Blogging Roller

Championnat Régional PISTE 2007
By François & Marie

This week in Roller Strong, I've got some status on the 4.0 and 3.1 code bases and note about Roller Weblogger vs. Roller Planet.

Development continues on the Roller 4.0 code base, but we're essentially feature complete and focusing on minor improvements and bug fixes. Allen worked to clear bugs and improve bootstrapping. I worked to update Roller's Atom protocol (APP) implementation to use the final APP namespace URI and to pass Tim Bray's latest Ape tests. I wrote up my experience with Ape here on my blog.

At Sun, we've been testing the new Roller 4.0 "EZ install" work and doing some additional work to make 4.0 even easier to install in Glassfish. Manveen Kaur created a Glassfish Update Center Module for Roller that automatically downloads and installs Roller with almost no user-interaction. She wrote up instructions to help others create and test Glassfish Update Center Modules.

We're also preparing some 3.1 fixes. All of the issues reported against Roller 3.1 have been fixed and we're just about ready to make a fix release, which we'll call 3.1.1.

And finally, a note about the project. Since 3.0, we've reorganized the Roller code base to reflect the fact that Roller is not just a blog server. Roller is a project that produces both a blog server called Roller Weblogger and a planet server called Roller Planet. For example, the Roller interface is gone and replaced with Weblogger for the blog server and Planet.

Using the word "Weblogger" reminds me of an unfortunate incident that occurred back in 2002. Not all of my Roller memories are pleasant ;-)

Roller Strong Disclaimer: this is a personal blog and I do not speak on behalf of Sun Microsystems or the Apache Software Foundation.

Lilac-breasted Roller by David Meeker

Not too much to report this week...

Matt Raible gave his Introduction to Apache Roller webinar on Wednesday. Most unforunately, I was unable to break out of my Wednesday meeting marathon to attend. At some point Matt says he'll post his slides to the Roller wiki.

In Roller development we wrapped up work on the new Roller EZ install, which makes it really easy to install Roller -- just set four properties, deploy roller.war and Roller will start up, creating or upgrading tables as needed.

Also, my Guice proposal gained consensus and I merged the work into the Roller trunk just this morning. As of now, I believe we're feature complete for Roller 4.0.

Tune in next week and perhaps I'll have something to say about release. It's about time to start getting 3.1.1 and 4.0 release candidates ready.

This little guy, Leo Michael Johnson, was born:

http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/date/20020621

And this is what the little guy looks like today:

What's he like? He's an absolute joy to be around, happy, tough and smart. He loves lemonade, Star Wars,  Jango Fett, building Legos, eating all of his veggies and making an ungodly racket with his big brothers. I've been working at home for most of his life, so I've gotten used to having him around pretty much all the time. Sometimes he brings me lunch. Sometimes he helps me make coffee. Sometimes I forget to lock my office door and he busts in during a telecon. Sometimes he calls out "daddy, I'm going potty and when I call you, you come and wipe my butt" at precisely the wrong time. But no matter what he does, I love him so very much. I'm really going to miss the little guy when he goes to all-day kindergarden this fall.

Happy birthday Leo!

• Moonwatcher: Mindquarry Focuses on Small Teams
  "The system allows management of teams, files, tasks, and wikis through an elegant AJAX interface"
• DaveDev: Web 2.0 in the Enterprise
  "Blogs.. Wikis... Social networking... Community Kit For SharePoint, enter stage left!"
• mnot’s Web log: The State of Proxy Caching
  "we tested a selection of Open Source and commercial proxy caches"
• Michal Szklanowski: first class Groovy support in Intellij Idea
  Looks like the install process is a little rough now, but it's got the features
• Jive Clearspace
  "Brings together discussions, blogs, files, instant messaging and wiki documents under one unified umbrella"
• Ross Mayfield: Lurching Legacy into 2.0
  "Lotus Connections, a social software suite I would even recommend. If you have 130k employees"
• Identity Management Buzz: Web 2.0 Meets Directory
  "Brandon, Don & Sun Open DS Community Manager, Trey Drake discuss OpenDS, web 2.0 applications and other uses of a directory"
• REST, Atom, APP, Web3S, and An Open Invitation To Prove MSFT Wrong
  M. David Peterson on Web3S: "There is some *killer* stuff in here!"

