Blogging Roller

Amy Roh has put together complete instructions for deploying Roller to Glassfish. Note that the instructions require Roller 2.1 (soon to be released) and Glassfish build 38 (also soon to be released).

I've been playing with Glassfish and the Java Web Services Dev. Pack (JWSDP)  this week, hoping to learn what's new in WS-* land. But, of course, as soon as I saw the wonderful Glassfish admin UI, I just couldn't resist trying to get Roller up and running. I figured it would be easy.

In the past, we've had problems with Glassfish because it didn't include a JDBC security realm, but we recently switched Roller over to Acegi security so we don't need a security realm anymore. No joy -- right now Acegi doesn't work on Glassfish (and I'm using Glassfish b32, the very latest build).

Amy Roh is working a different angle. Glassfish now has an experimental JDBC security realm and she's trying to get Roller 2.0 (pre-Acegi) working with that. She's running in to problems too.

Roller's a pretty good app server smoke test, eh? I hope we can get both of these issues resolved before final Glassfish.

Update: the Glassfish/Acegi problem has been marked as fixed in Glassfish CVS. Maybe it'll be in build 38?

Valentines day was a bad choice, so the talk is cancelled and we hope to re-schedule for a later date.

The Microsoft Team RSS blog explains the three major ways an application can use the new IE7 RSS platform. Very interesting. I'm going to have to commandeer a Windows box for a couple of days and try this stuff out.

Thank goodness the book is almost done, 'cause I've got lots of cool new software to play with:

Netbeans 5.0 is finally out. Thank goodness for that. I was getting tired of the constant stream of betas, q-builds and RCs. Those Netbeans guys are relentless fanatics, so watch out Eclipse.

NeoOffice 1.2, the X11-free Open Office port for the Mac, is now available. It's got the ability to read Open Document Format files (but it can't save them yet?).

ROME 0.8, the Java newsfeed wrangler (as Tim Bray called it), is available with the ability to parse and produce Atom 1.0 format newsfeeds. And ROME bloggers, please send me your feed URLs so I can add you to Planet ROME.

Jeff Blattman, of the Sun Portal team, has submitted a patch for Roller Atom Admin Publishing Protocol, which is an Atom-like protocol for managing users and blogs. Need to evaluate that and figure out how to get it into Roller.

IBM's Phay Tac Lau and Elias Torres have contributing tagging support to Roller. Elias commited the code into a development branch and  I'm hoping we can land it into the trunk in time for the next release (2.2).

Roller 2.1 is still waiting in the wings. We've got a release candidate that looks good to me, but I'm not sure anybody else has checked it out.

Ted Husted: The OpenOffice suite provides an interesting opportunity for open source products. Since the suite is free, open source, and multiplatform, using this tool with our projects is little different than using Subversion or Ant.

Problem is, the format is not change-log friendly. By design, all changes made to a ASF product are logged to one of the mailing lists, where they become part of our "communal memory". When a change is made to an OpenOffice document and checked into the repository, it is logged as a change to a binary file. No one watching the project knows what changed unless they spend several minutes opening the document and reviewing the internal change log.

Albeit, Roller is deliberating whether to use the OpenOffice to maintain it's user documentation. The vote is pending now. Since OpenOffice can save to multiple formats, my suggestion is that we also checkin a companion HTML document, so that everyone can see what changes in real time. We'd contnue to edit the ODF file, and just Save As to HTML before checking in both files. Film at 11.

Yes that's right: Ted Husted (of Struts fame) is blogging!

Plus, Ted has been participating on the Roller dev list and most recently raising some issues with the use of OpenOffice.org for our user and install guides. As you can see, Ted's biggest concern is that, when docs are in a binary format it is hard to monitor doc changes by watching the diffs in SVN commit notifications. Does your open source project use OpenOffice.org and if so, how did you deal with this issue?

Rich Sharples has written up some of his thoughts about group blogging and Roller's relatively new group blogging features -- including some good RFE ideas.

