Blogging Roller

• Sun Ultra 3 laptop
  Cool, but where's the AMD lappy?
• JavaOne photos
  Lots of good photos on Flickr
• PhippsCasting
  Simon Phipps on the open sourcing of the Java EE 5 reference implementation
• Danese on Java license proliferation
  Danese: "Yes, that's right. They've taken the SCSL apart into 3 licenses!!!"
• Ed Burns on day 2
  Covers the web framework (Faces, Wicket, Struts, AJAX, etc.) related sessions on day 2
• iTunes Podcatcher
  iTunes is now a full-fledged podcatcher

I finally found the bandwidth (and the time) to upload the Roller 1.2 release. The full Roller 1.2 announcement is on the Roller project blog.

Last week: wrapped up documentation and final fixes Roller 1.2 release. I'm doing the build now. Also, I was able to devote several full days of work to Roller 2.0/Group Blogging and made some real progress.

This week: JavaOne! My talk is Thursday at noon (Blogging: Feed Syndication and Publishing With Java™ Technology TS-7318).

• OpenSolaris BOF
  Stephen Hahn: "What else can we do to make Java a first class systems programming language for Solaris?"
• 10th JavaOne show
  "celebrate the programming language's first decade"
• Wicket debut at JavaOne
  Infravio VP Miko Matsumura will host a session about Wicket 1.0
• JavaOne to vCalendar
  Gero Vermaas: "Check out my JavaOne 2005 Scheduling aid"
• Destination: Moscone
  Frosty's photo bloggin' JavaOne behind the scenes
• JavaOne on your palm
  Wilfred Springer: "Now I can read the entire conference schedule from my Palm"
• JavaOne Eclipse announcements
  via Ian Skerrett, Director of Marketing with the Eclipse Foundation
• Flickr: JavaOne2005
  Flickr group for posting JavaOne 2005 photos and images

Something odd just happened in my aggregator and I'm not sure how to explain it. I was reading through my Java related subscriptions and I noticed that The Server Side feed had just one entry, an "AD" for a service called Pheedo. It looked like this:

So I went to theserverside.com and checked their newsfeed. It looked just fine and did not contain even one reference to Pheedo. Hmmm. What happened? So, I went back to NetNewsWire and choose "View XML Source" for The Server Side feed. I saw a feed with a The Server Side header and an atom:link element pointing to Pheedo with rel="start". See the screenshot below:

So, what happened here? Just a glitch when The Server Side installed the Pheedo stuff or something more sinister. One thing's for sure, we're gonna need Adblock for feed-readers real soon now.

Simon Phipp's and Jim Grisanzio have organized a JaveOne bloggers meetup at the Thirsty Bear from 6-8pm on Monday June 27th. See you there.

I'm attending JavaOne 2005 next week and speaking on Thursday at noon. The talk is titled Beyond Blogging: Feed Syndication and Publishing With Java™ Technology (TS-7318) and there are four speakers Alejandro Abdelnur (not attending), Pat Chanezon, Kevin Burton and myself.

I missed the fortnightly Raleigh bloggers meetup last night. We were out celebrating Leo's third birthday, Andi's birthday and the sale of our old house in Charlotte. I'm going to try to make it to the Chapel Hill meetup tonight, but it looks like work might run a little late today.

I convinced Andi that Alex(8) and Linus(7) are old enough for the Star Wars films. So, this past weekend we watched episides I, II and III. We started with Episode 1.1: The Phantom Edit, a fan-edited version of the film that includes much less Jar Jar than before. They boys thought they could have cut more; I kid you not. I thought the Phantom Edit was a little too fuzzy to enjoy. I guess that's because it was created from a VHS copy of the film.

I think the boys enjoyed Episode II: Attack of the Clones more than Episode I, but there was a little too much kissing. It's funny to see the kids cringe when Anakin and Padme get all mushy.

It was Andi's birthday on Sunday, so she took Alex and Linus to Episode III and I stayed home with the little Leo. They enjoyed it the most of the three, but Linus was a little disturbed when he saw what happened to Anakin. I don't think he was really traumatized, at least not as bad as he was on The Mummy (whatever you do, do NOT mention The Mummy to Linus).

I wonder what they're going to think of the original films. Will they see IV and V as the awesome classics that I know them to be, or dated and dull after the orgy of special effects they've just gone through in the prequels.

• Roller 1.2: I spent most of last week working on Roller 1.2. Part of that work was for the OpenSolaris launch. We used Roller 1.2's built-in "planet" aggregator to create the OpenSolaris blog, aggregating together about 150 blogs into one big blog with it's own newsfeed. I had to write a little custom code to load the list of blogs, because the aggregator's UI doesn't have a bulk-load capability yet. Later in the week I spent a couple of days on fixing bugs, Javadocs and Velocidocs.

• Roller 1.3: We've started to talk a bit about a Roller 1.3 release to incorporate some theme management changes. We need to make it easier to manage themes and apply changes globally to all user's themes, but still allow power-users to tweak their page templates. Allen has put together a rough proposal for better theme management.

• Roller 2.0: I spent a couple of days on Roller 2.0 last week, still working on the data model and the new many-to-many relationship between weblogs and users. The OpenSolaris and Roller 1.2 contininued to put me further behind schedule, but I'm still shooting for group blogging done in August.

• Roller@Apache: Starting today, we're using the Apache incubator mailing lists for the Roller-dev and Roller-user lists, but I still haven't updated the wiki with subscribe and unsubscribe info.

