Blogging Roller

I caused a little stir yesterday with my "oh the shame" post, Sam Ruby picked up on it and several others took notice. I think most people realize that I was just having some fun with words and ranting. I know Sun didn't actually steal anything from O'Reilly and I don't really think O'Reilly's weblogging software is rinky-dink. However, there was some truth there. I do think the java.net blogs would benefit from more advanced blogging features. I'd like to help and I would (obviously) love to see them use Roller.

If the blogs on java.net are just provided for simple project news and RSS feeds, then I can understand the desire to keep the blogging module simple. If, on the other hand, these are going to be real weblogs with the personality and character of the blogs we read on java.blogs, then something better is needed.

Part of the java.net charter is to support the open source Java community and foster open source Java projects. I'd like to see java.net eat it's own dogfood and use open source Java rather than the open source Perl, PHP, Python, or whatever else it is that they are using now. Instead of the O'Reilly blog software, why not use Roller, Blojsom, JSP Wiki, or Snipsnap? If these aren't good enough, let's figure out why and make them better.

By the way, I have registered http://roller.dev.java.net (pending approval) to reserve the name and to start exploring the java.net features. If it looks good, I may migrate the Roller CVS, downloads, and mailing lists from SourceForge.

Sun's new web application development tool, Rave, sounds really cool. Here what the bloggers are saying about it:

Simon Brown: Anyway, if you've done any programming with a 4GL environment like PowerBuilder, VisualBasic, etc then this is pretty much the same, albeit for the web. You can drag and drop components on to the canvas (the web page) and hook them up with event listeners, datasources and web services. All in all a very quick way to build webapps and certainly aimed at the corporate developer market that Sun is trying to bring over to the Java world in an effort to significantly increase the developer community. Good demo, nice tool.

Dehashish Chakrabarty: Sue Spielman has some more details on Project Rave. The key phrase here is "simplified development model",  in accordance with Sun's aim of  "lowering the barrier and entry point for the corporate developers" and "sucking up the VB corporate/IT programmers into the Java platform". It's another thing that, as Sue reported, a 404 error surfaced during Hammerhead's demo at JavaOne.  Rave uses NetBeans Platform as its base (though visually it will be different) alongwith JavaServer Faces and JDBC Rowsets standards. And if you didn't know Sun has no plan to make this project open source.

Cedric Beust: I have to say I was quite surprised by the slickness of Rave, until I realized why: it doesn't seem to be based on NetBeans. Well, that's my impression. I was a bit far from the screen to be sure, but it certainly didn't look like the standard NetBeans interface to me.

Andres Aguiar: Project Rave is a tool for those guys. It looks cool, and it's fast, as they built it with no extensibility hooks as other more ambitious IDEs (NetBeans, Eclipse). Right now it just supports Web applications, and it's not targeted to the EJB developer, it's for guys that want to access their database directly, with tools to do data binding directly from the database, etc. It targets the same people as ASP.NET Web Matrix.

Cedric and Andres are wrong. Rave is, in fact, based on Netbeans.