Blogging Roller

Bittersweet news today. Claire: we're going to miss you at blogs.sun.com, so keep in touch and don't stop blogging. Check out Claire's new blog at clairegiordano.org. I hear she'll be working with Anil.

Jim's right: "encourage them to participate and write their own blogs" is definitely a more helpful and consistent position with regard to PR people and blogs.

The problem is, PR wants it all. They don't want to blog along with all the other employees, they want to control your company's one corporate blog. Look at the GM Fastlane blog for example, it's run by a team of Marketing/PR people and a couple of outside blog consultants. Sure, the GM execs do some of the writing, but it's certainly not a blog in the blogs-as-authentic voice sense; it's an always on-message corporate newletter.

So, I have to agree with the Debbie Weil quote "don't let your PR department write your blogs" (in Does your company belong in the blogosphere?). Instead, encourage your employees blog freely and set them up with infrastructure to help them do that.

Cool! Mustang (Java SE 6) will have built-in continuations via the Rhino JavaScript engine. So my old JSPFlow code and it's much more successful child StrutsFlow should work right out of the box.

The ServerSide reports that two popular Java web application frameworks, Struts and WebWork, are merging. Here's the Merger with Webwork proposal. That's really good news for Struts users (like me). We'll get the WebWork innovations (and maybe even a good upgrade path) and WebWork users will get a bigger/stronger community.

I ported another one Rebecca Wei's beautiful Wordpress themes to Roller, Ocadia You can see the results on Carl's blog. It was an easy port because the underlying HTML is almost identical to that in Almost Spring.

Comments are back, by the way.

I've got a build of Roller 2.1-dev running on this site now and there's a small bug in the new comment moderation feature, which is preventing new comments. I hope to deploy a fix this weekend. Hold your tongue until then.

It's really not that hard to do, but a couple of new Roller macros would make it a lot easier. After an hour or so, I ported Almost Spring to Roller. It's running on Otto's blog. I think I'm going to try a couple more.

I case you're wondering, most Wordpress themes are licensed under GPL. That means we can't include them in Roller (since Roller is Apache licensed), but somebody could offer a separately downloadable theme-pack.

One thing I noticed during this exercise is that Wordpress themes are dangerous. They're written in PHP, so you don't want Joe average user to edit them. As the Wordpress.com FAQ says templates are "untrusted code that we haven’t verified" so template editing and importing are banned. Contrast that with Roller, where templates are written in Velocity and are therefore safe for end-user customization.

Jason Caplain, a VC here in Raleigh, posted a rumor about Google to open RTP office. The story also made the Raleigh paper. The News and Observer story Google Looks for Local Offices quotes Andy Beal, who speculates that Google may be considering aquisition of local startups ChannelAdvisor or Motricity. Or perhaps they just want to syphon off some talented but bored IBM and SAS employees.

Roller 2.0 is now available on Roller's Java.Net download space. Roller 2.0 is a major release that includes:

• Full support for group blogging. Users can have multiple blogs and can invite other users to join group blogs with three permission levels and simple workflow.
• Web user interface redesign. The entire UI has been reworked to support group blogging, simplify and enhance the user experience.
• Additional database support. Database creation scripts added for Apache Derby, IBM DB2 and Oracle (in addition to existing MySQL, PostgreSQL and HSQL-DB support).
• Superusers. Global administrators can now admin and edit any blog in the system.
• And lots more!. The release also includes numerous bug fixes and small improvements, see CHANGES.txt for the full list of changes.

This is a new release, but the Roller 2.0 codebase has been in use for weeks at a number of production sites, including blogs.sun.com and this site. Here are links to the updated documentation:

• User Guide
• Macro Reference
• Installation Guide
• Upgrade Guide - how to upgrade Roller 1.x to Roller 2.0
• Configuration Guide
• Javadocs

As usual, if you run into installation or upgrade problems, please seek assistance on the Roller mailing lists. Please report bugs and enhancement requests to Roller's JIRA based issue tracker.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody and a big thanks to everybody who helped out with this release!

Enjoy.

Last weekend, I helped Alex finish his first model: a 1/48th scale replica of a Republic P-47D Thunderbolt fighter. Alex did everything except for the putty/sanding work and some of the finer painting. I spent a *lot* of time building models and painting miniatures when I was a kid. I entered hobby store contests and even convinced my parents to buy an air-compressor and an airbrush for me. It's cool to rediscover some of that fun with Alex.

Kit by Revell/Monogram.

We've got the final build and the votes needed to release, so expect the Roller 2.0 release in the next couple of days.

   bash-3.00$ svn copy \
   https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/roller/trunk \
   https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/roller/tags/roller_2.0 \
   -m "Tagging Roller 2.0 release"

   Committed revision 348727.
   bash-3.00$

The weekend is over so I suppose I should blog something to move that awful underwear experiment post down of the page. So how about this. As Rich Sharples asks, why would anybody use Websphere Community Edition rather than Glassfish/Sun Java App Server? Know why? Leave him a comment.

