Blogging Roller

There was a double-escaping problem in Roller's RSS feed that prevented all links and lots of other HTML from working in AmphetaDesk, Aggie, and probably other aggregators as well. For some odd reason, Radio handled it fine so I never noticed the problem. The problem is fixed now on this site, and in the upcoming Roller 0.9.6 release.

As usual, the best photo was one taken by my Dad, with his superior camera and his superior composition skills. He has captured the essence of our four month old boy Leo. <img class="photo" src="http://www.rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/essence-of-leo.jpg" hspace="5" vspace="5" align="left" alt="baby boy Leo at 4 months old" /> I don't mean to brag, but at this point in time I'm sure that Leo is the best baby in the world. He has been sleeping though the night for almost a month now, sometimes going out for 8 hours at a time. He is happy and laughing almost all of the time. And best of all, he is as healthy and fat as can be (100th percentile for weight!).

Once I do some work with the mountain of digital photos I have taken recently, I'll have a little time to work on Roller tonight. But, before that here are some quickies:

Lance has added support to Roller for <a href= "http://www.devarticles.com/content.php?articleId=90&page=1"> Mitchell Harper's JavaScript-based WYSIWYG editor. It works only on IE,but it is still cool. Now Roller supports three editors: Ekit, the Harper special, and the plain old text box.

I think I read that <a href= "http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd">Matt added sort-by column to the Roller user table that appears on the new Roller 0.9.6 front page, but I can't find that email right now. That will make it easier to browse the blogs at FreeRoller.

There are a lot of cool blogs at FreeRoller that I have not noticed before. For example, <a href= "http://www.freeroller.net/page/cbeust">Cedric Beust's weblog and Ara Abrahamian's <a href= "http://roller.anthonyeden.com/page/ara_e">MemoryDump. Ara has some interesting ideas about an <a href= "http://roller.anthonyeden.com/page/ara_e/20021014">n-way metadata bus for Java persistence scenario. Cool idea.  He says MiddleGen may support this some day. Wow, I need to take another look at MiddleGen.

Scott from Atlassian wrote to tell me that OFBiz-EE can be used in all four of the persistence scenarios that I discussed yesterday. He wrote:

You have your JavaBeans already, you then need to create an entitymodel.xml file to represent your entities (which will then CRUD the relevant database tables), and you can use the API to store your changes to the database. However, the storing is not automatic - you would have to write the code yourself. [Scott from Atlassian]

But if you have to write the storage code yourself, can you really say that OFBiz-EE supports this scenario? I don't think so. OFBiz-EE takes a very different approach, not a bad approach, but a different approach.

I think OFBiz EE needs its own scenario - the generic-object scenario. I don't think it truly fits into any of the four scenarios that I listed. It does not really do anything to support the JavaBeans model (no introspection, no JavaBeans generation) and it does not do any code generation (except for the DDL, right?). So here is the new generic-object scenario that I have just added to the comparison to accomodate OFBiz-EE:

Generic-object: Start with a meta-data description of your desired database schema, generate DDL to create your database, and use a persistence API to store and retrieve generic data objects, with values stored as a hash of name-value pairs, to and from your database.

<a href= "http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/index.jsp?date=20021014#104120">Russell pointed out XORM, another Java persistence framework that sounds interesting. However, you cannot use XORM if you do not license your application under the GPL. That is a BIG limitation.

XORM beta 2 is an open source, "extensible object-relational mapping layer for Java applications. It provides interface-based persistence to RDBMSs using the Java Data Objects (JDO) API while allowing developers to focus on the object model, not the physical layer." XOTRM is published under the GPL.[from Cafe au Lait by way of Russell]

The September 2002 issue of the Communications of the ACM has a very interesting article on career development by Peter J. Denning. Denning covers the ladder of competence and the different ways that people at these different levels work and the ways that they learn. He bases this in part on Hubert Dreyfus's AI writings from the 1960s and 1970s. Great stuff. Denning also has some insightful things to say about what he calls the self-directed and community-directed styles of career development. Well worth a read.