Roller graduation and 3.1 announcement
Finally! Roller has graduated to become a top-level Apache project and we've shipped the long awaited Apache Roller 3.1 release. You can find the full announcement on the Roller mailing list and on the Roller project blog and our new top-level site at http://roller.apache.org.
APP interop event day #1
Day one of the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) interop event was a success, at least from my point-of-view. I was able to test the Propono client against Blogger.com/GData, AOL Journals and an implementation from Oracle. I found and fixed problems in Roller's APP implementation. Plus, it was great to meet all of the good folks implementing Atom and to get a close look at the Google campus. I'm getting ready to drive back to Google now so... gotta go.
Check out Tim Bray's blog for some photos of the event.
5th anniversary of Blogging Roller
Today is the fifth anniversary of this blog, which I started on April 11, 2002 to promote the Roller blog software that I had just finished writing.
Roller wasn't really ready for deployment at the time, so I started blogging using Userland Radio radio.weblogs.com. You can find my first post on Radio here FIRST POST!!! You can also find the original Roller 0.90 user guide on the old site, complete with screen-shots. A couple of weeks later, my article on Roller was published at OnJava.com and folks started to take notice of Roller.
Now, five years later, Roller has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become Apache Roller, blog-tech is my full-time job at Sun and I'm still Blogging Roller. Thanks to Roller users and contributors everywhere for helping to make this possible.
Testing 1 2 3
JRuby on Roller
This is just a quick follow-up to my previous post on Pluggable renderers and scripting languages in Roller. It took me a while, but I finally made JRuby code work inside a Roller page template. Here's an example JRuby page template that displays most recent blog titles and text in HTML format.
Not the most beautiful thing in the world, I must admit. Any JRuby experts reading along? Is there a simple templating solution that will work in JRuby... something like Groovy Templates? And is there a way to map puts output to a java.io.Writer that will work via BSF?$out.println "<html><head>"
$out.println "<title>#{$model.weblog.name}</title>"
$out.println "</head><body>"
$out.println "<h1>#{$model.weblog.name}</h1>"
$model.weblogEntriesPager.entries.keySet().each {|day|
$model.weblogEntriesPager.entries.get(day).each {|entry|
$out.println "<h3>#{entry.title}</h3>"
$out.println "<p>#{entry.text}</p>"
}
}
$out.println "</body></html>"
Roller on SJS Web Server 7.0
Complete instructions for Running Roller Weblogger on Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 by Seema Alevoor and Marina Sum. Via The Aquarium.
Pluggable renderers and scripting languages in Roller
Status, CC: world
In case you're wondering what's going on lately with Roller, ROME and other projects I've been working on, here's a status update from my point-of-view.
Apache Roller graduation. The Roller team voted for graduation, the Apache Incubator PMC voted for incubation and the next step is to take the resolution to the Apache board meeting, which is coming up in the next week or so.
Roller 3.1 release. We've been moving slowly on this one. RC1 was released Nov. 20 and today RC4 just about ready to go. It's possible that 3.1 will be our first "official" Apache Roller release -- depending on what happens on the board meeting. Wonder what's coming in Roller 3.1? The What's New in Roller 3.1 page is now available on our new wiki at apache.org.
Roller 4.0 development. We started the Roller 4.0 branch a couple of weeks ago and I've been spending most of my time updating and trying to perfect Craig and Mitesh's new JPA back-end. Elias outlined a bunch of IBM contributions including an iBatis based back-end. We hope to get some of those in the 4.0 and do some JPA vs. iBatis testing, but we haven't seen any proposals or code yet.
Roller-Planet. Actually, Allen's taken over work on Roller-Planet and he's implementing many of the things I outlined in the Roller-Planet mind-map. He promoted Roller-Planet from the sandbox, built a nice Struts2 UI, added a Roller-style feed/page rendering system and Roller-style caching. Good stuff. We have not discussed when to start making standalone releases of Roller-Planet.
ROME Propono. I've been working on a new ROME subproject called Propono that will include a blog client library, an Atom protocol client library and an Atom protocol server kit. I've been quiet on the ROME dev list, but I've been working on the client bits an they're basically done. I'm waiting for final approval to commit them to ROME CVS.
Blogapps examples and server. I'm still working on a 1.0.5 release, which will include updated Atom protocol support and some bug fixes. I just haven't had the time to get a release out, but I have had some time to work on Blogapps 2.0 where I've ditched the chapter-based directory names and switched to org.blogapps packaging. Once ROME Propono is available, I'll include it in Blogapps 2.0 and drop my old Blog Client library.
Redmonk on Roller, Covalent and IBM
James Governor: Covalent gets its mojo back and refocuses on its core competence - supporting open source code, and doubles down on Apache projects, going back to its roots. The latest example of Covalent seeing an opportunity and nailing it is the companyâs announcement of support for the Roller blog platform. Thatâs now two companies, IBM and Covalent, making direct revenues from a platform originally built by a Sun employee, but for which Sun has no business model. Here is a hint Sun - perhaps its not software you need to sell but service and support. That is what Covalent is nailing.