Since this is a "professional" blog, I would never tell you the story of the underwear experiment, in which a little boy decides to test the limits of parental odor detection, fabric strength, and personal hygene by seeing how long he can go without changing his underwear. But I will say this, the experiment lasted two months.

Lookin' good!

I gave up on the first Netbeans 5.0 beta, it threw way too many weird exceptions and I just didn't have the time. Fortuately, the new beta2 release looks a lot better. I switched to beta2 on my Mac and tomorrow, I'll do the same on my Solaris x86 box. It's got all the refactorings I'd been using in Eclipse and the new CVS client is fantastic compared to the old one and only an interation (or two) away from matching the one in Eclipse.

The only significant shortcomings I've found are the lack of Subversion support and no global search-and-replace. Actually, Netbeans 5.0 does have Subversion support, but it's based on the crummy old "generic VCS" system and, what's worse, you can't use both the new CVS client and the Subversion client at the same time. That's pretty disappointing for those who have projects in both CVS and Subversion (like me). So Netbeans guys, want me to delete Eclipse from my hard-dive? You're almost there. Just add those two missing features.

The Zettabyte File System (ZFS) was released yesterday as part of OpenSolaris build 27 and to celebrate, the ZFS community is having a (one time?) blog carnival, hosted by Bryan Cantrill.

UPDATED: I had the wrong link to Bora's entry about blog carnivals.

It's been a while since I did a status report, so here are some updates on the public projects I'm working on at work and in my off-hours.

Roller 1.3 released: it's been announced on the project blog and is now available on Java.Net. It's a minor bug fix release and I expect that most sites will want to wait for Roller 2.0 instead of installing 1.3.

Roller 2.0 release on the way: blogs.sun.com has been running a Roller 2.0-based build for a couple of weeks now, but the Roller project still hasn't packaged up a final release. We've been testing a release candidate of Roller 2.0, doing final testing and debugging. We may be able to release 2.0 within the next week, depending on how testing goes. Unfortunately Javalobby is running into some problems will the upgrade process and they may turn out to be 2.0 bugs. Want to know more about Roller 2.0? Check the Roller 2.0 documentation summary page.

Roller 2.1 development starting: it will focus on spam prevention/management and performance improvements, for details check the Roller 2.1 proposal page.

The Roller@Apache move: Roller has been in the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Incubator for about five months now. Roller code is in ASF's Subversion repository, a status page is in place, dev/user discussions take place on the ASF mailing lists and our ASF mentors are listening in and advising us. The Roller dev community seems to be growing, thriving and recently, really pulling together to get 1.3 and 2.0 out the door. That's all good, but there have been some hold-ups.

Nothing is holding up Roller development, but we've been waiting for ASF's new LGPL license policy. We will eventually have to deal with our LGPL dependency, but until ASF announces its new LGPL policy, we won't know exactly what we need to do.

Recently there was some question about whether we should be allowed to make the Roller 1.3 and Roller 2.0 releases, since they contain and depend on LGPL licensed components (most notably Hibernate). We resolved that bit of controversy and are now cleared to release Roller 1.3 (which we did) and Roller 2.0 (coming soon). Since we're in the ASF Incubator, our releases are not official/endorsed ASF releases.

RSS and Atom in Action still in limbo: the book is delayed because the Atom protocol is not complete. Draft 06 wasn't bad, but it was missing important pieces, like category support. Unfortunately, Atom protocol is not just incomplete, it's also in flux. The working group is having a very hard time dealing with introspection and discovery. So, I can't finish Chapter 8, but we've have been moving the rest of the chapters through production.

Blogapps project born: I started a Java.Net project called Blogapps for the RSS and Atom in Action examples and uploaded the code, but I haven't made a release yet. I hope to release the examples bundle and the Blogapps Demo Server, which is a super easy-to-install blog/wiki server based on Tomcat, HSQLDB, Roller and JSPWiki.

Note that this blog is my personal blog and I don't claim to speak for my employer, my publisher, the Roller project or the ASF.

I get the feeling a lot of people are clicking the refresh button today and seeing this message from Google Analytics:

Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being 
gathered now. Your first reports will be ready within twelve hours.

And it's not just us cheap bastards either, paying customers are also waiting. Sounds like somebody failed to plan.

YeeeHAI! I've been accepted as a committer on the ROME project, which is very convenient because I have a big ole chunk'o'code to commit for Atom 1.0 format support. After reviews and tweaks, Atom format 1.0 support should be available in ROME v0.8.

• Solaris Networking - The Magic Revealed (Part I)
  A mini-book on Solaris networking internals
• Solaris Networking - The Magic Revealed (Part II)
  Continued...

• 32 threads in 2 square inches
  UltraSPARC T1: "highest-throughput and most eco-responsible processor ever created"
• Sun paints Niagara green for launch
  What's good for Sun is good for Earth
• The Tech Industry's Great Task
  "Open-source technologies and low-cost devices are a step in the right direction."