• RSS and Atom in Action: Since the chapters are out of my hands, at this point all I can do is watch the Atom Protocol list. Chapter one may be coming back from copy-edit today.

I spent some time with VelociDoc yesterday and updated the Roller Velocity Macro Reference.

I also updated the Roller Javadocs and added some diagams from my Roller presentation.

• Oh yes we can!
  Scoble: "the founder of Gentoo just came to work here"
• Joel on Recruiting
  "[Microsoft] can't compensate for being the target of eight years of fear and loathing from the Slashdot communty"
• OpenSolaris mascot
  The only thing OpenSolaris lacks is a cute mascot
• Blog sifting
  Bryan Cantrill's excellent roundup of the OpenSolaris blogs
• Gold stars to Sun
  Andrew Lark: Blogs play key role in launch of Open Solaris...

• Note to IBM and Sun
  James: "So IBM forked OpenOffice, and now its using Roller for internal blogging"
• Fighting Roller
  Phil offers some constructive criticism of Roller's built in themes and macros
• IBM's Roller
  A couple more screenshots of IBM's Roller fork
• Productized Open Source
  Matthew: "suggesting you offer "productized" Open Source may really conjur up the wrong impression"
• rc3.org on OpenSolaris
  Rafe: "there really is no better form of public relations than letting engineers loose to blog"

The said it couldn't be done. They were wrong. OpenSolaris has been released under a true open source license and the project will be run as a true open source project, with outside contributors and independent distros and everything. Congrats to everybody inside and outside of Sun who helped maket his happen. This is definitely a historic day for open source.

It may also be a historic day for blogging. It's not a "normal" product launch, that's for sure. Instead of launching OpenSolaris with a media splash, press releases and a carefully crafted message, the OpenSolaris crew has taken over blogs.sun.com and let the bloggers loose. They're blogging (blogs.sun.com and opensolaris.org) and tagging (technorati, del.icio.us and flickr) and chatting (#opensolaris at freenode.net) and badging and getting the word out in their own imaginative and personal ways. I'm proud to be even a small part of that and I can't wait to get my hands on the code (of course, like everything else in my life, that'll happen right after I finish the book).

• Opening day overview
  "Welcome to OpenSolaris. Opening Day is here."
• Engineer-driven communities
  Eric: "So what‘s the wrong way for a company to go open-source?"
• OpenSolaris news
  Round-up of press articles on OpenSolaris launch
• Real Unix, Real Open
  OpenSolaris is availabe via BitTorrent
• OpenSolaris source browser
  Chandan says it's powered by Apache Lucene
• More open than open
  Dan says Solaris is simply Sun's OpenSolaris distribution
• I told you so
  Clingan: "I wont tell the numerous folks hiding behind "Anonymous Coward" "I told you so" either, mostly because I don't want to lower their self esteem even further."
• OpenSolaris era
  "The work inside the firewall will begin to happen outside the firewall," Goguen said.
• Open!
  Jim: "OpenSolaris changes everything at Sun. Everything"
• OpenSolaris graduates
  Justin: "Now, the hard part begins. Come and join the effort"

Preview version of the new NetBeans CVS Support now available!: The NetBeans team is proud to announce a preview (alpha) version of the new redesigned CVS support, an innovative approach to integration of a Version Control System (VCS) into the NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The new module provides a simple, efficient IDE versioning workflow and intelligent support for common versioning operations.

The module is not derived from the current NetBeans VCS support, but instead is meant as a lightweight approach with less focus on architectural abstraction and much more attention to User Interface (UI) functionality.

CVS integration is the one thing that keeps pulling me back to Eclipse, so I'm really glad to hear the VCS subsystem is being re-worked (maybe 'replaced' is more accurate). Check out the screenshots, looks like good stuff. I hope better Subversion support is not far behind.

Via Roman Strobl and John Jullion-Ceccarelli

It's status time again. Quick summary: last week I spent most of my time on Roller 1.2 related issues and the Apache move. This week, I'll get back to the Roller 2.0/group blogging work.

On the Roller 1.2 front, I made some small enhancements to the Planet Roller aggregator and did some work to make the blogs.sun.com front pages a little easier to maintain. I also did a number of deployments last week to our internal blog server for testing.

Unfortunately, changing the front-pages in a Roller site is not quite as easy as changing a blog's theme. The front-pages are JSP, so you can't edit them through the Roller UI and folks who don't know Java and JSP have a hard time making changes. A number of people have suggested the idea of having a blog serve as the front pages of Roller and I think that's a great idea.

Now let's turn to Apache. Our Subversion repository space is ready at the Apache Incubator, but we're not. Since the Roller 1.2 release is coming up soon, last week we decided to keep main-line Roller development in CVS. Once the release is ready, we'll move to Subversion and branch 1.2 from there. Also: our new mailing lists are ready at Apache, but we haven't made the move yet.

Roller 2.0 work got short shrift last week, due to Roller 1.2 and related issues. Since Roller 2.0 lives in its own branch and Apache won't allow us to bring branches and history along with us (for a number of reasons, some legal), I had to do some extra work to recreate the Roller 2.0 branch in Subversion. I managed to complete that work and resume work on group blogging. I'm hoping that I can spend the rest of this week on group blogging.

That's all folks. I'm going to cover RSS and Atom in Action status in a separate post.

UPDATE: I completely forgot that we released Roller 1.1.2 last week, a minor bug fix release.