Blogging Roller

Don't bother with that cockamamie 911 theory, check this instead: <a href= "http://dubyadubyadubya.com">dubyadubyadubya.com (Flash required).

Dave Winer reports that a <a href= "http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bloggerDev/files/documentation.html">developer preview of the XML-RPC-based Blogger API 2.0 has been made available on the BloggerDev group on Yahoo (you'll have to join the group if you want to view the spec). The new spec makes use of XML-RPC structs for just about everything (so it will take some work to support) and finally supports weblog entry titles (but it will be worth it).

There was a time when Brett and Mike did my surfing for me, now Erik Thauvin is doing that. He is constantly on top of the cool Java (and other) news. Thanks Erik!

The other day, I posted a new version of my Ag persistence example on SourceForge for download. This new version includes the HSQLDB database and is a lot easier to install and run than before.

I just commited to the Roller 0.9.6 CVS branch a series of changes that should improve the performance of the Roller main page (index.jsp) by making better use of OSCache page caching. I hope that FreeRoller will put these changes in place, because the FreeRoller main page is VERY SLOW! Assuming that the changes work well, I'll label and release Roller 0.9.6.5 on SourceForge sometime next week.

As you may have noticed, Roller 0.9.7 development has been put on the back burner. At the moment, Matt, Lance, and I are all too involved in other side projects to do any significant work on Roller. I'll probably get back into Roller development around Christmas time with some enhancements to Roller's referer tracking.

Thanks to the "ice storm of the century" we now have a 40 foot long and 3 foot tall Christmas garland of cedar, holly, and magnolia clippings (and logs) lining the curb in front of our house.

I have to agree with David Jordan's most recent OnJava article. "Castor JDO" is a confusing name for a product that does not support JDO. I don't know or care who was using the JDO acronym first; the Castor folks need to drop JDO from the Castor name.

I have two complaints with the XML-file approach to webapp configuration approach that <a href= "http://freeroller.net/page/jduska/20021206#how_to_handle_configuration_information">Jeff and <a href= "http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd/20021206#webapp_configuration">Matt have been discussing (and the one that Roller currently uses):

• It does not work well in a distributed situation. If my application is distributed across multiple servers, then app instances cannot easily share one XML file. In that case, I'd need to copy the XML file to every server. If I want to make configuration changes while the app is running then I'm are out of luck. A better approach would be to store this type of information in a database, not a file.
• There is no meta-data. I would rather not have to write a configuration UI for every webapp that I write. But, to write a generic configuration editor UI, I need to have meta-data about each configuration property. For strings and string-list properties, I'd want a list of possible values. For integer properties , I'd want a range. For a real configuration API, I need meta-data about properties and acceptible values.

Is there a configuration or preferences API that supports meta-data? I don't believe that the Java 1.4 preferences API does this. I wonder why not? Maybe Sun was just trying to replicate the Windows Registry.

Like those other RTP bloggers, we are thankful to have our electricity back and thankful to have kind friends and neighbors. Thursday night we stayed with friends who have a working fireplace and a nice little camping stove. Friday morning, we decided to drive up to Washington, DC to stay with the in-laws. We drove back to our house to pack up and much to our happy surprise we found that our power was back.

So, we stayed in town and everybody came over to our place. Our fireplace friends came over to spend the night because they still had no power. My parents and brother from Chapel Hill also came over for the same reason. We had a nice evening and quite a feast with a freezer load of food from Chapel Hill that would have otherwise spoiled. Chapel Hill and Durham were hit harder than Raleigh and power may not be restored over there until Tuesday. So we will probably have visitors in the house for a few more days.

Despite the weather disaster we still managed to pull off a really nice space-themed 6th birthday party for my son Alex. We had about 15 kids under 6 here today making alien balloons, throwing star gliders, playing asteroid toss, running, screaming, and generally driving all of us adults totally insane.

We did get a half-inch here, but it was a half-inch of solid ice. Our holly tree snapped in half, one of our magnolia trees lost two limbs, and our cedar tree uprooted and fell over. It could be worse, I suppose. Now we are without power and the power company says 3-5 days before everbody will be back up. You might not hear to much from me until then.

Doc Searls mentions Roller in a post titled Rolling a new blog on the Linux Journal website.

Roller is part of homework <a href= "http://spectral.mscs.mu.edu/Ent2002/assignment/04.html">assignment #4 in Enterprise Architecture class at Marquette University. Take a look at the "ass4" links on the <a href= "http://spectral.mscs.mu.edu/Ent2002/ClassList.html">ClassList page to see what the students had to say about Roller and weblogging in general.

We are expecting a half inch or so of wintery mix here in N.C. this evening, so the entire Triangle "metropolitan" area is shutting down, the supermarkets have been completely cleared of milk, eggs, and bread. The web usability experts over at Hesketh.com have put together an entertaining presentation to help relocated northerners in the area understand what is going on.

If you haven't checked the FreeRoller statistics lately, perhaps you should. FreeRoller responded to 702,015 requests for the month of November! I think we should break a million requests per month within a couple of months. [Anthony Eden]

Very cool! The first Roller site (mine) went live on June 8 of this year and now thanks mainly to Anthony there are over 250 Roller-based webloggers out there. If you use FreeRoller, please help Anthony pay for the bandwidth.

There is a very complementary review on Slashdot today of the Manning Press Struts in Action book.

The link below showed up in my referer logs today. I sure would like to read that document, but, alas, it appears to be behind the iPlanet firewall. It looks like somebody is suggesting that Roller or some part of the Roller architecture could be used in the iPlanet portal. Way cool!

<a href= "http://ips.red.iplanet.com/%7Echanezon/ipsarch/suggestions_portal_architecture.html" title="...portal_architecture.html">http://ips.red.iplanet.com/~chanezon/ipsarch/suggestions_portal_architecture.html

You say Tomcat is crap, I say it is not, you say .Net rocks, I say you've got the borg in your belly, and the hits come rolling in (no pun intended).

Castor OIL, the GUI tool for creating Castor JDO mappings from existing database tables, has been brought back to life by Peter Kasson. It was originally written by Lance Lavandowska and donated to the Castor project.[Bruce Synder on the castor-dev mailing list]

As you can see below, Castor OIL takes a different approach than JDOMapper.

• Reads database and creates Castor mapping properties.
• Writes mapping.xml from Castor mapping properties.
• Reads mapping.xml and creates Castor mapping properties.
• Writes java source for each element in mapping.

Using the terms I discussed in my Java persistence frameworks post, Castor OIL supports a bottom-up development approach. The JDOMapper comes close to supporting the top-down approach, but it falls short because it does not generate a database schema (DDL).

I like the XDoclet approach to generating Castor mappings, but this new GUI from Shelly Mujtaba looks pretty cool.

JDOMapper provides a user interface for creating Castor JDO mapping files. The application allows user to import Java classes and map them to an Relational schema . The tool performs series of validations to ensure that classes and fields are correctly mapped. Existing mapping files can also be imported into the tool. [JDOMapper]

Forrester Research has published an interesting summary and analysis of the current state of the app server market.