We're getting ready to release Roller 2.1 (incubating). This release turned out to be a pretty big one. We focused on performance, comment management and spam prevention, but we also added a host of other small changes, fixes and improvements. Here's a summary of the most significant changes: What's new in Roller 2.1.

John Clingan: More group blogs are popping up on blogs.sun.com.

We're using Mark James' wonderful Silk icons in Roller now. You can get all 700 of them at Mark's site FamFamFam.com and he's got pretty much everything covered whether you're developing an IDE, an ecommerce site or a blog server. The price is $0.00 and the license is Creative Commons (Attribution).  Here's a small sample:



We were using the old Java Look and Feel Repository icons in Roller. You know, they're really in need of an update. Maybe the icons from Open Office and the various Netbeans incarnations could be bundled into a nice Java icon pack.

Here's an update on recent Roller developments and mailing list activity.

Roller 2.1 was planned for late December 2005. We had it ready to go and deployed it to some production sites but there were a couple of loose ends that prevented an "Apache Roller" release and then the holidays hit. We decided to postpone 2.1 until the end of January and add in the features we had planned for 2.2. The Roller 2.1 release proposal summarizes the new features planned. Pardon the mess, it's still under development.

Roller 2.0.1 is ready for release. It is intended for PostgreSQL users who are upgrading from Roller 1.X and if you're not a PostgreSQL user you can safely ignore it.

In other news...

Elias has updated the Weblog Tags proposal, originally written by Allen, and claims to have a significant chunk of IBM code ready to contribute. Tags may be in sooner rather than later, so we'll have to figure out how to manage that in SVN. Dave Levy has also joined the tags conversation.

I've been corresponding off-list with Craig Russell, who is implementing a JDO backend for Roller. After some questions about getting Netbeans setup to debug the unit tests and about the Roller manager interfaces, he's off and running.

A new contributor on the Roller-dev list, Sean Gilligan, contributed a proposal and a patch for Really Simple Discovery (RSD) and Allen helped get it into the Roller 2.1 codebase.

Migs Paraz, whose Roller-based geo-aggregator I mentioned before, is continung it contribute to the Roller-dev list and is working on enhancing Roller's planet-style aggregator so that new planet groups can be defined for the front page via the UI.

Thats all for now.

Allen's written a short post about the cache changes in Roller 2.1 (which is  almost ready for release) and the caching challenges ahead.

Here's a couple of items of interest to Roller watchers.

Longtime Roller user and contributor Matt Schmidt, director of technology at Javalobby and the guy who keeps JRoller.com humming along, has ageed to join the Roller project. Matt's been helping out with Roller for a long time, some this is mostly a formality -- but working more closely with the project should help Matt keep JRoller.com up to date with Roller releases (and hopefully help us snag some of his enhancements).

Thanks to Patricio Martínez Ros, who has contributed a complete Spanish (es_ES) for Roller 2.1. Our translations have fallen behind a bit and we need all the help we can get. If you'd like to help out, let us know (on the roller-dev mailing list). There are some docs to get you started in Anil's Localization Guide and we can help you get the files you need (or a snapshot build).

Anil Gangolli has put together a very nice Localization Guide for Roller.

On Tuesday, I also talked to (JDO spec lead) Craig Russell, who's interested in helping to create a JDO backend (using JPOX) for Roller to replace Hibernate. Later, I talked to (Struts in Action author) Ted Husted, who's interested in doing the same thing with iBatis. And even later, at dinner, Ted Leung suggested the idea of a Roller persistence bake-off. We'd challenge the JDO, iBatis and even EJB3 proponents to create competing implementations of the Roller backend and then we'd choose the best one based on performance, generated SQL, developer ease-of-use and whatever other factors. The prize? An iPod? No, the prize would be the honor of being the official persistence framework of Roller

Here's an update on my ApacheCon 2005 experience.This morning was day one of the conference proper. The opening keynote "Open source is not illegal -- yet" by Cory Doctorow was quite entertaining and at the same time quite scary. Cory explained how the governments of the world, including the US, are enacting draconian entertainment industry sponsored laws to mandate Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) in all essentially all hardware and software products. He also explained how the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is working to help governments understand that DRM doesn't work, is anti-competitive and completely incompatible with open source software. I walked out of the talk, walked downstairs to the EFF table and made a donation. If you care about your digital rights and open source software (and bloggers rights) I urge you to do the same. Support the EFF.