I appreciate the support from James and the Redmonk crew. They always seem to be rootin' for Roller.
Of course I'd like to see better support for Roller all around, but at this point I can't say much beyond this: I'm focused on building a great blog platform and support is a very important part of any platform.
A couple of small corrections for James. I was not a Sun employee when I originally developed Roller. Second, IBM hasn't shipped Connections, so they're not any making "direct revenues" yet. Third, I don't know if Covalent has "nailed" anything -- I haven't heard from anybody who has tried the service and I'm still trying to figure out exactly what they offer.
Covalent announces support for Roller
Configuring Roller with OpenDS
More Lotus Connections screenshots w/Roller
Eco theme
Aaron Cohen is looking for feedback on a simple and clean new Roller theme known as Eco.
Update: Linda says Eco is not really a "Roller theme" as it relies on some .Sun Engineering ad-server components to serve up the rotating eco-fact. She's got some instructions for BSC users interested in the theme on her blog.
Akismet works
Since I upgraded this site to Roller 3.2-dev, with pluggable comment validators and Akismet support, not a single spam has gotten through the system. Over the weekend I saw 20-30 email messages like this:
This comment failed validation for these reasons:
* Akismet service (akismet.com) says comment is spam
* Trackback from site/page that does not link to your weblog entry
Brisa wrote: [Trackback] nothing here
That's music to my ears. Die spammers die!
Voting for Roller graduation
IBM Roller development update and iBatis vs. JPA
Elias posted some good news about some upcoming IBM contributions to Roller. We're discussing how best to get them into Roller now.
Note that we now have two possible replacements for our old Hibernate back-end. We've got a Java Persistence Architecture (JPA) based back-end developed by Sun's Craig Russell and Mitesh Meswani and IBM is getting ready to contribute an iBatis based back-end. How do we choose which one to use in Roller? Consensus seems to be that we'll have a bake-off. We'll compare the programming models, test performance and discuss the pros and cons -- and let the best framework win.
pixyblog.com
Pixyblog is a photoblogging site, powered by Roller. Looks slick.
Update: Raible blogged about Pixyblog too and some Sun-related news about his job search.
APP interop at E-Tech
So Dad wants a blog...
Over the weekend I convinced my Dad to start a blog and I offered to host it on my site with Roller (of course). We've already started to set the site up. Dad picked up a nice short domain name, I added it to the kattare.com name servers (Kattare is my ISP) and I added support for the new domains to my Apache/Tomcat setup there.
Now I have to to figure out how to host multiple domains with Roller. That's a topic that has come up before.
A while back LinPro Norway developed a multi-site capability for Roller. I called it multi-domain at the time, but now I think that was wrong. As I understand it, multi-site allows one Roller database to serve multiple Roller sites. Each site having it's own Server Admin settings and serving one or more domains. Mutli-site requires significant changes because the each table must have an additional field that indicate which site it belongs to. Unfortunately, the patches were too extensive for us to incorporate into Roller.
What I'm doing now is multi-domain, which appears to be much easier. I'm not sure multi-site and multi-domain are accepted terminology, so I'll explain. I want one Roller database to serve multiple domains, but with all domains sharing the same Server Admin settings. It's definitely going to require some code changes, but with the new 3.0 rendering system, I'm finding that those are pretty easy to do. In fact, I've already got some working code ready to deploy. Once I get it deployed and working, I'll write up a proposal and see if I can get simple multi-domain support into the Roller codebase.
Good news
Lots of good news and stuff to blog this past week including the Sun makes a profit story, the Sun-Intel deal and more. I really like reading news like this Amid Profit, Brighter Days for Sun and this Sun turns profit after five quarters in red.
And how could I fail to mention the announcement of Lotus Connections, the product formerly known as Ventura. Connections is IBM's new Web 2.0 social networking suite and it includes Roller. IBM's James Snell posted some background info about IBM's internal use of social networking tools and how that led to Lotus Connections. Elias Torres blogged about it too and included a screen-shot of the new Connections based BlogCentral (IBM's internal blogging site).
And in other news...
My ApacheCon EU talk on 'Roller and Blogs as a Web Development Platform' was accepted. Looks like I'll have a busy May, Amsterdam for ApacheCon and (hopefully) San Francisco for JavaOne all in the space of two weeks.
Wordpress is finally gonna get Atom format support and apparently Atom protocol support is going to happen too.
The ROME project is just about ready for ROME 1.0 and there's a new subproject in the works: ROME Propono. co-worker Ramesh Mandava and I are putting together a Blog Client library (based on code from Blogapps) and an Atom client/server library (based on code from Roller). Hopefully, we'll have it ready by the time that ROME 1.0 comes out.
« Previous page | Main | Next page »