Blogging Roller

Seema explains how to get the latest Roller code running on Sun Java System Web Server 7.0 Preview 1. And Seema's right, Roller 2.3 (incubating) should be out real soon now. RC4 is looking good and I think it might be the gold.

The first version of the Atom protocol isn't going to include administrative features, such as user management and weblog creation, but Jeff Blattman needed those features now. Jeff needed to be able to create users, weblogs and manage group blog membership remotely, so he created Roller Admin Protocol (or AAPP). He patterned his work after the Atom protocol so that, perhaps someday, it can be useful to the IETF Atom Working Group.

Jeff's did great work on the AAPP. He proposed it to the Roller dev list, designed the whole thing on the wiki and contributed all of the code and tests to the Roller project. He also wrote a complete set of AAPP docs for the Roller Developer Guide, created an AAPP SDK and finished some of my work for me by adding docs for Roller's Atom protocol implementation. Thanks Jeff!

Like Roller's Atom protocol implementation, AAPP is still considered an experimental feature  and is not for production use, likely to change, etc., but it is included the upcoming Roller 2.3 release (both Atom and AAPP will be disabled by default). Take a look and let us know how well Roller Admin Protocol will meet your blog server admin needs (direct feedback to the roller-dev mailing list).

We're testing release candidates of Roller 2.3, so expect a release in next week or two. This release is a big one because we skipped 2.2, so we've got twice the normal monthly dose of features. Plus, we're shooting for full Apache license compliance. Read on for more [Read More]

We finally switched over to using the org.apache.roller package name in the Roller codebase. In related news: Apache license headers have been added to all source files and our release files have been cleansed of LGPL dependencies. Perhaps we'll graduate after all.

Looks like WolfBlogs is live and my alma mater N.C. State University is blogging with Roller. I don't know the specifics of the setup, but I believe they are running on a cluster of Solaris/SPARC servers and using a pretty standard Roller configuration (i.e. Tomcat and MySQL).

Sean Montgomery discovers that JRoller.com doesn't fully support Unicode, but lots of other Roller-based sites do. I suspect that converting the old JRoller.com database over to UTF-8 is a non-trivial problem. Any MySQL folks want to lend the Javalobby a hand?

I'm happy to announce that my Roller talk was accepted for ApacheCon EU (June 2006). I'm slated for 10:30AM on day one (here's the full schedule). I'm giving basically the same talk as I gave at ApacheCon US, but I'll have to make some significant updates because Allen's been busy refactoring the Roller backend and the proposed Roller roadmap has changed pretty drastically since then (more about that  later). Here's the abstract:

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, XML-RPC and more. This overview, a primer for Roller users and contributors, covers the Roller feature set, architecture, lessons learned, project status and future plans.

Andi is already looking into travel arrangements. I think the stars might be aligned just right for a vacation in Ireland. The week after the conference is the Sun summer shutdown and the in-laws have bravely volunteered to watch the boys.

There's a new layout on the Roller project blog, which uses Roller built-in Planet aggregator to display blogs from Roller committers, wiki changes, and recent issues.

Roller doesn't yet provide a blog export facility, but you can do just about anything with Roller templates if you know what you're doing. For example, Debashish Chakrabarty explains how to use Roller templates to generate the RSS required to move a blog from Roller to Wordpress. He was able to get all of his blog entries and all comments out of JRoller.com this way, he imported his entries to his new Wordpress blog, but he couldn't find a way to import the comments.

Seema Alevoor explains in great detail how to install Roller on the Sun Java Web Server.

Tom Stroobants figured out how to get Roller working on OC4J -- something I'd done once before, but I wasn't able to offer much help because that was almost four years ago and painful memories fade fast.

We're on the third release candidate now, so expect Apache Roller 2.2 (incubating) real soon now. There's a What's New doc on the Roller wiki in case you're wondering what's coming up.

Trygve Lie on the roller-dev list: We have spent a lot of time evaluating (almost one year now) different blog software and we also have one installation of your largest competitors running (Drupal, which we are not happy with) as an pilot and we have found Roller to be way ahead of all other blog solutions out there when it comes to technical architecture. But, no blog solution has this multi domain support. I think such a support would be a benefit for a whole new set of Roller users (and possible contributors).

I totally agree. Unfortunately, getting big changes into an open source project is difficult when you have no committers on the project (and the current committers have other pressing priorities), but I think Trygve and the team from LinPro AS are taking the right approach. I want to encourage them to work with the Roller community to make this work. Even if this specific multi-domain implementation doesn't end up in the Roller core, we'll all benefit from this discussion.

Your Roller bookmarks are available in OPML format. That means you can graze them at Grazr.com. Your URLs look like this:
    http://<hostname>/roller/flavor/<username>?flavor=opml&path=<path>

So, for example, you can see all of my bookmarks here:
    http://rollerweblogger.org/flavor/roller?flavor=opml
    (or view them in grazr.com)

And my blogroll is here:
    http://rollerweblogger.org/flavor/roller?flavor=opml&path=/Blogroll
    (or view it in grazr.com)

Tags: topic:[opml], topic:[blogging]

Yum, very tasty. What's for dessert?

I fully agree with James, BTW.

Bill Higgins makes the first post. Very cool!

Daryl Taft of eWeek interviewed me a couple of weeks ago and the resulting article Sun's Open-Source Roller Keeps Blogs Rolling was published today. The article covers Roller history, Apache Roller status, RSS and Atom in Action, the Blogapps project of RSS and Atom utilities and even mentions my year and a half honeymoon in Jamaica as a GRASS consultant. I'm very happy to get some more publicity for Roller and for the book, which will be officiallly complete tomorrow, available in e-book form next week and hopefully printed later this month.

Roller 2.1 is available (announcement). The major new features are comment management, comment moderation, trackback verification (optional), security improvements, performance improvements, an all-new pluggable cache system and Atom 1.0 support in the integrated planet aggregator. New features are summarized in What's New doc.

Jeff Genender explains how to get Roller running on Apache Geronimo. He mentions that Roller binaries are built with JDK5; a mistake (I believe) that affects only Roller 2.0.1. I'm going to respin that build as soon as I get a free minute.

I'm heading down to the D.H. Hill Library at North Carolina State University (go Wolfpack, my alma mater by the way) today help the folks there get started with Roller.

State chose Roller for campus-wide student blogs (> 30,000 students!) and the first order of business is to figure out how to hook Roller into State's WRAP authentication single sign-on system. The answer may be to develop a WRAP plugin for Acegi (the framework Roller uses for authentication), but I hope to also understand how OpenSSO technologies might fit into the picture.