Blogging Roller

I've been reading some interesting comments from .Net guy Brian Wilson, Steve Gillmor of Computer Reseller News, Dave Winer, and Jeffrey Zeldman on Microsoft's recent moves to kill the standalone versions of the IE browser both on Windows and on the Mac. According to the news stories, IE is going to become part of Windows, which means that we will not see another release of IE until the next version of Windows ships in 2005 or 2006.

Brian says this means that Microsoft has given up on the web, no longer sees the need to innovate there, and is already starting to lose browser share.

Steve says that IE fell victim to internal Microsoft politics and the "Allchin" tax.

Dave and Jeffrey say that Microsoft now owns the web, has it locked in the trunk of the car, and is driving it off a cliff somewhere.

I have to agree with Matt, this stuff won't have an effect on us poor schmuck web developers for a years to come.

The Swiss edition of InfoWeek features what looks like an interesting article on weblogging by Urs Bertschy: New Kids on the Blog that covers weblog features like trackback, referers, blogging clients, and RSS. Too bad I don't read German. The Babelfish translation only goes so far, literally. The article mentions Roller and lists my weblog in a section titled "Interessante IT-Blogs". Nice.

After you resign it is really difficult to get motivated to work on anything.

I just resigned from my current job and I will be starting a new one July 1st. I'm very excited about this new job, but because I try not to mix work and blog I'm not going to go into specifics. I will tell you that I'll be staying here in Raleigh, I'll be doing J2EE application development, I'll be working for a large and very stable software company, and my title will be Senior User Interface Developer.

Checking in with java.blogs on a Monday morning via SharpReader. It is very cool to find new releases: Ant 1.5.3, JBoss 3.2.1, Hibernate 2.0, Netbeans 3.5, and Struts 1.1RC2. It is not so cool to recieve a popup from Ammai.com every time I click on a news item and to find that most of this news is over a week old. SharpReader needs a popup blocker.

Matt has the RollerWikiPlugin up and running. He has also created a very nice new JSPWiki theme and started his own Wiki to support his weblog, AppFuse, and StrutsResume projects.

I caused a little stir yesterday with my "oh the shame" post, Sam Ruby picked up on it and several others took notice. I think most people realize that I was just having some fun with words and ranting. I know Sun didn't actually steal anything from O'Reilly and I don't really think O'Reilly's weblogging software is rinky-dink. However, there was some truth there. I do think the java.net blogs would benefit from more advanced blogging features. I'd like to help and I would (obviously) love to see them use Roller.

If the blogs on java.net are just provided for simple project news and RSS feeds, then I can understand the desire to keep the blogging module simple. If, on the other hand, these are going to be real weblogs with the personality and character of the blogs we read on java.blogs, then something better is needed.

Part of the java.net charter is to support the open source Java community and foster open source Java projects. I'd like to see java.net eat it's own dogfood and use open source Java rather than the open source Perl, PHP, Python, or whatever else it is that they are using now. Instead of the O'Reilly blog software, why not use Roller, Blojsom, JSP Wiki, or Snipsnap? If these aren't good enough, let's figure out why and make them better.

By the way, I have registered http://roller.dev.java.net (pending approval) to reserve the name and to start exploring the java.net features. If it looks good, I may migrate the Roller CVS, downloads, and mailing lists from SourceForge.

Sun's new web application development tool, Rave, sounds really cool. Here what the bloggers are saying about it:

Simon Brown: Anyway, if you've done any programming with a 4GL environment like PowerBuilder, VisualBasic, etc then this is pretty much the same, albeit for the web. You can drag and drop components on to the canvas (the web page) and hook them up with event listeners, datasources and web services. All in all a very quick way to build webapps and certainly aimed at the corporate developer market that Sun is trying to bring over to the Java world in an effort to significantly increase the developer community. Good demo, nice tool.

Dehashish Chakrabarty: Sue Spielman has some more details on Project Rave. The key phrase here is "simplified development model",  in accordance with Sun's aim of  "lowering the barrier and entry point for the corporate developers" and "sucking up the VB corporate/IT programmers into the Java platform". It's another thing that, as Sue reported, a 404 error surfaced during Hammerhead's demo at JavaOne.  Rave uses NetBeans Platform as its base (though visually it will be different) alongwith JavaServer Faces and JDBC Rowsets standards. And if you didn't know Sun has no plan to make this project open source.

Cedric Beust: I have to say I was quite surprised by the slickness of Rave, until I realized why: it doesn't seem to be based on NetBeans. Well, that's my impression. I was a bit far from the screen to be sure, but it certainly didn't look like the standard NetBeans interface to me.

