Blogging Roller

Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine has taken my Generating JSON for your Roller blog post a few steps further down the road. He created a screen-cast to show how easy it is to use Netbeans 5.5 and the JMaki widget wrappers to serve up Roller data in a a Dojo table. Cool stuff. I really need to find the time to take JMaki for a spin.

And BTW, I'm still working on my Dojo table example, which will be similar to what Alexis has done but it will use Dojo directly within a Roller blog -- no IDEs or JSPs required.

In case you haven't heard the news or followed my Latest Links: at an analyst conference last week IBM announced a new server-side product suite called Ventura that includes blogging, social bookmarking and social networking. Ventura is Java EE-based, runs on Websphere (with DB2 or Oracle) and the blog server component is based on Apache Roller (incubating) 3.1. That's the very same version of Roller that we're currently running at blogs.sun.com.

So how do I feel about it? I'm thrilled to see IBM contributing to, building on and supporting the Roller project. No matter how you cut it, that's good news for Roller users including those at blogs.sun.com who are already benefiting from IBM's contributions (e.g. tagging support in 3.1). Of course to be honest, I'm also a little disappointed that Sun isn't shipping and supporting a Roller distribution -- that's always been one of my goals. Sun has put heck of a lot of engineering time into Roller, helped to grow the community in the Apache incubator and benefitted greatly via blogs.sun.com -- it sure would be nice to share those benefits with our customers by offering service and support.

Roller 3.0 is a major new release that focuses on infrastructural improvements necessary to better support a large community of bloggers. These improvements includes a completely new URL structure, a new template system, better support for multi-language weblogs and an easy-to-manage front-page weblog. (read more)

You can find the full announcement with download and documentation links is on the Roller project blog.

It's fairly easy to navigate to your old blog entries on a Roller system, but we don't provide an archive page like some blog servers do. Today on JRoller.com, Alex Ruiz explains how to add a nicely styled archives page to your blog using Roller's "big calendar" macro.

By default Roller 3.0 provides provides Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0 format feeds for each blog, but you can easily add other formats. In his latest blogs.sun.com post, Henry Story explains how to add an RSS 1.0 feed to your Roller blog using the new Roller 3.0 macros. 

We deployed the Roller 3.1 codebase to blogs.sun.com yesterday so Sun bloggers have got Web 2.0 taggy goodness now. The rest of the Roller-using world will have to wait for Roller 3.1 to make its way through the Apache Incubator release process. Want to know more about 3.1, here's the Roller 3.1 What's New page.

But be warned. If you stand outside the Apache software factory waiting for Roller 3.1 to emerge onto the loading dock, you'll be somewhat disappointed. The next release due out is Roller 3.0 (here's the Roller 3.0 What's New page) -- we just got the votes to make the release so you can expect it in the next couple of days.

We're just about ready to create a first release candidate for Roller 3.1 so I've installed it on this site. The major new user-facing features are tagging (thanks to Elias) and a new WYSIWYG editor (thanks to Xinha).

I'm still playing with tags and how to add them to my blog. Roller 3.1 won't copy your categories to tags, so I had to use some SQL to do that -- I don't want to start from scratch. For now, I put my tag cloud at the top of the page but it will probably end up on the sidebar.

I got to meet Will Glass-Husain today who, I was happy to learn, works on the Apache Velocity project. In case you don't know, Velocity is the template engine that Roller uses to generate blogs and feeds -- so it's near and dear to my heart, dispite it's many little deficiencies. I was a worried that Velocity was stagnating but Will told me the Velocity 1.5 is coming out soon with a load of good bug fixes and a promise of 100% backwards compatibility. We'll have to see about that. Velocity 1.5beta1 has been out for almost a month now.

ApacheCon kinda snuck up on me and now its suddenly time to pack. I'll be in Austin from Monday thorugh Sunday, attending the hackathon and the conference. This is my fourth ApacheCon so I know I'm gonna have fun, but I also hope to get some Roller 3.1 work on during the hackathon and try to knock off some of the minor issues that are still keeping the project from graduating from the Apache Incubator.

I'm speaking on Thursday at 3PM on the subject of Roller. The talk is similar to previous talks I've given on the topic, but it's been improved and updated to cover all of the cool stuff in Roller 3.0. Here's the abstract and an outline of the talk with a couple of bonus links.

Session title: TH18 - Apache Roller: an open source Java blog server
When/where: 3PM in Salon E

Roller is the open source Java blog server that drives the popular Sun's employee blogs at blogs.sun.com, IBM developerWorks blogs, JRoller.com and numerous other blog sites. Currently making its way through the Apache incubation process, Roller is built on a host of Apache technologies including Struts, Velocity, Lucene, Jakarta Commons, XMLRPC and more. This overview, a primer for Roller users and contributors, covers the Roller feature set, the all-new Roller 3.0 page models/macros, Roller 3.0 architecture, lessons learned, project status and future plans.

