Blogging Roller

I have not been able to spend a lot of time on Roller development recently, but I have gotten a couple of things done. I took a look at at alternative webapp and persistance frameworks and decided to stick with Struts and Castor for the time being.

Also, I implemented a simple backup mechanism for Roller. I started working with Axis (the next generation of Apache SOAP) and I was hoping to create a SOAP-based blog-backup interface for Roller. But I ended up just writing a Servlet that blasts out the current user's data in Roller's own (Castor-generated) XML format - no SOAP needed for that.

Right now, I'm working on bookmark import. I've got a start-page of favorite links and I want to import them into Roller. To do this, I wrote a little command-line program that parses an HTML page and then writes all links from that page to an OPML file (maybe I should have used XBEL, but OPML was easier). Now I need to get that data into Roller, perhaps by file-upload perhaps by SOAP.

Once I complete bookmark import, I'll probably polish-up Roller's bookmark management and display features and put out a 0.9.5 release. Perhaps I should throw in Radio import as well.

In this Java World article Tal Liron describes how to use VNC technology to create remote-terminals for your Java Swing, AWT, or command line app.

That Microsoft actually entrusted remote control technology to us idiots at home (Remember, Microsoft has to give us user support too!) represented a triumph for a 20-year-old model. With any computer acting both as host and terminal, all you need is an Internet connection to access any computer anywhere in the world.

How could I have missed it. Download it here.