Blogging Roller

Turns out, one of the "other analysts" that Michael Signer spoke of was a blogger named James Governor. In the comments to my previous post, James writes:

"actually it was me. i got a quick email from Michael and gave him a rapid response. its pretty harsh to accuse him of making the idea up if he attributed it to an analyst. Basically i felt that you are doing good work with Roller, and engaging with Sun customers, but that Sun itself has said basically not much about the future of the product at all. Michael had heard a sniff of an open source splash and is looking for ideas. i have not got the inside skinny, but i could easily imagine Sun "packaging" the Roller and open source news, or changing the license. or something. Either that or open sourcing some other JES componentry. Feel free to set the record straight. What are Sun's plans for Roller?"

James, I assumed that he was making things up because he was so far off base. How could he not know that Roller is already open source? Development is done on a public CVS server, issue tracking is public, and discussions happen on public mailing lists, blogs, and the Roller wiki.

James asks that I "set the record straight" and "what are Sun's plans for Roller?" I'm not going to discuss Sun's future product plans or announcements, but my personal plan is to make Roller the best possible platform for blogging, collaboration, and community building. If you want to know how that plan is going, watch me work.

Sun Readies Open Code, Michael Singer: "Other analysts say Sun could also open source its enterprise blogging application, named Roller. While the platform began its life as an open source project, before Sun hired its founder David Johnson, the company has not given the software the full on corporate treatment since he joined."

I don't believe those "other analysts" actually exist, this guy is just talking out of his, uh, never mind. I guess I need to set the record straight. First, Roller is and has always been open source. The version of Roller we use at Sun is the same one that you can download from the Roller project site at Java.Net in either source code or binary form. Second, I'm not interested in the "full on corporate treatment" -- I'm a married man.

I spent most of the break working on the book and now it's time to get back to Roller. Bugs have been trickling in from blogs.sun.com. Plus, Matt and Rick over at Javalobby upgraded JRoller to Roller 1.0RC2 last week and that shook loose a couple of bugs. So, now there's a short list of bugs that should be fixed before Roller 1.0 final. Thanks to everybody who has helped out by reporting bugs.

I'm doing what I can to help folks with Roller 1.0RC2 issues this week, but I'm not doing any substantial work on Roller. I'm using the Winter break to work full-time on Blogs, Wikis, and Feeds in Action, so the 1.0 release will have to wait until the new year. The good news is, although there are some bug reports rolling in (pun always intended), Roller 1.0 has been running very well at blogs.sun.com.

I hope you and yours are having a nice winter holiday. We had a great Christmas here with way too many toys, wonderful food, and lots of family around. Transformers and Imaginex toys rule this house now. We didn't get a white christmas here, we never do, but tomorrow we may get 2 to 4 inches of snow. That's close enough for the kids.

I'm pleased to be the first to publicly welcome our newest contributor and committer Anil Gangolli to the Roller team. As I mentioned before, Anil has been doing great work helping Roller users, filing bugs, digging into the code, and offering excellent fixes. Welcome Anil and thanks again for your contributions.

This morning Andi and I attended the holiday program at the elementary school that my older boys Alex(8) and Linus(6) attend. We were quite proud parents as Alex got a "Going the Extra Mile" award for academic achievement. Nice to get out of the office/house. I need a break, but I'm not going to get it just yet. The week between XMAS and New Years is going to be devoted to writing.

I spent the rest of the morning responding to emails about the Roller 1.0 roll-out at blogs.sun.com. There were a number of glitches and some have been filed as bugs to be fixed for Roller 1.0. Some were caused by browser caching issues as we saw on JRoller earlier this year. There are lots of questions about themes and page templates. A number of folks are inspired by new release and are working up cool new themes. I'll have to point some of those out in later post. In the next couple of weeks, I hope to whip up some new themes myself and write a short tutorial for folks just getting started.

Since I had to delete an irritating comment today, I'll fill you in on my comment policy. If your comment irritates or offends me in any way whatsoever, I will take great joy in deleting it.

We made the cut-over to Roller 1.0 (actually 1.0RC2) at blogs.sun.com today. We had some minor glitches, but overall the upgrade went pretty smoothly after we flipped the switch and started directing traffic to the new server.

Is blogs.net for real or is it just a site devoted to blog spam? (It's not hard to tell that the site is running Roller.)

The full Roller 1.0RC2 announcement can be found on the Roller project blog. In addition to lots of bug fixes, we also added a new JCaptcha based comment authenticator. I've got it running on this site if you'd like to try it out.

JCaptcha integration was really easy because JCaptcha developer Marc-Antoine Garrigue did all the work. He implemented the Roller CommentAuthenticator interface and documented the integration process. Now all you have to do to enable CAPTCHA support in Roller is to uncomment a line in Roller's web.xml file. Thanks Marc-Antoine.

Roller 1.0 is very, very close, possibly only a day or two away. I'm still fighting a mysterious bug that is preventing Firefox 1.0 browsers from logging into my test server. We use Apache mod_rewrite to rewrite the blogs.sun.com URLS, so we can have http://blogs.sun.com/<username> redirect to http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/<username>. For some reason, this prevents Firefox 1.0 from logging in (via standard Servlet Authentication). All other browsers work fine and if I turn off mod_rewrite Firefox 1.0 works too.

