Blogging Roller

Here is one for the reading queue: Jeff Lowery's new OnJava article about Castor JDO.

Scott: Hey! I clicked the Next button below your calendar, but it failed to show me tomorrows blog! I want tomorrow's news today! What gives? I did enjoy the "There are four lights" title to one of your blurbs, though. It made me snicker. Or snigger. Or whatever.

Dave: What is so friggin funny about "There are four lights?"

Scott: I snickered (sniggered) because of the four lights that always shine on "four lights the clown." Don't tell me you don't know about old "four lights!" He's the funniest clown around, save Lemons.

Dave: Mark Pilgrim seems to like torture people with obscure literary and pop-culture references. I could find nothing about four lights the clown, but I did find this StarTrek TNG reference.

Scott: I thought that it was you, not Mr. Pilgrim, that decided on the "four lights" blurb title.  Of course there's no "Four Lights the Clown!" Of course I knew it was a STNG reference. That's why I thought it was so great -- because of the wonderful obscurity, yet definite applicability, of the blurb title. Four Lights the Clown. Heh heh.

Dave: now who is applying the torture?

Why does www.websphere-world.com run on PHP? Shouldn't they be eating their own dogfood? And yes, I know they are not affiliated with IBM.

Looks like Hugh Brian is experimenting with combining the Roller weblogger, the Chiki wiki, and the Jetspeed portal to form a corporate website. Looks like a useful combo and it looks like a fun project. I hope he will give the Roller project some feedback and tell us how we can help to make this sort of integration easier.

BTW, I don't know Hugh, but he popped up in my referrers log this morning. Now you know why Roller does not have a referrers feature yet: I've still got a valid Radio account.

I attended this J2EE shootout. I was the person that asked the question about JDO. [...] I also spoke to some of the other speakers. In general, the people were not knowledgeable at all about JDO, they did not have a JDO solution to offer, so they dodged the question. I also got the impression that these EJB vendors simply viewed JDO is minor competition. The fact that JDO can be used with their existing products seemed surprising to some of them. [JDO expert Dave Jordan, from a JDO Central thread].

It has been one year since Mark Pilgrim took a stand for his right to write online and lost his job for doing so.

"The IDE from BEA is very difficult. It isn't the traditional IDE that most Java developers are used to working in, with an editor, compiler, debugger-type of tool," Murphy said. WebLogic Workshop is oriented toward Visual Basic programmers, while TogetherSoft offers a traditional J2EE development, he said. [ InfoWorld, BEA, TogetherSoft partner...]

Wait a minute here, the IDE from BEA is both "very difficult" and "oriented toward Visual Basic programmers?" That sounds like a bit of a problem, doesn't it? I'm sure adding some UML tools is the key to dumbing it down to VB level... not! I do hope TogetherSoft can straighten those BEA guys out.

Turns out, there is a Perforce plugin for Eclipse! It is called P4Eclipse. I just installed it and it looks awesome, even though it is only a v0.0.8 release.