Blogging Roller

As I promised at the start of the week, I've put together an easy to install "early access" build of Roller 2.0. The build is a standalone bundle that includes pre-configured Tomcat app server, HSQL-DB database and Roller packages. You should be able to get up and running by simply unzipping the package and running the startup script.

You can get the build here: roller20ea-demo.tar.gz

The purpose of this release is 1) to get feedback on the new Roller UI and group blogging features and 2) to allow folks to help out with testing. If you have feedback on the UI and new features, subscribe to the Roller user/dev list and discuss them with the Roller team. If you encounter bugs, please report them to Roller's JIRA issue tracker.

Here is the README that is included in the build:

ROLLER 2.0 EA DEMO RELEASE

This is a totally unofficial demo and test release of the Roller blog server 
software. Roller is currently in the incubator at Apache, but this release is
not sanctioned, approved or supported by Apache Software Foundation in any way.

If you have problems with this release, please contact Dave Johnson at 
(davidm.johnson at sun.com) and/or report bugs to Roller's JIRA issue tracking 
database at the following URL:

   [http://opensource2.atlassian.com/projects/roller]


INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

1. Download roller20ea-demo.tar.gz from Java.Net

2. Unzip the file into a directory on your hard-drive 
   (directory name should have no spaces)

3. Ensure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to point to your JDK

4. Ensure that CATALINA_HOME and CATALINA_HOME are NOT set in your environment

5. To start Roller, either:
- on Windows: open the Roller bin directory and double-click on startup.bat 
- on UNIX: cd to the Roller bin directory, chmod +x on all files, run ./startup.sh

6. Point your browser at http://localhost:8080/roller

7. Login as admin/admin, otto/otto or register as a new user

8. Get rollin'

BTW, I built the demo on my Solaris 10 box and tested it on Mac OS X 10.3.9 and Windows XP SP2.

I've been crazy busy on Roller 2.0 and unread emails and blog entries are piling up. Sorry if I haven't responded to you. I'm going to catch up tomorrow morning.

If you're waiting on Roller 2.0, here's the deal. The roller_2.0 branch is rapidly approaching stability, but there are still some rough spots and stack-traces lurking around the edges. Feature work is nearly complete and should wrap-up this week. I've been promising a snapshot build for the past month or so, but this time I mean it -- I will release a standalone demo/test build by the end of this week.

If you're wondering about RSS and Atom In Action, so am I. Writing is basically complete, except for chapter 8, which covers the Atom Protocol. The protocol list seems to be making progress, but it's going slow and it's looking like the next draft is going to be significantly different than the last.

That's all for now. Night all...

My Roller talk has been accepted for ApacheCon 2005, Dec. 10-14, 2005 in San Diego, CA. I'm planning to cover Roller features and architecture as a primer for new users and developers.

To integrate group blogging into Roller, we had to make some fairly big changes to the Roller UI. We're hoping to deploy Roller 2.0 next month, so it's time to start getting some feedback on the new look (and testing). Unfortuately, I still don't have the promised standalone demo ready, but I do have some preliminary screenshots. So, without further ado...

First up, the front page. Not much change here, but you are introduced to the new layout and color-scheme used in the new UI. Unlike Roller 1.X, there are no tabs on this page, but we still need to add some sort of tabs here for when the Planet Roller aggregator is enabled -- perhaps one tab (and newsfeed) per aggregation group that is defined?

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/ss-roller2-1-front-sm.png" title="Roller 2.0 screenshot" alt="screenshot" border="0" />

Next up, the main page. If your user account has just one blog, then you'll go straight to the Roller weblog edit page when you login (just as you did in 1.X). If you don't have a blog yet or you have more than one then you'll land on the main page, shown below. This page allows you to manage your weblogs, create weblogs and accept/decline invitations to join weblogs. We've broken the Roller UI up into three portions: 1) the main menu page, 2) weblog edit/admin pages and 3) server admin pages. From the main page, you can drill right into any of your weblogs by clicking New Entry, Edit Entries or Manage to get to the weblog edit/admin pages. You can enter the server admin pages by clicking the Server Adminstration link.