Wall Street Journal on the iPhone: "Incompatible technology has become an increasing problem for businesses as hand-held email and phone devices are evolving into minicomputers that can do such things as download music, take pictures and surf the Web."

Surprise surprise. Incompatible technology is a problem for people who choose non-standard crap like Exchange.

John Gruber responds: Apple’s answer to the enterprise “problem” isn’t to kowtow to the Microsoft Exchange hegemony; it’s to point in the opposite direction, and show how much better things can be with open industry protocols like IMAP and CalDAV and with simple web-based solutions.

Like many successful revolutions, this one might come from the bottom.

Viva la revolucion! 

Via Rafe Colburn and Slashdot. 

I stayed up a little too late last night upgrading this site (rollerweblogger.org) to the latest Roller 4.0 code base, which includes the new Struts2 based Admin UI and a new OpenJPA based back-end. No more Hibernate for me. The upgrade was a bit of a rocky road, but the site seems to be working OK now.

This week was a big week for Roller, development and deployment-wise. As you may already know from Linda Skrocki's blog, Roller 4.0 went live this week at the premier corporate blogging site blogs.sun.com (BSC) with some nice new themes, easier blog customization and a UI that has been completely rewritten to do use Struts2. Check the What's New in Roller 4.0 page to learn more about the upcoming release.

But don't get too excited, you can't download Roller 4.0 just yet. Sun deployed a pre-release version of Roller and if you want to do the same, you'll either have to build it yourself or wait for the official Apache Roller 4.0 release coming out this summer. And don't be too disappointed, that's one of the nice things about Roller: before we make a release, the code is battle tested on blogs.sun.com. Big thanks to .Sun Engineering for that.

A couple folks wrote into to tell me that GIS software developer ESRI is blogging with Roller, something I've been meaning to mention for quite some time. In fact, I've been meaning to mention it for over a year and now it's time to wish ESRI a happy 1st blogaversary. Man, how time flies.

That's it for this weeks installment of Roller Strong. Y'all come back now.

There was quite a flurry of blogging about the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) over the weekend, all kicked off by Dare Obasanjo's criticisms of the protocol. Some of the posts were critical of Dare and his motives, but I'm thankful he started the conversation. Here's the dump from my del.icio.us account:

• Dare Obasanjo: Why GData/APP Fails as a General Purpose Editing Protocol for the Web - Good only for microcontent, no support for partial updates, poor support for hierarchy and "we [Microsoft] will likely standardize on a different RESTful protocol"

• Bill de hÓra: APP on the Web has failed: miserably, utterly, and completely - APP editor Bill de hÓra responds to Dare's APP critique
  
  
• snellspace.com: Silly: James Snell responds to Dare's APP critique. Cites usage of APP in Lotus Connections.
  
  
• Joe Gregorio: In which we narrowly save Dare from inventing his own publishing protocol: APP editor Joe Gregorio's point-by-point response to Dare's APP criticisms
  
  
• David Megginson: REST, the lost update and the sneakernet test: - "Without exclusive locks, there’s no way to avoid this problem, but it is possible to detect it."
  
  
• Tim Bray: I’ve Seen This Movie: Tim Bray responds to Dare's post: "Microsoft has tried to swim against the current of the Internet a few times before"
  
  
• snellspace.com: Beyond APP - Partial updates: Dare's post inspires James to post a strawman proposal for using HTTP PATCH to implement partial updates w/Atom.
  
  
• Keith Fahlgren: Partial Updates, a simpler strawman: "The basic inspiration is thinking about each operation as an XSLT template"
  
  
• snellspace.com: Partial Updates in APP, Part 2: James responds to Keith's simpler strawman.
  
  
• Dare Obasanjo: GData isn't a Best Practice Implementation of the Atom Publishing Protocol: Dare responds to the flurry of APP posts he kicked off

© Oliver Mallich

First, an announcement from Covalent. They've rescheduled their Apache Roller webinar with Matt Raible to June 20.

