Blogging Roller

Initially I was using Roller's newsfeed aggregator to monitor what was going on in the blogs which I find interesting. Now I am finding more and more that I am going to a few blogs all of the time and then jumping to other blogs from their blog lists. I think this is partially because the Roller aggregator is not very good (all real-time, pain to add new feeds, etc.) [ Anthony Eden, Interesting...]

So true. I'm surprised you were able to endure the pain for so long. I would like to add better aggregation features to Roller and have been toying with the idea of adding a full featured aggregator. I'm not sure a full-featured aggregator belongs in Roller, maybe Rickard is right in saying that aggregation is a client side job. Here are the reasons that I think a server-side aggregator should be integrated into Roller:

• Many users will subscribe to the same news sources and so can share a cache of the newsfeed data.
• Having an integrated aggregator will allow us to add a "Post about this item" button to each news item thus making it easier to comment on the posts of others.
• Roller already allows you to display newsfeeds, via the macros.showNewsfeed() directive, on your blog and having the newsfeed data cached will make these directives perform a lot better

Here are a couple of reasons against including an aggregator in Roller:

• Will not scale. Running a multi-threaded scheduling engine in process with a Servlet Engine, Roller, etc, will be a big burly memory eating bear. And what if you want to distribute Roller accross multiple worker processes?
• Web UI is clumsy. Wouldn't you rather have a pretty little JFC, SWT, Thinlet, or dot-Net app running on your PC as your aggregator?
• Others disadvantages that I can't think of because I am biased towards the server-side?

Anthony Eden, who has been generously offering free Roller accounts for a couple of months now, has just renamed his Roller site FreeRoller. What a cool name! This gives me another opportunity thank Anthony for doing what he is doing. Not only is he making possible a bunch of cool weblogs, but he and his bloggers are giving us some great feedback on Roller. Not everbody is totally happy with Roller and that is fine, but I'd like them to be specific about the things that suck (I can take it ;-) and even file some bugs if they have the time. Thanks again Anthony.

Rickard Öberg has posted some great comments on the J2EE Container Shootout. Before you get to the J2EE Container Shootout comments, keep an open mind as you read Rickard's comments on Bush's "war on terror" - like it or not, this is how we Americans look to some of our best allies.