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/ss-roller2-2-main-sm.png" title="Roller 2.0 screenshot" alt="screenshot" border="0" />

The Create new weblog page, available from the Main Menu, is shown below. Note the new format and the help text for each field. We've added this type of help on many of the forms in the Roller UI.

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/ss-roller2-3-createweblog-sm.png" title="Roller 2.0 screenshot" alt="screenshot" border="0" />

From the Main Menu, you can access the New Entry page, shown below, for any of your weblogs. This hasn't changed much from Roller 1.X, but do note the new Pending Entries box. New weblog entries from LIMITED users will show up here. LIMITED users are not allowed to post, instead they submit posts for review by AUTHOR or ADMIN users. If there were any posts up for review in the weblog, they'd be listed in the Pending Entries box

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/ss-roller2-4-edit-sm.png" title="Roller 2.0 screenshot" alt="screenshot" border="0" />

Finally, we have the Member Permissions page, which a weblog ADMIN user can use to manage the users in a weblog. You can change permissions, revoke permissions or invite new members to join up.

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/ss-roller2-5-members-sm.png" title="Roller 2.0 screenshot" alt="screenshot" border="0" />

That's all I have time for right now. I still hope to have a really easy to install standalone demo ready in the next couple of days so you can try this stuff for yourself.

On the Roller dev list, Allen Gilliland recent asked Roller site administrators to share some stats. He asked for:

how many blogs does it have?
what is your performance like?
what are your cache size settings?
how good is your caching efficiency on average?
any numbers on how much activity the site gets? hits/visits? load?
server info?  processors?  ram?  OS?  webserver?  database?
how is stability?  does the server require restarts often?

Here are a couple of interesting stats. As far as we know, the biggest Roller sites are jroller.com with around 9,000 blogs, blogs.sun.com with about 1,600 and IBM internal blogs with about 1,200 blogs and 12,000 registered users (they require registration for comments).

Care to share your site info? You can join the dev list, leave a comment here or just blog it.

Last week I demoed Roller 2.0 to the blogs.sun.com team. The concensus seemed to be that the group blogging UI is too "documentation light" -- meaning that we don't explain well enough the implication of creating additional blogs and of adding additional users to existing blogs. Another important point that came up is that group blogging should be optional, because some sites might want to opt-out a keep Roller running as is: one user per blog and one blog per user.

So I spent most of the rest of the week improving the UI, adding better titles and prompts and in-line documentation. I also made the group blogging features completely optional via startup property groupblogging.enabled. After that, I started working on "landing" Roller 2.0 -- that is, merging all of the 1.X changes that have been happening in the trunk up and into the Roller 2.0 development branch. I'm almost done with that and hope to commit my changes today.

For the demo last week, we used VNC. I was't aware that VNC allowed multiple users to sign-into the same session, had a built-in web server and Java applet viewer, and had a read-only mode for giving presentations over the web. It worked *really* well. Who needs costly WebEx or LiveMeeting when free VNC can do all this? We did have some initial problems getting all of the meeting attendees signed in to VNC, but in the end it worked and I seem to remember similar problems with both of the costly options.

So... this week, my goals are to polish up Roller 2.0, fix as many bugs as possible in both the Roller 1.X and Roller 2.0 branches and get more feedback by creating a standalone demo of Roller 2.0 or a screencast or both.

My status report was easy this week because I only worked on one thing. I spent all of last week working on Roller 2.0/Group Blogging and hope to be feature complete by (internal) demo time, i.e. tomorrow. I'll put together a standalone demo too, so you can check it out.

Linda's written up a summary of her smaller-is-better web application release philosophy and Roller fans take note, one of the projects she manages is blogs.sun.com. That's right folks, we're rolling out new blogs.sun.com releases on a monthly basis. Coming from a software product background, monthly releases seemed crazy to me, but Linda (and Will) have beaten me in to submission.