Andres Aguiar: Project Rave is a tool for those guys. It looks cool, and it's fast, as they built it with no extensibility hooks as other more ambitious IDEs (NetBeans, Eclipse). Right now it just supports Web applications, and it's not targeted to the EJB developer, it's for guys that want to access their database directly, with tools to do data binding directly from the database, etc. It targets the same people as ASP.NET Web Matrix.

Cedric and Andres are wrong. Rave is, in fact, based on Netbeans.

Overall I think java.net looks like a great start, lots of potential there. I think the site could benefit from better navigation because it really is difficult to figure out where things are and how it all fits together. Other than that, the site looks great and there is lots of interesting content there. I'm still exploring.

The open source project hosting looks really cool and it seems to include the same set of project hosting and management features as provided by SourceForge, plus project wikis and blogs. I wonder if Roller would benefit from java.net. It would be a royal pain to switch over from SourceForge, I'm sure, so I really wonder if it would be worth it. What SourceForge features are missing from java.net? I guess this is just the SourceCast vs. SourceForge question. Would a new home there be worth the relocation expenses?

I offered to install Roller for Sun, but noooooooo, they had to go and steal (from O'Reilly) some rinky-dink little blogging package. Sheeesh! Are those blogs for real? They are all identical, no themes. Some of them look a little forced, as in "you will blog now please employee #76654, get to work." The others look and feel like the O'Reilly blogs, you know, the ones where the author is maintaining two blogs: one personal blog and one O'Reilly blog which is generally not worth subscribing to. All the interesting stuff shows up on the author's personal blog and, occasionally, an article or two shows up on the author's O'Reilly blog.

On top of all that, they didn't bother to tie into java.blogs. Shouldn't java.blogs be a federated site? Or, at least a linked site?

Whatever. I'll get over it. Maybe some of those blogs will be successful and truly worthwhile, who knows. At least Gosling's blog looks genuine.

[via Wes Felter] I'm sorry I'm gonna miss this talk. I guess it is not really anything ground-breaking, just a new set of peers, but it stills sounds very interesting and maybe there will be some discussion of the future of Swing and AWT.

AWT on Linux and Unix systems is currently based on the Motif widget set. AWT is often called a Heavyweight Toolkit, because of its Motif-based peers. The construction of one Toolkit on top of another Toolkit can often cause "impedance mismatches" that can lead to sluggish performance due to the excessive layering of code, not to mention quality problems and nightmare bugs. In JavaTM 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE TM) v1.5, AWT will take on a new set of peers that remove the Motif toolkit from underneath AWT. This provides a high-performance and high-quality Toolkit that will be 100% backward compatible with existing JavaTM technology applications.

Reuters: Sun will at its JavaOne conference this week unveil plans for an advertising campaign and new Web sites, featuring singer Christina Aguilera toting a Java-enabled cell phone that plays games, Sun executives said.

Yep, it's for real.

Lookie there, java.net has gone live.

I enjoyed Shlomi Fish's Rules of Open Source Development and Charles Miller's Handling Bug Reports today. I saw a couple of parallels:

Charles Miller: give users empowerment equal to their station.

Rules of Open Source Development: The user is always right unless proven otherwise by the developer.

Customer success is important, but hey, let's get real.

Ok, I've been a bit preoccupied recently and I missed the anniversary by one day, but what the heck. I've been running my blog on Roller for one year an a day. Yay!

Clemens Vasters: Scalability is about building wider roads, not about building faster cars.

I'm interested in open source Java CMS, but my customers run on a 
variety of application servers, not just JBoss.

I read that Nukes is a J2EE app so I assume automatically that it 
will run on other app servers, but I also read that it requires JMX 
and that this makes it difficult to install on other app servers. 
What is the deal?

For example, Weblogic supports J2EE and JMX, so what will it take 
to deploy Nukes to Weblogic?

Still no response. Maybe the blogosphere will be more responsive than the Nukes forum.

I'd like to believe, as Jonathan Peterson does, that blogs would work in IT project management. I'd like to see Mark Pilgrim's <a href= "http://diveintomark.org/archives/2001/10/03/knowledge_management_it_all_sounds_so_good.html"> Knowledge Management (it all sounds so good) proven wrong, but based on my experiences in cubelandia I don't think that is likely.

Merrick Schincariol explains Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and attempts to dumb-it-down to my level. This is not an easy task, but he does it well.

The JBoss guys have ported PHP Nukes to Java, read about it at O'Reilly's place: Nukes: the Open Source Java CMS. Looks interesting, but it is certainly not the first comprehensive open source Java CMS on the market as the author claims. Also, I don't understand why they include a weblog about fashion trends.