Blogging Roller

We've decided to change the time and place of our Raleigh Bloggers meet-up. Too many folks complained about Tuesday night, so we've moved to the 2nd and 4th Wednesdays of each month. Now we'll find out if "Tuesday's not good for me" was just an excuse to avoid hanging with the tech/geek patrol. And we've moved from crowded and loud Helios Coffee to the quiet Raleigh Times Bar (yeah, right). I mean, if nobody's gonna show up we might as well drink, no?

When: Second and Fourth Wednesdays of every month at 6:30PM

Where: The Raleigh Times Bar (Map)

14 E Hargett St
Raleigh, NC  27601
919.833.0999

• Tim Bray: OpenID
  Tim's problems with OpenID. The big one, attribute exchange, will be resolved in OpenID 2.0
• O'Reilly Radar: Pros and Cons of OpenID
  "there are a lot of people who have OpenID, but they don't have many places to use them"
• Phil Windley: OpenID Economics Centers on Relying Parties
  "With attribute exchange, some niche OpenID providers are likely to spin up based on specific attributes or features"
• Multi-gig databases in Java DB? You Betcha
  "You can't do this with 'just a developer database.' "
• Skrocki: Blog Bling is like eye shadow
  Cool! New Roller themes coming "Sun brand-free by default, so the Roller community can leverage them as well"
• How real is the NetBeans Platform book?
  Rough cuts edition coming soon, est. availability Feb 22, 2007
• Erwin Tenhumberg: South Africa moves to open source
  All new software "will be based on open standards and government will itself migrate current software to FOSS"
• Suw Charman: Six Apart spins like a Whirling Dervish
  Post about SixApart with comments from SixApart's Anil Dash and Wordpress' Matt Mullenweg
• Simon Phipps: Sun and FSF
  "Sun has become a Patron of the Free Software Foundation"
• JDIC Browser on the NetBeans Platform
  Screenshots of Firefox embedded in Netbeans and other Swing apps

In case you're wondering what's going on lately with Roller, ROME and other projects I've been working on, here's a status update from my point-of-view.

Apache Roller graduation. The Roller team voted for graduation, the Apache Incubator PMC voted for incubation and the next step is to take the resolution to the Apache board meeting, which is coming up in the next week or so.

Roller 3.1 release. We've been moving slowly on this one. RC1 was released Nov. 20 and today RC4 just about ready to go. It's possible that 3.1 will be our first "official" Apache Roller release -- depending on what happens on the board meeting. Wonder what's coming in Roller 3.1? The What's New in Roller 3.1 page is now available on our new wiki at apache.org.

Roller 4.0 development. We started the Roller 4.0 branch a couple of weeks ago and I've been spending most of my time updating and trying to perfect Craig and Mitesh's new JPA back-end. Elias outlined a bunch of IBM contributions including an iBatis based back-end. We hope to get some of those in the 4.0 and do some JPA vs. iBatis testing, but we haven't seen any proposals or code yet.

Roller-Planet. Actually, Allen's taken over work on Roller-Planet and he's implementing many of the things I outlined in the Roller-Planet mind-map. He promoted Roller-Planet from the sandbox, built a nice Struts2 UI, added a Roller-style feed/page rendering system and Roller-style caching. Good stuff. We have not discussed when to start making standalone releases of Roller-Planet. 

ROME Propono. I've been working on a new ROME subproject called Propono that will include a blog client library, an Atom protocol client library and an Atom protocol server kit. I've been quiet on the ROME dev list, but I've been working on the client bits an they're basically done. I'm waiting for final approval to commit them to ROME CVS.

Blogapps examples and server. I'm still working on a 1.0.5 release, which will include updated Atom protocol support and some bug fixes. I just haven't had the time to get a release out, but I have had some time to work on Blogapps 2.0 where I've ditched the chapter-based directory names and switched to org.blogapps packaging. Once ROME Propono is available, I'll include it in Blogapps 2.0 and drop my old Blog Client library.

I've been slacking off with the blogging this week, but there's some other Johnson blogging going on. Dad's enjoying his Photophys blog and getting good feedback on the draft chapters of his book. He's posted the first seven chapters now. By the way, my multi-domain hack seems to be working pretty well -- photophys.com is hosted on the same Roller instance as this site rollerweblogger.org.

And brother Dan is keeping the blogging going at Film Babble blog. Check out his Oscar predictions. He's also writing at Helium.com and up to 119 posts there, each a mini movie or music review. 

I've been updating my javax.ws.rest post with links to blogs about JSR 311: Java (TM) API for RESTful Web Services. I went from a couple to nine links today and I'll probably keep on linking, but I'm about to go quiet for couple of days. It's wiki mountain weekend time again.