A couple of new users showed up on the Roller mailing-list this week. One was Ryan Delaplante who wrote about his Roller installation experience and the nice new theme he developed on his blog ryandelaplante.com. Jason Johnson stopped by to tell us about the new Roller-based blogging system at the University of South Dakota blogs.usd.edu. They've got some looking themes there too, check out Astra blue and red.

In the blogs, here's a post for Sun bloggers only from Rich Sharples: OpenID Delegation with Roller (take 2). Rich explains how to setup your Roller-based blog as a proxy for your Sun OpenID account.

In development, we're still finishing up the Roller 4.0 release. Most commits this week are coming from Allen who is working on bug fixes across the board. I've been making slow and steady progress on the Roller easy install work. Also, if you look at the Subversion logs you'll see that I'm working in a separate branch to implement Dependency Injection (DI) in Roller via Google's Guice. I'm almost ready to show-and-tell with a proposal. Denis Balazuc has also created a DI implementation using Spring, so we may have some interesting discussions next week.

No significant news about releases this week. We've probably got enough fixes to justify a Roller 3.1.1 release, but nobody has prepared a release candidate yet. I might be able to do one next week.

That's it for this edition. Have a great weekend.

Roller Strong Disclaimer: this is a personal blog and I do not speak on behalf of Sun Microsystems or the Apache Software Foundation. 

Looks like Mark Pilgrim got what he wanted, but a couple of years too late.

Via Justinsomia. 

Joe turns a #redmonk IRC chat-room discussion into an insightful Steven O'Grady style Q&A on REST, WADL, interfaces and APP. For the record, I still think WADL is going to be useful to many, but I think APP is going to be a whole lot more useful and it doesn't need or use WADL.

Update: Pat Meuller has more on the WADL question. Apparently, there were some interesting hallway discussions about about out at IBM RTP. I just caught the tail-end of that on IRC.

I feel bad blogging about this so last minute. I really should have mentioned it weeks ago.

I just signed up for DCampSouth, a BarCamp style unconference for "anyone interested in design and user experience" that's happening here in Raleigh, tomorrow June 2 from 8:30 - 4PM. The attendee list looks interesting and the venue certainly looks pretty far out (literally and figuratively): the School of Communication Arts housed in "three Monolithic hurricane proof, clear span concrete domes."

It's a busy week but I'll definitely be able to make it to the morning and some of the afternoon sessions.

Atom and LDAP sitting in a tree. Trey Drake has released his OpenDS based Atom store as an open source project on Java.net at http://atom.dev.java.net. It's a directory server distributed as a Java web application that supports both Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

Signing, encrypting and decrypting Atom. On IBM developerWorks, Nicolas Chase explains how "digital signatures and encryption can easily mesh with Atom data using the Apache Abdera API."

Google GData: A Uniform Web API for All Google Services. Dare Obasanjo praises Google for creating a single uniform and RESTful web services API for eight of its key services, the APP based GData API. He writes "not only is it now possible to create a single library that knows how to talk to all of Google's existing and future Web services since they all use GData. It is also a lot easier to provide 'tooling' for these services than it would be for Yahoo's family of Web services given that they use a simple and uniform interface."

RESTful web services support in Netbeans. Geertjan links to blog entries and a screen-cast that explain Netbeans 6.0 support for RESTful web services, including the early access JSR-311 REST API.

Generate code from your WADL REST API. Eduardo at The Aquarium links to Thomas Steiner who is making progress on a WADL editor and a generator, bringing WSDL-like code generation to RESTful web services.

Congrats to the OpenJPA team.

Patrick Linksey: Last week, OpenJPA graduated from the Apache incubator, meaning that it's now a fully-fledged Apache project. We're graduating to a top-level project, so once the infrastructure administrivia gets worked out, the new URL will be http://openjpa.apache.org.

I'd like to thank Craig Russell for pushing the project through the last mile of graduation details, and our incubation mentors (Brian McAllister, Eddie O'Neil, and Geir Magnusson) for all their help transitioning into the Apache world.

I'm pushing to replace Hibernate with JPA in Roller and OpenJPA seems the most likely candidate, so I'm glad to hear the community is thriving.