• Roller history
• The O'Reilly article (link)
  
• FreeRoller and JRoller and...
  
• Roller features
• Standard blog stuff
• Blogs per user, users per blog
• Blog client support
• What's new in 3.0
• New URL structure
• Front page is a blog
• New models and macros (see roller30-template-guide.pdf)
• Why choose Roller
• Roller limitations
  
• Roller community
• Developers, admins and bloggers
• Community challenges
• Release cycle
• How to add a feature
• How to make a release
• Why is Roller still incubating?
  
• Roller internals: backend
• Architectural overview
• POJOs: users, blogs and entries
• POJOs and XDoclet markup
  
• The manager interfaces
• Today Hibernate, someday JDO, JPA ...?
  
• Roller internals: frontend
• UI archtecture
• Struts actions and XDoclet markup
• Page and feed rendering
• Changes in Roller 3.0
• New template models and macros
  
• The pager interface
• $site and $planet models
• The new macros
• Customizing Roller
• Roller futures
• Tagging (Roller 3.1, coming soon)
• Modular Roller (and Modular Planet)
  
• Protected weblogs
  

I'll post the slides once I made the final changes.

Update: here they are ApacheConUS2006-TH18-RollerBlogServer.pdf

Dave Johnson: But, cool thing is, IBM has already implemented tagging in Roller. Previously, we were not able to merge IBM's work into the mainline of Roller development for a number of reasons, but now Roller committer Elias Torres (of IBM) is charging ahead with a new proposal to do just that. We could have tagging support in the *very* near future, thanks to Elias and IBM. Ain't open source grand?

And by the way, there are at least four Dave Johnsons at Sun. That one is me.

Finally! Roller 3.0 RC1. Here's the What's New page and here's the mailing-list announcement.

The 3.0 code based has already been in production at a couple of big sites for a couple of weeks now, so it's pretty solid -- but the installation and upgrade process may have some kinks. Plus there are some big Big BIG changes, so please use RC1 for testing only and let us know about the problems on the Roller mailing lists and our JIRA issue tracker.

Feed reading readers won't notice or necessarily care, but I've put a new set of templates in place here at Blogging Roller, giving the blog a whole new look and feel. The templates use the new Roller 3.0 model and macros, plus a modified static width and centered layout from Glish.com. I've also updated my archives, links and about pages.

We deployed Roller 3.0 to blogs.sun.com last week and over the weekend I deployed it on this site as well. There are still a couple of "issues" that need to be addressed before we package up Apache Roller 3.0-RC1 (incubating). If you click around the site, you may notice a couple of style and layout clitches -- I'm working on fixing those.

One of the new features of Roller 3.0 is a completely redesigned URL scheme. As a result of that my blog URL, feed URLs and permalinks have changed.

New bog URL:
   http://rollerweblogger.org/roller

New feed URLs:
   http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/feed/entries/atom

Old URLs are still suppored by they're redirected (HTTP 301) to the new scheme, so those of you who subscribe to Blogging Roller won't have to unsub and resub -- your feed readers should do that for you.

For more information on Roller 3.0:

• Roller project site - Current home of Roller
  
• What's New in Roller 3.0 - overview of new features
• Roller User Guide (PDF) - updated to cover new features
• Roller Template Guide (PDF) - complete reference to templates and macros
• Blogapps Server 1.0.2 - Easy to install demo server, now includes Roller 3.0

Somebody's running the Roller 3.0 codebase in production. I think this is the first time that blogs.sun.com updated before rollerweblogger.org did.


I'm working on putting together a release candidate (RC1) today, so we can get Apache Roller 3.0 (incubating) out the door. Want to know more about Roller 3.0? There's a What's New page, the User Guide (PDF) has been updated, there's a new Template Guide (PDF) and Installation Guide changes are in the works.

Forrester: As an open source solution, Roller has been deployed only in a few instances, but it has been used by thousands of bloggers on a single installation. It features an excellent ability to allow administrators to manage permissions across blogs, but individual blog management is cumbersome, and robust content management workflow tools are lacking. Roller is ideally suited for companies that want to deploy blogs in an enterprise where content management and oversight will be minimal.

Since I participated in the study, I was able to read the full report, both the Roller report ($795) and the market overview ($995). Roller didn't do so well in the comparison chart (see Charlene Li's post), but we're still ranked as a strong contender -- especially for companies interested in Sun-style trust-your-employees blogging. Overall, I think the report is fair and accurate. I definitely agree that parts of Roller's authoring/admin UI are cumbersome and in need of redesign, but Forrester isn't very specific about the areas that need improvement.