 

That's big news. A standard Java API is coming for building REST based web services. If you're an expert in REST, you can participate in it's development by signing up for the expert group. Apache, BEA, Google and Jerome Louvel (the RESTlet guy) are on-board. Here's the intro from the JSR:

JSR 311: Java (TM) API for RESTful Web Services: This API will enable developers to rapidly build Web applications in Java that are characteristic of the best designed parts of the Web. This JSR will develop an API for providing REST(Representational State Transfer - See reference to Roy Fielding's dissertation in section 3.1) support in the Java Platform. Lightweight, RESTful approaches are emerging as a popular alternative to SOAP-based technologies for deployment of services on the internet. Currently, building RESTful Web services using the Java Platform is significantly more complex than building SOAP-based services and requires using low-level APIs like Servlets or the dynamic JAX-WS APIs. Correct implementation requires a high level of HTTP knowledge on the developer's part.

This JSR will aim to provide a high level easy-to use API for developers to write RESTful web services independent of the underlying technology and will allow these services to run on top of the Java EE or the Java SE platforms. The expert group will investigate whether a subset of the API can be made used with Java ME. The goal of this JSR is to provide an easy to use, declarative style of programming using annotations for developers to write REST ful Web Services and also enable low level access in cases where needed by the application.

RESTful Web Services is a relatively new area in the industry and there are still a lot of unknowns in this space. For example, a key aspect of RESTful Web Services is for the service to be stateless. However, this often requires the developer to produce boiler-plate state restoration code that could be avoided with state-aware API help. We expect the expert group to be an active and engaged group of people participating to prioritize and help drive issues to achieve the end goal of a developer friendly API.

Here are a couple more links about the new JSR:

• Elliote Rusty Harold is not exactly positive, saying "this is like asking Karl Rove and Dick Cheney to write the Democratic Party platform" but concludes with a call for participation: "are there any JSR members here who might join the working group and bring some sanity and actual REST experience to the development of the eventual specification?"
• Jerome Louvel explains the idea of REST annotations and explains that implementations will be possible with JAX-WS, Servlet API or Restlet API.
  
• Dan Diephouse says "This is excellent news - I’m glad to see people are thinking more seriously about RESTful services on Java" and "Expert group members may be interested in checking out the previous work I’ve done on Java REST annotations"
• Brian McAllister: says the JSR sounds like another case where "reasonably good developers trying to design software for presumed-incompetent developers which will in fact be used unhappily by basically competent developers."
  
• Mark Hadley addresses some of the concerns raised above and provides an interesting code example showing the REST annotations in action.
  
• Pete Lacey: "Initial thoughts: 1) Cool! 2) The servlet API is not ideal, this is needed. 3) I hope they don’t screw it up (see JAX-WS)."
• Steve Loughran: "I don't have the faintest clue what a REST API should look like, except that it must not look like JAX-RPC/JAX-WS"
• InfoQ thread: summary of news and three comments as of Thursday
  
• Paul Sandoz: "I have been wanting to work on such an API and implementation for about 5 years! [...] Now the Web zeitgeist is back and so are we :-)"

James Governor: Covalent gets its mojo back and refocuses on its core competence - supporting open source code, and doubles down on Apache projects, going back to its roots. The latest example of Covalent seeing an opportunity and nailing it is the company’s announcement of support for the Roller blog platform. That’s now two companies, IBM and Covalent, making direct revenues from a platform originally built by a Sun employee, but for which Sun has no business model. Here is a hint Sun - perhaps its not software you need to sell but service and support. That is what Covalent is nailing.

I appreciate the support from James and the Redmonk crew. They always seem to be rootin' for Roller.

Of course I'd like to see better support for Roller all around, but at this point I can't say much beyond this: I'm focused on building a great blog platform and support is a very important part of any platform.

A couple of small corrections for James. I was not a Sun employee when I originally developed Roller. Second, IBM hasn't shipped Connections, so they're not any making "direct revenues" yet. Third, I don't know if Covalent has "nailed" anything -- I haven't heard from anybody who has tried the service and I'm still trying to figure out exactly what they offer.

I mentioned before that I convinced my Dad to start a blog. Well, now after a week or so of back-and-forth with Kattare.com getting the domain handling setup properly and modifying Roller to support multiple domains, his blog is live running on the same Roller instance that I use for this blog (but with the domain photophys.com).

Dad's blog is titled Photography: Appreciation through Understanding. He's publishing draft chapters from his new book there, hoping to get feedback and attract some new readers.

Hmm... RSS and Atom feeds don't seem to be working correctly. Apparently, I've still got some multi-domain work to do...

