performance leader."
• Asus Eee PC First Thoughts
  $250 laptop with Linux, OpenOffice, 16GB flash HDD and 10 second startup

I don't know why it took me so long to pick up on it, but Nicolas Chase has been publishing a very nice series of Atom protocol articles over at IBM developerWorks. Some of them make use of the Blogapps server from RSS and Atom in Action:

• Create a sidebar using an Atom service document: An Atom service document is for more than just telling readers where to find a site's feeds. This article shows you how to use this introspection document to create a sidebar that provides a window into everything your server has to offer. This article uses the Blogapps server, which supports draft 10 of the Atom Publishing Protocol 1.0 specification, but will be applicable to any APP 1.0 compliant server. To use the actual code, you should also be familiar with Java programming but you can apply the Atom concepts to any programming language.
• Manage a media collection with Atom: You might know the Atom syndication format as a way to provide blog entry information. But, did you know that in conjunction with the Atom Publishing Protocol, you can use it to manage media files? This article shows you how to create a Web-based media repository with Atom.
• How to use Atom's slug header when you publish content: One advantage of the Atom Publishing Protocol is the ability to not only retrieve information, but also to add or edit information. In this tip, learn to use Atom's Slug header to influence the final URL for this information. This tip uses the Blogapps server, which supports draft 10 of the Atom Publishing Protocol 1.0 specification, but is applicable to any APP 1.0 compliant server.

And by the way, I'm working on updating Roller, Blogapps and Propono to support the latest Atom protocol draft (#16). More about that later.

My bro Dan, who clearly understands the secret to blog success, has done it again with another lengthy and well-researched blog post. Thanks to his most recent post <a href= "http://filmbabble.blogspot.com/2007/07/10-definitive-films-within-films.html">10 definitive films within films, he was featured on the IMDB hit-list again this week.

Looks like we're going to have a pretty good turn-out for the Raleigh bloggers meet-up tonight (7PM at Raleigh Times) with Pat Mueller, Jackson Fox, Wayne Sutton, Michael Kimsal and perhaps even Mister Sugar himself planning to show up. That's a little unusual because attendance has been pretty spotty recently. In fact, last time it was just Pat and I sipping pints outside of the Raleigh Times Bar.

Pat proposed that we rename, refocus and relocate the Raleigh Bloggers meet-up. He suggested that we admit our geek nature by renaming it the "RTP Blogging Code Monkeys Meet-up." Also that we move it to the RTP area so it's convenient to folks from all three corners of the Triangle. I'm ready for a change and declining attendance is a drag, so I'm a big +1 on that. I suggested that we be more inclusive to non-bloggers with a blurb like this:

RTP dev/blogger meet-up. Come and chat about software development and web-technologies with Triangle-area code monkeys and bloggers.

Interested? If so, subscribe to the BlogTogether mailing lists for further updates.

So says ZDNet's Ed Burnette.

Ed Burnette: Shortly after the iPhone went on sale, hardware enthusiasts started tearing into them to see what made them tick. They found that the iPhone is using an ARM1176JZF-based processor, probably the Samsung S3C6400 that operates at 667MHz. This chip sports an embedded Java acceleration engine called Jazelle.

And in closing Ed writes:

Now, if Apple can just get over its anachronistic “Java is heavyweight” beliefs, then small, efficient, hardware-accelerated Java games and multimedia for your iPhone could be just a software upgrade away.

Maybe the iPhone won't suck for developers after all.

I'm starting to sound like a broken record, I know, but we're still wrapping up work on Roller 4.0. We worked on fixes, enhancements and documentation this past week.

I spent a couple days doing a complete rewrite of the Roller installation guide for 4.0. The guide covers the new EZ install process, includes a 5-minute install option and details on Tomcat v6 and Glassfish v2 installation.

If you are interested in reviewing/testing the new install guide you can get it here <a href= "http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/apache-roller-4.0/roller-install-guide.pdf">new 4.0 install guide (571kb PDF) and there's also an unofficial <a href= "http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/apache-roller-4.0/">snapshot release of Roller 4.0 for testing the guide.

Also, the first release candidate for Roller 3.1.1 is <a href= "http://www.nabble.com/Apache-Roller-3.1.1-RC1-ready-for-testing-p11489144s12275.html">now available for testing. The 3.1.1 release is a fix release that addresses problems found in the Roller 3.1 release and updates Atom protocol support (still considered experimental).

That's all for now. Tune in next week for more Roller news.

In the unlikely event that you are a Triangle area geek who reads this blog and has not yet signed up, you might want to know that registration for BarCamp RDU is open.

And please get well soon.

Update: I couldn't look at that picture of George any longer, so I took it down.

Via the Aquarium, there's a nice Java EE and Glassfish adoption story over in Chillboro:

Adam Constabaris: A fundamental question for us in building this application was whether to use Tomcat and "soup it up" by using Spring to add services Tomcat doesn't provide itself, or whether to use a full Java EE container. We could have made it work with the servlet container approach, since our application isn't heavily "enterprisey" and we were initially reluctant to pay the complexity price of EJBs. After looking at the Java EE 5 specification, though, we saw a lot of ways we could simplify and standardize things, such as using JSF 1.2 and coding to the Java Persistence API rather than using Hiberrnate APIs directly.

Hey! I know that guy. Hi Adam.

Is there a trend towards full app servers and away from plain old Tomcat? Is it because of strong open source Java EE offerings from Sun, JBoss and Apache? I don't know, but I sure hope so.