Charles Miller: "if you develop web applications and you aren't looking today for ways to include dynamic interface techniques like those made practical by XmlHttpRequest, you're going to end up losing to someone who is."

I don't know Anil personally, but he's been helping out Roller users and submitting lots of bug reports against Roller 1.0.RC1, most of which are accompanied by a fix. So, I just want to say thanks Anil. You've been a big help. Quick Roller status report: I really hope to have Roller 1.0 out (or at least an RC2 release) in the next week or so.

I was doing some Roller testing today and I found that the old Midas-based editor for Mozilla/Firefox is broken. I searched around for docs on Midas and found out about RTE, written by Kevin Roth, an open source cross-platform WYSIWYG editor that works with recent versions of IE, Mozilla, and Firefox (sadly Safari is not supported). Instead of fixing editor-midas.jsp, I replaced it with editor-rte.jsp. So now, thanks to Mr. Roth, Roller 1.0 will include a cross-browser WYSIWYG editor. Here's a screenshot to prove it:

Before I had kids, I never got really angry. I did't yell and I didn't get into knock down, drag out arguments with anybody. But, as every parent knows, kids can make you crazy and kids can make you angry. I've got good control over my temper and I think I'm a pretty mild mannered guy, but with three young sons, I've got plenty of opportunities to yell, and to say things I never thought I would ever, ever say. I get angry now (and, of course, that is not entirely bad).

I've got a theory about why kids can make parents so angry. They don't realize it, but kids emulate their parent's verbal and physical mannerisms all the time. As you watch your child you can see bits and pieces of your own personality. They pick up on the little phrases that you repeat. They repeat them too. When your kid starts to fuss or throw a tantrum or otherwise behave like a jackass, he does it in a way that reminds you of yourself, your mannerisms, and your personality. You see your own inner jackass reflected in the actions of your child. Your kid learned how to be a jackass directly from you, it shows, and boy oh boy does that piss you off.

I've only raised kids up to the age of seven, so I don't know the full range of anger that a child can induce yet, but I think I'm onto something here.

I'm going to take a short trip to the sunny southern state of Florida next week to speak at a joint meeting of the Gainesville and Orlando Java User Groups. I'll be presenting an updated version of the presentation I gave to the Triangle JUG earlier this year. I added some slides on blogs.sun.com, I updated the Roller architecture section, and I moved the whole presentation from Evil Empire format to Open Office format. For more information, check the GatorJUG web site.

John Udell: The CAPTCHA game: "Any scheme that relies on perceptual or cognitive talents, in order to distinguish humans from robots, will necessarily discriminate against some population of humans. If you're using such an approach, accessibility dictates that you offer several alternatives."

Udell comes to the same conclusion that we did with Roller. You have to offer several alternatives. Roller 1.0 has a pluggable comment authentication mechanism so that the Roller administrator can decide how to authenticate comments. I don't think this is quite good enough. The administrator should not be the one making the choice. The person who is leaving the comment should be the one who chooses the authentication mechanism.

Matt and Rick have moved JRoller over to a bigger and better hardware and to Servlet speed king Resin. Once they get the JRoller.com JIRA back up, let them know if you notice any odd glitches.

This site originally ran on Resin, so I was familiar with it at one point. Is Resin still the speed king or have advances in Tomcat turned the tables? The Web Performance, Inc. Servlet Performance Report shows them running just about neck-and-neck (and of course leaving WebSphere in the dust).

Since the Roller 1.0RC1 release, I've been working on upgrading blogs.sun.com. The upgrade is a little more challenging than upgrades I've done before because of the security concerns and because my manager (quite reasonably) insists that there be no down time. I'm not worried at all, of course -- as we all know Roller upgrades never cause any downtime.

To achieve a no-downtime upgrade, we are taking the side-by-side upgrade approach. We install the new Roller on a new server, side-by-side with the old server. We periodically sync the data from the old server to the new server. We test the new server until it performs to our satisfaction and then we turn off the old and switch traffic the new.

So, current status is this: we have a side-by-side install up and running, but we haven't announced it's location yet. The new program SyncUpdate098Xto1000.java is running from cron, keeping the databases in sync. We run rsync from cron to keep the uploaded files in sync. Now we need to do some testing, fix some bugs, do some more testing, and flip the switch. After that, we'll release Roller 1.0.

Gary Potter: But, what is clear is that a corporate blogging initiative at Sabre is going to be a bit harder than I thought. What I do know is that it won’t be because our tool of choice is hard to use. We installed Roller in a day and our first users are from my work group. It will stay that way until we are able to tweak things to our liking. New user registration to a first blog post in less than 10 minutes; that is what it took someone whose only knowledge about blogging was how it was spelled. That made me smile.

I'm smiling too. Let us know how we can help.

Parts II and III of Jeff Chilton's Adventures with Roller Weblogger series in now online at WebspherePower.com. The long story of porting Roller to Websphere has a happy ending. Have a look: Part I: Adventures with Roller Weblogger, Part II: Further Adventures with Roller Weblogger, and Part III: Even more adventures with Roller Weblogger.