Blogging Roller

It's been over a month since the last Roller Strong, so now I'm really glad I didn't call this thing Roller Week. Anyhow, in this installment I've got news about including new releases, a big new Roller customer and upcoming Roller-related events. I'll start with the release news. [Read More]

Matt Raible gave a talk today at the Colorado Software Summit on integrating Roller with LDAP and CAS. He also has provided some nice notes on that and running Roller on Geronimo:

• Roller 4.0 with LDAP and CAS
• Roller 4.0 on Geronimo

Matt had to make a couple of tweaks to get thing going with Roller 4.0 RC8 and a couple other problems have been found, so you can expect RC9 shortly.

<a href="http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/What%27s+New+in+Roller+4.0 "> I'm working on documenting the Roller plugin system, comparing it to similar systems (e.g. Wordpress and Confluence) and coming up with some proposals for improvements. As part of that work, I've come up with a list of the plugin types supported by Roller 4.0. [Read More]

I just made the files for Apache Roller 4.0 RC8 available for testing and called for a 2nd release vote (RC7 as the first). If we can get a couple more committers to test and sign-off on the release, we could possibly get it out this week, which would be nice. I've been spinning RCs since August 13.

My blogging has really dropped off in September. I'm working on too many things at once and things that I can't blog about yet, but that doesn't mean I'm neglecting Roller. In fact, the opposite is true and I've got a big new edition of Roller Strong to prove it. So let's get started. [Read More]

ApacheCon is coming up fast. I just faxed in my speaker's agreement and I'm starting to update my talk to cover the latest changes in the upcoming Apache Roller 4.0 and 4.1 releases.

I've been four times now and ApacheCon is always a great conference. It's small and cozy enough, but almost all of the Apache projects are represented. So it's easy to find the experts, make new friends and get all of your questions answered. The session line-up looks great this year; here are ones that caught my eye:

• Hacking Atom with Apache Abdera - Garret Rooney
• A little REST and Relaxation - Roy Fielding
• WS-* vs. REST: Facts, Myths and Lies - Sanjiva Weerawarana
• Go Light with Apache Struts 2 and REST - Don Brown
• How to Run a Business Around The ASF - Sanjiva Weerawarana
• Open Source Community Anti-Patterns - Ted Leung
• RIAs using Apache Derby and Comet - Jeanfrancois Arcand & Francois Orsini
• Apache Derby - Saucer Separation - Rick Hillegas
• JCR in Action - Content-based Applications with Apache Jackrabbit - Carsten Ziegeler

Want to go? There's still time to shave a couple of hundred dollars off the conference fees by registering early. Early bird pricing has been extended to Sept. 22, 2007.

And the Weston looks like a pretty nice place for a conference:

ApacheCon US 2007 | Register here
November 12-16, 2007
Westin Peachtree Plaza
Atlanta, Georgia

It's been a couple of weeks since the last Roller Strong because I've been very busy with 4.0 and some other new projects. Plus, I was getting a little tired of saying "we're still working on 4.0." So now I'm happy to report that release candidates have been made available for upcoming Apache Roller 4.0 release.

It should be very easy to try out the new release because we spent a lot of time focusing on a new easy-install process, plus there is no need to download a separate bundle of Hibernate files as Roller no longer uses Hibernate. With the new easy-install, installation should be as easy as editing four settings in a small configuration file and dropping the WAR into Tomcat or Glassfish.

Below are some links to the 4.0 RC1 release files.

• <a href= "http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/apache-roller-4.0/apache-roller-4.0-rc1.tar.gz">apache-roller-4.0-rc1.tar.gz (key)
• <a href= "http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/apache-roller-4.0/apache-roller-4.0-rc1.zip">apache-roller-4.0-rc1.zip (key)
• What's new in Roller 4.0
• <a href= "http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10000&styleName=Html&version=10270">Roller 4.0 Change list in JIRA
• <a href= "http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/apache-roller-4.0/roller-install-guide.pdf">Roller 4.0 Installation Guide (PDF)
• <a href= "http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/apache-roller-4.0/roller-user-guide.pdf">Roller 4.0 User Guide (PDF)
• <a href= "http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/apache-roller-4.0/roller-template-guide.pdf">Roller 4.0 Template Guide (PDF)

Keep in mind that 4.0 RC1 is not an official Apache release and is meant for testing only. Even so, this is probably a pretty solid release. The .Sun Engineering team put the code into production at at blogs.sun.com over a month ago and my coworkers on the Sun App Platform team just put the code through a couple weeks of testing.

rollerthemes.com

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/roller-themes.png" alt="screenshot of rollerthemes.com" align="right" /> Big thanks to Gene Strokine! As seen on raibledesigns.com, Gene has been busy with Roller theme development and has started a new site rollerthemes.com to promote his work. Gene is also the newest committer on the Roller Support project at Java.net and has committed many of his themes there (they still need to be upgraded to work with 4.0 though).