So, monthly releases are good for blogs.sun.com, which is a website, but do they make sense for Roller, which is a product? Sun can't force Roller to make monthly releases, since it's an external and independent project, but should the Roller team try to align with the blogs.sun.com release schedule? Is a monthly release too much for an open source web application like Roller? What if Sun was shipping a jazzed-up version of Roller, would Sun want to ship that once a month?

I'm thinking monthly releases a too much for a product like Roller, but I could be convinced otherwise. What do you think?

We've got enough rough UI in place now to support basic group blogging in Roller. It's now possible for a single user to create, manage, invite others to join up, and blog in multiple weblogs. There's plenty more to be done, but we're still planning on completing all UI work by Friday. After that comes database migration, testing, testing and more testing.

For more information on Roller's new group blogging features, check the group blogging proposal page on the Roller wiki.

The guys at JavaCertificate.com, on the other hand are digging Roller, because it's "easily extensible and low in maintenance." They got the name wrong though. It's Roller not JRoller.

<a href= "http://www.j2eegeek.com/blog/2005/07/20/sad-state-of-affair-in-java-net-blog-server-software/">Vinny thinks Roller sucks because it doesn't support Weblogic and Oracle. I posted this response in the comments of his blog:

Roller is not a commercial product with a revenue stream, so it’s difficult to justify the added expense of supporting lots of application servers and databases.

As you said, Roller uses Hibernate and should therefore work with any JDBC capable database, but somebody has to write the installation guides and answer the tech support database questions for each platform — if you’d like to volunteer to do that for Weblogic/Oracle, we’d love it!

And, if you do get Roller working on Weblogic and Oracle please submut patches to the dev-list so that others don’t have to suffer through the porting process too.

Last week

• Roller 2.0 progress! I focused on Roller 2.0 group blogging work last week (to the exclusion of pretty much everything else) and made very good progress. After making the giant number of changes required to create a many-to-many relationship between users and websites, I put everything back together again; first the unit tests, then the Roller UI. I'm well into the group blogging UI development now and will have something to show next week.
• Roller@Apache progress. We submitted Roller's first quarterly status report to the Apache incubator last week. You can read the whole report, but in a nutshell: Roller is in Apache's Subversion repository now, we're using the Apache mailing lists and we're trying to figure out how to deal with the contentious issue of Roller's LGPL dependencies.

This week

• Roller 2.0 work. I'm going to focus on Roller 2.0 again this week and not much else.
• RSS and Atom in Action. We're still putting the book through producution and preparing for Manning's early access program. At the same time, I'm updating the newsfeed format, parsing and serving chapters to cover Atom Format 1.0. Unfortunately, we can't complete chapter 8 until the Atom Protocol 1.0 is complete.
• Vacation. I'm leaving Wednesday afternoon for a trip the the NC mountains, probably my last vacation of the summer.

I just updated Roller's Atom support to Atom 1.0 and added the updated template (atom.vm) to this site.

<img border="0" alt="Valid Atom 1.0" src="http://www.rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/_valid-atom.png" /> This is a valid Atom 1.0 feed.

I finally found the bandwidth (and the time) to upload the Roller 1.2 release. The full Roller 1.2 announcement is on the Roller project blog.

Last week: wrapped up documentation and final fixes Roller 1.2 release. I'm doing the build now. Also, I was able to devote several full days of work to Roller 2.0/Group Blogging and made some real progress.

This week: JavaOne! My talk is Thursday at noon (Blogging: Feed Syndication and Publishing With Java™ Technology <a href= "https://www28.cplan.com/javaone05_93_1/session_details.jsp?isid=270318&ilocation_id=93-1&ilanguage=english">TS-7318).

It's that time again.

• Roller 1.2: I spent most of last week working on Roller 1.2. Part of that work was for the OpenSolaris launch. We used Roller 1.2's built-in "planet" aggregator to create the OpenSolaris blog, aggregating together about 150 blogs into one big blog with it's own newsfeed. I had to write a little custom code to load the list of blogs, because the aggregator's UI doesn't have a bulk-load capability yet. Later in the week I spent a couple of days on <a href= "http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10000&styleName=Html&version=10151"> fixing bugs, Javadocs and Velocidocs.