Jeffrey Blattman has put together a new Portlet that makes it possible to blog via Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) from a portal page. He's added it to the Open Source Portlet Repository on Java.net so you can try it out against your favorite APP server.

And before I leave the topic of movies I'll mention this; recently I've been enjoying Neil Young's Heart of Gold, an absolutely wonderful concert film of and documentary about the debut of Neil's Prairie Wind album last year. See also, my brother Dan's brief review of the film over at Helium.com.

It's been in my Netflix queue for a long time and it finally arrived this week. Jesus Camp (see also Wikipedia, IMDB) is a documentary about an evangelical Christian bible camp that indoctrinates children with far right-wing and anti-science teachings. It's an excellent documentary and well worth seeing if you want to understand what's going on in the deep red areas of the USA. It's truly scary stuff, but church folk aren't all like that -- check out Evolution Sunday coming this weekend to a pulpit near you.

Somehow I missed the Jan. 22, 2007 announcement, which was made on Covalent's Roller-based blog. According to the announcement, Covalent will support Roller, eleven other Apache and Spring on a "per incident basis."

Trey Drake explains what you have to do to get Roller 3.x working with OpenDS. He's right, its a kludgey process and I hope we can improve it. The bug he mentions "after registration the user must close and re-open the browser" will be fixed in Roller 3.1 which is just about ready for release.

I can't get to pipes.yahoo.com (due to heavy web traffic I assume) so I haven't had a chance to check it out myself, but Pipes sounds pretty amazing. According to Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny:

Pipes is a hosted service that lets you remix feeds and create new data mashups in a visual programming environment. The name of the service pays tribute to Unix pipes, which let programmers do astonishingly clever things by making it easy to chain simple utilities together on the command line.

Jeremy also posted a list of the blogs that are covering Pipes and every one that I read is a rave review. Tim O'Reilly calls it a "milestone in the history of the internet." Apparently, I'm not the only one who wants to put feed creation, aggregation and filtering tools in the hands of ordinary folks and not just developers Everybody seems to think this is a great idea and Yahoo appears to have executed it very well, so it will be interesting to see how well it works and how it is put to use.

Niall Kennedy and Anil Dash both posted a screen-shots of the Pipes UI, here's one from Niall's blog:

Cool stuff.

A possibly related side-note: ROME co-founder Alejandro Abdelnur now works for Yahoo. 

And I mean that in the nicest way possible, i.e. the Codehaus way.

Bob McWhirter: Ultimately all open-source survives and grows based upon goodwill. Tending to the community is required, else you risk alienating your own users. I aim to use my experiences from a variety of open-source projects and communities to make sure the JBoss community is one of which I’m proud to be a member.

Congrats Bob. Sounds like a great new job. This mean you'll be coming to Raleigh more often?

IBM's Rob Yates blogged about Lotus Connections the other day and posted some screen-shots of the Roller-based blogging component.  The UI looks different but you can tell it's Roller under the covers. Notice that they've switched out the Xinha editor with the Dojo equivalent.

Aaron Cohen is looking for feedback on a simple and clean new Roller theme known as Eco.

Update: Linda says Eco is not really a "Roller theme" as it relies on some .Sun Engineering ad-server components to serve up the rotating eco-fact. She's got some instructions for BSC users interested in the theme on her blog.

Since I upgraded this site to Roller 3.2-dev, with pluggable comment validators and Akismet support, not a single spam has gotten through the system. Over the weekend I saw 20-30 email messages like this:

This comment failed validation for these reasons:

* Akismet service (akismet.com) says comment is spam
* Trackback from site/page that does not link to your weblog entry

Brisa wrote: [Trackback] nothing here 

That's music to my ears. Die spammers die!

The Roller team voted last week for graduation to top-level project status. The next step is to call for a vote on the Apache Incubator mailing list. I'm hopeful that the nearly two year journey that started when Danese Cooper sent me off to ApacheCon US 2004 in Vegas is nearly over. So far, life at Apache has been great for Roller and it can only get better with graduation. Wish us luck...

Usually I find a couple of contradictory stories every time I read the feeds. Here's a pair from today's session. First via John Gruber.

Bll Gates in Newsweek: Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally. I dare anybody to do that once a month on the Windows machine.

And next, via  John Robb, I found:

Spencer Kelly, BBC: We set up a poor Windows XP machine with no firewall or anti-virus software. Connecting it to the internet would be like throwing it into a lion pen with raw meat strapped to its hard drive. How long would it be before we were hit by something nasty on the net? Hours, minutes? As it turned out - eight seconds!

Of course Bill may have been talking about Vista, even though he did not qualify. Maybe Vista is better, but I wouldn't count on it. Initial reports don't sound so good (Vista users: keep your speakers and microphones turned off).