Notes on Roller and JA-SIG CAS SSO

And Phillip Rhodes reports success integrating Roller and JavaBB with single-sign on via JA-SIG CAS and has plans for additional identity related work. He has posted his notes on Roller and CAS/SSO to the Roller dev list.

JRoller.com troubles

In the "OK, so maybe Roller ain't so strong" department, JRoller.com has been having problems with Roller 3.1. Matt Schmidt upgraded JRoller.com from Roller 2.0 to Roller 3.1 a couple of weeks back and ran into database connection pool problems, which were resolved by switching back from Tomcat to Resin. Now he's dealing with some explosive memory usage and <a href= "http://www.javalobby.org/java/forums/t99490.html">asking for help from the Javalobby community.

Coming soon: a Geronimo plugin for Roller

Our Geronimo friends David Jencks and Peter Peterssen stopped by the Roller-dev list this month to contribute some code to make it easier for Roller to work in Apache Geronimo. They're cookin' up a Geronimo plugin for Roller and I'm looking forward to seeing it in action.

In other news...

One final note. We've made a bunch of fixes to 3.1 so we also have a new RC available for the upcoming Apache Roller 3.1.1 fix release. You can find the RC files for 3.1.1 in my Apache site and the change list in JIRA.

Good news today from Tim Bray: Atom protocol has been finalized. The final version of the spec is going to be Atom protocol draft #17.

Instead of staying up until the dawn hours (not naming names) reading the final Harry Potter book, I spent most of the weekend working on bringing Propono in-line with the draft #17 and in particular adding support for out-of-line categories and relative URIs. I've got code ready to commit that passes Tim's Ape tests, so hopefully we'll have a new Propono 0.6 release ready very soon that supports the final spec.

Roller's Atom protocol implementation is already up to date and passing Ape tests, so Roller 4.0 will be Atom protocol ready. I still need to do a little work to document the setup.

More of the same news this week as work continues on Roller 4.0, testing and bug fixing. Allen made some comment formatting related changes and introduced what I hope is the last database schema modification we'll make in 4.0. Davis Nguyen is testing and finding problem, some of which may be caused by bugs in the new JPA back-end so I'll have more debugging work this week.

As you can see from the road roller graphic on the right, we're making progress with 4.0. We've gone from a wobbly pen and colored pencil drawing to a snazzy Gimp-powered image with gradients and drop-shadows.

Looking forward to getting started with post-4.0 work, I started two new 4.1 proposals to externalize <a href= "http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/Proposal+Externalize+User+Management">user management and <a href= "http://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/Proposal+Externalize+User+Permissions">permssions to make it easier to hook Roller into directory servers and permissions systems.

In other news, the Roller 3.1.1 RC1 release has been out for a about a week now. We haven't gotten much feedback on it yet, but we have been getting some feedback on Roller 3.1 in general from Websphere and Weblogic users as they're having problems getting Roller up and running. If you work for IBM/Websphere or BEA/Weblogic you might want to stop by and help us figure out what's going wrong, maybe there's something we can fix in 3.1.1 to getting Roller running better on your platforms.

Also on the 3.1 front, Matt Schmidt is working on upgrading JRoller.com to Roller 3.1 and has plans to move to 4.0 after that. Roller 3.1 will bring better performance/stability and new features to the DZone network's Java blogging site.

That's it for this weeks episode. Please tune in next week for more...

Quick links to previous episodes: #6, #5, #4, #3, #2 and #1.

I'm starting to sound like a broken record, I know, but we're still wrapping up work on Roller 4.0. We worked on fixes, enhancements and documentation this past week.

I spent a couple days doing a complete rewrite of the Roller installation guide for 4.0. The guide covers the new EZ install process, includes a 5-minute install option and details on Tomcat v6 and Glassfish v2 installation.

If you are interested in reviewing/testing the new install guide you can get it here <a href= "http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/apache-roller-4.0/roller-install-guide.pdf">new 4.0 install guide (571kb PDF) and there's also an unofficial <a href= "http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/apache-roller-4.0/">snapshot release of Roller 4.0 for testing the guide.

Also, the first release candidate for Roller 3.1.1 is <a href= "http://www.nabble.com/Apache-Roller-3.1.1-RC1-ready-for-testing-p11489144s12275.html">now available for testing. The 3.1.1 release is a fix release that addresses problems found in the Roller 3.1 release and updates Atom protocol support (still considered experimental).

That's all for now. Tune in next week for more Roller news.

Not too much to report this week...

Matt Raible gave his Introduction to Apache Roller webinar on Wednesday. Most unforunately, I was unable to break out of my Wednesday meeting marathon to attend. At some point Matt says he'll post his slides to the Roller wiki.

In Roller development we wrapped up work on the new Roller EZ install, which makes it really easy to install Roller -- just set four properties, deploy roller.war and Roller will start up, creating or upgrading tables as needed.

Also, my Guice proposal gained consensus and I merged the work into the Roller trunk just this morning. As of now, I believe we're feature complete for Roller 4.0.

