Blogging Roller

I returned to work today after two wonderful weeks of paternity leave. I still have one week of leave remaining, but I have a bug list a mile long, a deadline looming, and a product that is screaming for release after 18 months of development. I need to get back to work. Things might get a little slow around here for a couple of days.

If you've been following Blogging Roller for long, you know what a terrible time I had with CQHost, my previous Servlet ISP.  CQHost was cheap at $12.50 per month, but the technical support was terrible, the server manager software was broken, and the Servlet engine spent more time down than up.  After a week or so of constant server crashes and daily trouble-tickets, CQHost actually blamed my Roller software for the crashes and I knew it was time to leave.

I had been following a thread on Servet ISPs at the Java Lobby, so I already had a short-list of ISP alternatives.  Luckily, Kattare was on that list.  After reading the rave reviews of Kattare in the Servlets.COM ISP list, I signed up for Kattare's Level 3.1 plan for $29 per month.  The plan includes 100mb storage, 4 mailboxes, private Tomcat JVM, MySQL, FTP/SCP, Telnet/SSH, and lots more.

Kattare had me up and running in hours and they answered my every question with a thoughtful and informative reply.   Their systems are fast, well configured, and stable.  Roller has been running at Kattare for a week now and I have have not experienced one server crash, outage, or other inconvenience.   So, if you are looking for a place to host your Roller-based weblog (or any other webapp) look no farther than Kättare Internet Services.

No new features, only bug fixes:

• #576004: Blogger API posts do not flush cache
• #576719: Calendar in Weblog:Edit page not working
• #576902: Error in web.xml, rollerdb datasource was omited
• #576157: RSS feed items are not ordered properly
• #576731: Database jars should go in common/lib

Download it at the SourceForge download page.

Surfing around tonight I found that the #8 link on blogdex was a list of weblogs presented by the Guardian. After noticing with delight that Be Blogging was one of the half-dozen tech blogs on the list, I followed the link to Corante: The Bottom Line and found this little gem:

It is probably true that the corporate scandals would not have happened had the graphical user interface not been invented, limiting the use of computers to people who deal with command lines

I'm not sure I agree with that, but I like the argument and I'll be back to Corante.

So far, the most worthwhile application that I have found for my Roller weblogging software has been the DaveAndi weblog. DaveAndi is a password protected weblog for family and friends who are intested in knowing what is going on with new baby Leo. I'm not going to share the password with you because 1) you'd be bored to tears and 2) it ain't none of your business.

While fixing my little RSS bug, I started looking for an alternative to the Jakarta Commons Digester RSS classes. I did not find an alternative, but I did find this nice little write-up of RSS and RSS 0.9.1 vs. RSS 1.0 by Elliote Rusty Harold. Now, why can't I find Rusty's RSS feed?

In light of the current economic conditions and layoffs in the Triangle area, I have a shorter wish list for my company. I want my company to be...

• One that continues to pay my salary

I'm going to hold off on Roller 0.9.4 for now. I want to fix a couple of bugs before I do another release and I want to enjoy the 4th.

Surely you remember our national motto: E Pluribus Unum. "Out of many, one." Beautiful, isn't it? Its origins go back to that magical day -- July 4, 1776 -- when Congress not only approved the Declaration of Independence, but also commissioned John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin to design an official seal for the new country. Their first design included the famous phrase that became our official motto.

There is just one small problem, however.

E Pluribus Unum isn't our national motto anymore.

Todd "Monkey Time" Mormon, Godless Capitalists, Patrick Henry and Politics as Distraction, Spectator Online. Somebody get that man a weblog.

Another glitch was found in Roller 0.9.3, so I will have to release a Roller 0.9.4 later on today.

I made a mistake in Step 5 of the Roller Installation Guide. The Jakarta Commons jars and the MM.MySQL JDBC driver jar need to go into the Tomcat common/lib directory, not the server/lib directory. I have updated online version of the Roller Installation Guide, but I'm not going to do a 0.9.4 release just for this.

Due to the openness of Microsoft in respect to .NET, one can speculate that Microsoft strategy involves a successive retreat from being the dominant platform supplier with the plan to be a dominant supplier of high-quality network applications and content. Harold W. Lawson, Rebirth of the Computer Industry, June 2002 Communications of the ACM.

Very interesting article, but I don't think it is available on the web.

Ugo, on first glance OSCache does appear to be JSP centric but it really does not require JSP. I would not have been able to use OSCache if it required JSP, because Roller weblog pages are not JSP pages - they are generated by Velocity templates.

OSCache includes a caching Servlet Filter. The CacheFilter automatically generates a cache-key based on incoming request parameters and either pulls the corresponding entry from the cache or runs the request. So, adding OSCache to your webapp can be as simple as dropping the OSCache jar in your classpath and adding a Servlet Filter entry to your web.xml.

I had to do a little more work than that because I need to cache on a per user basis and the auto-generated cache-key does not consider request.getUserPrincipal(). So, I had to write my own Servlet Filter based on CacheFilter. Also, CacheFilter is not very well documented, so I had to look at the source to figure it out.

Roller 0.9.3 is ready
Download it today. Here are the new features.

• Blogger API Support: contributed by Shawn Dahlen (dahlen at mitre.org). See the Roller User Guide for details.
• Database configuration via JNDI DataSources: Roller now looks up datasources in JNDI (using java:comp/env/jdbc/rollerdb).
• Database connection pooling: if you follow the instructions in the Roller Installation Guide, Roller will use database connection pooling.
• Results caching for weblog pages: Roller now uses OSCache for caching all weblog pages. This results in a dramatic improvement in performance.
• Three new themes: Roller now includes three new themes, adapted from free themes found on blogskins.com.
• Lots of bug fixes: too numerous to list.

This post was made via the Blogger API using the w:bloggar client.