If you want to learn all about Apache Roller (incubating) project status, features, architecture and all the cool new features coming in Roller 3.0 then you'll want to make plans to attend ApacheCon US 2006 in Austin, TX. In other words: my Roller talk was accepted.

It's been a very busy week and I've scarcely had time to catch up on email and blog reading and other critically important activities. I spent almost the entire week deep in Roller 3.0 development. Here's a quick update on our work.

Things are looking really good in Roller 3.0 and I'm really happy with the refactoring work we've done in the blog/feed rendering system. Our charter for 3.0 was to completely rework Roller's URL structure and to introduce the concept of a site-wide frontpage blog, but doing that work required a lot of refactoring -- a lot of ripping out crufty old and patched-up code with clean and shiny new abstractions. The results look great.

Thanks to Allen's new URL work, the rendering system is now pluggable, the caching system is easier to understand and maintain, we're approaching a point where we'll be able to offer the option of static rendering and, of course, the URL structure is much nicer, more conventional, logical and able to handle multi-language blogs.

As part of the new frontpage blog work, we introduced some new page models an macros to make it easy to display site and planet-wide blog community information, including a user and blog directory. But we didn't stop there -- we've implemented a completely new set of models and macros for all blogs and we hope to deprecate all of the old macos and old themes. We'll still support them, of course, but moving forward we believe the new macros will make it much easier for bloggers and theme authors to build a library of great themes -- something that Roller is missing.

We've been working hard this week because we're really supposed to be done by now, but I've got no regrets. We set some aggressive goals and, like I said, the results look great. Now we need to quicky stabilize things, get a test build together and get some feedback from the community and especially from theme authors.

I made it to Dublin for ApacheCon EU but without my baggage thanks to weather-related delays. Missing luggage wouldn't have been much of a problem if I had dressed sensibly, but I chose to wear my traditional uniform of shorts and a t-shirt. Turns out, it's cold an rainy in Dublin. So now I'm dead-tired since I haven't slept in 24-hours, cold, wet and in search of a tooth brush and a comb so I can make myself presentable before my talk tomorrow morn. Hopefully the rest of the week and vacation next week will be better.

Also, as you can see in the sidebar of my, I've started to post some ApacheCon related photos to my Flickr account.

Tags: topic:[apacheconeu2006], topic:[apachecon]

Nick Bradbury: when I'm coding away like a madman, I don't blog (or do much of anything else!)

That's what happens to me too. For me it's this -- do I blog about the blog software I'm developing or do I continue to code? If I blog about those cool new Roller 3.0 features I'm working on, perhaps I won't finish them in time to get them into Roller 3.0. Fortunately for my blog, a mega-thunderstorm just rolled in and it's bad enough that I've shutdown my w2100z, unplugged my UPS and moved out to the porch to catchup on email and blogs.

So regarding Nick's topic of coding like a cowboy I'll say this: it's a lot more fun to just start coding and sometimes it works best to lay-down some code up-front, but if you want to work with others you need at least a little process. On Roller, we've got a pretty light process. We require that folks write proposals for features they want to add and each must include a brief requirements statement and an outline of the design. But the purpose of a proposal isn't to carve the design in stone, it's to provoke discussions, reviews and arguments about the best way to do the work. So you can code like a cowboy, but you'd better coordinate with the other cowboys so you don't run the herd off of a cliff. You know, like the lazy-consensus cowboys of days gone by.

If you want to see what those Roller-dev proposals look like, take a look at the three we're doing for Roller 3.0: New "Atlas" front-page, New URL structure and New Atlas Macros/Models. And if you want to learn more about Roller features, architecture, project status and future plans, then attend my talk next week at ApacheCon EU next week in Dublin.

The storm has passed by now. Back to work.

Crossposted from the Roller project blog

Apache Roller 2.3-incubating is now available via the Apache incubator. For more information about the release see What's New in Roller 2.3 on the Roller wiki. This is a new release, but the Roller 2.3 codebase has been in use for over a month at a number of production sites, including http://blogs.sun.com and this site. Here are direct links to the download files:

• Roller 2.3 Web application (key)
• Roller 2.3 Source code (key)

Note that we no longer use the wiki for the user and installation guides. Instead, we're using OpenOffice format and generating HTML and PDF versions of these two documents. Here are links to the latest docs for Roller 2.3.

• Roller 2.3 Installation Guide (HTML)
• Roller 2.3 Installation Guide (PDF)
• Roller 2.3 User Guide (HTML)
• Roller 2.3 User Guide (PDF)

Please report bugs and enhancement requests to Roller's JIRA-based issue tracker.

NOTE: Roller is in the Apache Incubator, but this release is not an official release of or endorsed by the Apache Software Foundation. Roller itself is licensed under the Apache license v2.0, but requires some components that have more restrictive licenses (i.e. Hibernate).