Here's Cory delivering his keynote:


Here's the Inside Apache panel, which followed Cory's talk, led by ASF chairman Greg Stein:


After the opening session, I went to Simon Phipps' talk on The Zen of Free: Deriving a General Model For Open Source, which was excellent as I expected, and Jim Driscol's talk on Open Source for Business and Profit. Jim's case studies on Ant, Tomcat and WatchDog were my favorite part of the talk.

After lunch it was time for my session. I felt inadequate after a morning of listening to the pros and in the end I wasn't all that happy with my performance. I think the content and my slides were good, but that was the only goodness. Due to my cold (and sudafed), my mouth was dry. I was worried about running over like I did at JavaOne, so I think I rushed a bit and I finished 20 minutes early! I'm not sure what the audience thought, so if you attended I'd love to hear your impression of the talk. Pleaese be honest, I can take it.

I've posted my slides here on my site. The talk is an overview of Roller including features/benefits, limitations and architecture. It's intended as a primer for new users and developers:

    Roller: An Open Source Blogging Platform (Open Office format | PDF format)

That's all for now.

Congrats to Matt Schmidt, Rick Ross and the JRoller.com community, which now numbers 10,000 users -- "the largest Java server on the net." Hopefully, they'll be moving to Roller 2.X soon so they can benefit from group blogging and the comment management features coming in 2.1.

Linda Skrocki: Another cool thing about the [Network Computing launch] event in NYC is the Blogs Engineering team was asked to participate. So, if you're there, stop by the OpenSource pods. Allen, blogs.sun.com/Roller Engineer, will be there (probably in a suit...someone please snap a picture) to answer your blogs/Roller questions and will demo some of the new Roller stuff recently released.

I've been listening to the Java Posse podcast from the get-go and, assuming you're a Java head, it's a great show. So, I was just as pleased as punch to hear them mention the Roller 2.0 release on the Friday show and say some nice words about blogs.sun.com. Thanks guys.

That's the title of Cory Doctorow's opening keynote at ApacheCon 2005, which is now one week away. I'm starting to get excited. Last year was my first ApacheCon and it was probably the most enjoyable conference I've ever attended. Here are the sessions I'm most interested in this year:

• MO07: Portals@Apache: Standards and the Portals Projects
• MO08: Open Source for Business and Profit
• MO18: State of the Web Services Union
• MO19: Apache MyFaces - Open Source JavaServer Faces
• MO20: Your Open Source Strategy Sucks!
• MO21: Power Regular Expressions
• MO23: AJAX in Apache MyFaces
• MO24: Business Tips for the Open Source Consultant
• TU16: Java-XML Binding Approaches at Apache
• TU20: Struts 2006: An Embarrassment of Riches
• TU24: Shale: The Next Struts?
• WE14: Ruby for Java Developers
• WE18: Cheap, Fast, and Good: You can have it all with Ruby on Rails
• WE19: Achieving High Scalability in JBI with Apache JavaFlow

This year, I'm giving a talk. I'm speaking on day one, Monday Dec. 12 at 2PM. Here's the abstract:

Roller is the open source Java blog server that drives the popular blogs.sun.com, 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.

I'll be at the Sun booth in the 4PM break after my talk, so stop by and say hi.

Tags: topic:{technorati}[ApacheCon], topic:{technorati}[ApacheCon2005]