Blogging Roller

A bunch of interesting Java related news items appeared on InfoWorld (and eWeek) over the past day or so.

• Sun readying J2EE 1.4 for a February 2003 release which will include SOAP, WSDL. Sun also "presented a laundry list of technology and promotional efforts" including:


• Sun intends to cooperate more with open source developers and will boost Linux support, but still has no plans to open source Java itself.


• Sun won't support IBM's Eclipse IDE project, but will back Oracle's recently submitted JSR-198 specification for pluggable Java IDE. I guess they think this will prevent a total eclipse.


• Sun will work to simplify the Swing APIs (what JSR is that?) and the Java language via JSR 175. JSR-175 is a new Java specification for adding meta-data to Java classes.


• Judge gives Microsoft 120 days to ship Java. This has been widely reported in the Java blogosphere. Microsoft's lawyer says "This is very, very messy, very, very complicated."


• Sun posts $2 billion loss, slight profit. "Price competition has also been brutal in high-end computers." The article concerns financial matters, so, of course, there is no mention of Java. eWeek reports on this as well and adds that Sun is planning 11% layoffs during 2003.


• SAP's new release of <a href= "http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/03/01/16/030116hnsapnetweaver.xml">mySAP will support both Java and Dot-Net. The article does not describe how this will be done, but it does seem to indicate that Java and J2EE are the heart of mySAP and that Dot-Net support will be done via Web Services. eWeek also reported this story.

Matt has put together a nice Roller 0.9.7 TODO list for himself. Cool stuff. The "remember me" feature sounds especially useful. Apart from finishing-up the linkback feature, the main thing I would like to do is to fix comments. I would like to eliminate the pop-up comment window and instead allow users to specify a template for displaying comments. I would like to make it possible for Roller users to have a comment page like the one on Sam Ruby's site: comments, linkbacks, pingbacks, and trackbacks are displayed in chronological order and are grouped by day. You can view comments per item, or you can view recent comments on all items.

Also, for FreeRoller, we need to move RollerConfig into the database so that Roller can run accross multiple background worker servers and fix the performance problems with the index.jsp page. The caching works great on index.jsp, but refreshing the cache is still painfully slow.

Wow, that's a lot of work...