• Roller 1.3: We've started to talk a bit about a Roller 1.3 release to incorporate some theme management changes. We need to make it easier to manage themes and apply changes globally to all user's themes, but still allow power-users to tweak their page templates. Allen has put together a rough proposal for better theme management.

• Roller 2.0: I spent a couple of days on Roller 2.0 last week, still working on the data model and the new many-to-many relationship between weblogs and users. The OpenSolaris and Roller 1.2 contininued to put me further behind schedule, but I'm still shooting for group blogging done in August.

• Roller@Apache: Starting today, we're using the Apache incubator mailing lists for the Roller-dev and Roller-user lists, but I still haven't updated the wiki with subscribe and unsubscribe info.

• RSS and Atom in Action: Since the chapters are out of my hands, at this point all I can do is watch the Atom Protocol list. Chapter one may be coming back from copy-edit today.

That's it for now. Again, I hope to spend the remainder of the week on Roller 2.0 'cause who knows how much I'll be able to get done duing JavaOne week. And, the week after that is summer vacation.

I spent some time with VelociDoc yesterday and updated the Roller Velocity Macro Reference.

I also updated the Roller Javadocs and added some diagams from my Roller presentation.

It's status time again. Quick summary: last week I spent most of my time on Roller 1.2 related issues and the Apache move. This week, I'll get back to the Roller 2.0/group blogging work.

On the Roller 1.2 front, I made some small enhancements to the Planet Roller aggregator and did some work to make the blogs.sun.com front pages a little easier to maintain. I also did a number of deployments last week to our internal blog server for testing.

Unfortunately, changing the front-pages in a Roller site is not quite as easy as changing a blog's theme. The front-pages are JSP, so you can't edit them through the Roller UI and folks who don't know Java and JSP have a hard time making changes. A number of people have suggested the idea of having a blog serve as the front pages of Roller and I think that's a great idea.

Now let's turn to Apache. Our Subversion repository space is ready at the Apache Incubator, but we're not. Since the Roller 1.2 release is coming up soon, last week we decided to keep main-line Roller development in CVS. Once the release is ready, we'll move to Subversion and branch 1.2 from there. Also: our new mailing lists are ready at Apache, but we haven't made the move yet.

Roller 2.0 work got short shrift last week, due to Roller 1.2 and related issues. Since Roller 2.0 lives in its own branch and Apache won't allow us to bring branches and history along with us (for a number of reasons, some legal), I had to do some extra work to recreate the Roller 2.0 branch in Subversion. I managed to complete that work and resume work on group blogging. I'm hoping that I can spend the rest of this week on group blogging.

That's all folks. I'm going to cover RSS and Atom in Action status in a separate post.

UPDATE: I completely forgot that we released Roller 1.1.2 last week, a minor bug fix release.

• Roller 1.1.2: still haven't released this minor bug-fix release, maybe later today.

• Roller 1.2: not a whole lot of progress 1.2 last week, but I did take three full days (1 holiday and 2 vacation days) to work on RSS and Atom in Action and as part of that, I implemented Atom Protocol Draft 04 in Roller's CVS head. The code will be part of 1.2, but will not be enabled.

• Roller 2.0: made some more progress in Roller 2.0 data model work last week, but not much.

• Roller@Apache: All accounts appear to be in place. Perhaps we'll make the move to Apache's Subversion repo this week?

• RSS and Atom in Action: Those two vacation days I took were part of a final push to finish the book. Although I was able to write a useful blog entry on Atom Protocol, I found that it is not yet stable enough to allow me to complete Chapter 8 Publishing with Atom. So, the plan is now to push all the rest of the chapters through production and wrap Chapter 8 just before going to print.

This site is now running Roller 1.2-dev (the latest from Roller's CVS HEAD), which includes Allen's cool new configuration system, Anil's new configurable ping feature and Anil's new topic tags plugin which makes it easy to add Technorati tags to any post, for example:

Tags: topic:{technorati}[RollerWeblogger]

Update: I'm not sure why Technorati is not picking up my tag. The tag looks to be properly formatted and I have "pinged" Technorati several times now (included a couple of manual pings).