Tune in next week and perhaps I'll have something to say about release. It's about time to start getting 3.1.1 and 4.0 release candidates ready.

Roller fans don't forget, Covalent's Introduction to Apache Roller webinar is tomorrow, Wednesday June 20 at 2PM ET. Raible has the details.

I stayed up a little too late last night upgrading this site (rollerweblogger.org) to the latest Roller 4.0 code base, which includes the new Struts2 based Admin UI and a new OpenJPA based back-end. No more Hibernate for me. The upgrade was a bit of a rocky road, but the site seems to be working OK now.

This week was a big week for Roller, development and deployment-wise. As you may already know from Linda Skrocki's blog, Roller 4.0 went live this week at the premier corporate blogging site blogs.sun.com (BSC) with some nice new themes, easier blog customization and a UI that has been completely rewritten to do use Struts2. Check the What's New in Roller 4.0 page to learn more about the upcoming release.

But don't get too excited, you can't download Roller 4.0 just yet. Sun deployed a pre-release version of Roller and if you want to do the same, you'll either have to build it yourself or wait for the official Apache Roller 4.0 release coming out this summer. And don't be too disappointed, that's one of the nice things about Roller: before we make a release, the code is battle tested on blogs.sun.com. Big thanks to .Sun Engineering for that.

A couple folks wrote into to tell me that GIS software developer ESRI is blogging with Roller, something I've been meaning to mention for quite some time. In fact, I've been meaning to mention it for over a year and now it's time to wish ESRI a happy 1st blogaversary. Man, how time flies.

That's it for this weeks installment of Roller Strong. Y'all come back now.

Welcome to the second edition of Roller Strong. This has been a busy week for me with a silly number of telecons, but I've still managed to keep up with Roller events and even get a little development done so here's the Roller news round-up. 

First, an announcement from Covalent. They've rescheduled their Apache Roller webinar with Matt Raible to June 20.

A couple of new users showed up on the Roller mailing-list this week. One was Ryan Delaplante who wrote about his Roller installation experience and the nice new theme he developed on his blog ryandelaplante.com. Jason Johnson stopped by to tell us about the new Roller-based blogging system at the University of South Dakota blogs.usd.edu. They've got some looking themes there too, check out Astra blue and red.

In the blogs, here's a post for Sun bloggers only from Rich Sharples: OpenID Delegation with Roller (take 2). Rich explains how to setup your Roller-based blog as a proxy for your Sun OpenID account.

In development, we're still finishing up the Roller 4.0 release. Most commits this week are coming from Allen who is working on bug fixes across the board. I've been making slow and steady progress on the Roller easy install work. Also, if you look at the Subversion logs you'll see that I'm working in a separate branch to implement Dependency Injection (DI) in Roller via Google's Guice. I'm almost ready to show-and-tell with a proposal. Denis Balazuc has also created a DI implementation using Spring, so we may have some interesting discussions next week.

No significant news about releases this week. We've probably got enough fixes to justify a Roller 3.1.1 release, but nobody has prepared a release candidate yet. I might be able to do one next week.

That's it for this edition. Have a great weekend.

Roller Strong Disclaimer: this is a personal blog and I do not speak on behalf of Sun Microsystems or the Apache Software Foundation. 

This blog is called Blogging Roller because that's what it's supposed to be about, but lately there's a shortage of Roller content here and I don't think I'm getting the word out the way I used to. There's a lot of cool stuff coming with Roller 4.0 and other efforts, so I need to fix that. I'm going to start by doing a weekly roundup of Roller news on Fridays, but I'm not going to call it Roller Week. [Read More]

Covalent is presenting a web presentation titled "Introduction to Apache Roller" that will cover Roller architecture, features, installation, customization and road-map with Roller committer and blogger Matt Raible. The presentation is on June 6 at  11AM Pacific Time. You can sign up at raindance.com.

WALNUT CREEK, CA, May 15, 2007 -- Covalent Technologies, the most trusted source for enterprise open source solutions, today announced it is now offering full commercial support for Apache Roller, the open source blog server from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

[...]

Organizations are increasingly using blogs as a means of more effectively communicating with their customers and ecosystem, says Mark Brewer, CEO of Covalent Technologies. Consequently, for the enterprise, blog technology is rapidly becoming an important and essential piece of their infrastructure. We are very pleased to be supporting this very worthwhile ASF project. More...

As I indicate in the press release, I think this is excellent news for Roller.

Sun is throwing another JavaOne bloggers bash at Thirsty Bear this year, at 6PM on Wednesday night. I'll be there and I hope to see other Roller users and developers there too.

I just uploaded the files for the Blogapps 2.0 release. It includes the new Blogapps Examples, which have been reorganized, expanded and modified to use ROME Propono instead of the old Blogapps Blog Client. It also a new Blogapps Server, a super easy-to-install blog/wiki server based on Roller (4.0 code-base), JSPWiki 2.4 and Derby. You can find the full release annoucement here on the Blogapps site.