Blogging Roller

Bob Aman did a nice round-up of newsfeed parsers and Java's own ROME came in second (with the only rating of good) only to Mark Pilgrim's Python-based Universal Feed Parser (with the only rating of excellent). His findings are the same as those in Chapter 5 of my book (which lists Universal Feed Parser, ROME, Jakarta Feed Parser, RSS.NET and ATOM.NET), except that I rate Jakarta Feed Parser a bit higher. The book goes to the printers on March 10 and I'm in final review now, so I've still got time to add a reference to Kevin Burton's new Jakarta Feed Parser fork; I need to check that out immediately.

Jeff Genender explains how to get Roller running on Apache Geronimo. He mentions that Roller binaries are built with JDK5; a mistake (I believe) that affects only Roller 2.0.1. I'm going to respin that build as soon as I get a free minute.

I've complained in the past about the fact that Eclipse for Solaris/X86 is linked to Motif and thus, drag-and-drop doesn't work, the mouse-wheel support is broken and  the whole thing looks like crap.

Since then I've switched over to Netbeans, but I when I saw that instructions were available for building Eclipse 3.1.1 on Solaris/X86/GTK, I just couldn't resist trying them out. Here's the result, Eclipse 3.1.1 running on Solaris 10 for X86. Looks almost as good as Netbeans, eh? Maybe they'll finally put an end to those awful Motif builds.

I'm heading down to the D.H. Hill Library at North Carolina State University (go Wolfpack, my alma mater by the way) today help the folks there get started with Roller.

State chose Roller for campus-wide student blogs (> 30,000 students!) and the first order of business is to figure out how to hook Roller into State's WRAP authentication single sign-on system. The answer may be to develop a WRAP plugin for Acegi (the framework Roller uses for authentication), but I hope to also understand how OpenSSO technologies might fit into the picture.

Joe Gregorio: APP, OpenSearch and Microformats. Get used to seeing them; those small pieces loosely joined are the future of web services.

Joe's talking about the new Lucene Web Services API, which is based on Atom protocol (APP), OpenSearch and Microformats. It's very cool to see the APP already applied outside of the realm of blogs.

Ross Rader: Perhaps ATOM is the better way to proceed after all - at least those documents are developed according to a consistent, reliable and predictable process that I can count on from a business perspective.

As another Dave might say: bingo!

Optaros open source CMS study: Roller is the most established of the Java-based blogging softwares. Powering sites such as the popular blogs.sun.com and JRoller, Roller certainly qualifies as industrial strength. Roller is designed to host multiple blogs, each with its own formatting layout and style.

As you can see above, Scott Gottlieb of Optaros included Roller in his evaluation of open source CMS servers. Roller did pretty well considering that Optaros evaluated an old release (1.3) and didn't seem to notice Roller's ongoing move to Apache Software Foundation governance.

And coming soon: Forrester Research will be including Roller in it's Forrester Wave evaluation of blogging solutions. That'll be good for Roller in a couple of ways. It will get us some more publicity for the project and it'll help us understand Roller's deficiencies when compared to other systems.

Another excellent introductory article about the ROME feed API today on the O'Reilly network. Check out ROME in a Day by ROME project member Mark Woodman (and while you're at Mark's site check out RSS gets an enema and Mark's charming enema illustration).

• 5% of American workforce blogging
  "only about 15% of employers have specific policies addressing work-related blogging"
• 52% of Chinese office workers blogging
  "60% of white-collars bloggers criticize their boss on their blogs"

Rich Burridge explains how to use Grabber one of the Blogapps utilities to back up your Roller-based blog, but Grabber should work with any blog server that supports the MetaWeblog API. I'm sure you have some questions about this so I'll just go ahead and answer them now. No, I didn't pay Rich to pimp my book. And yes, it would be much better if Roller included an export facility.

Amy Roh has put together complete instructions for deploying Roller to Glassfish. Note that the instructions require Roller 2.1 (soon to be released) and Glassfish build 38 (also soon to be released).

See you at Cafe Cyclo at 6:30PM. As usual Josh has the details.

• There's an RSS advisory board at Harvard
  "Is RSS controlled by one person? No. Each of the advisors must make up his or her own mind..."
• The RSS advisory board goes public, apparently with Dave Winer's blessing
  "A new era begins today for the RSS Advisory Board [...] The board is taking on eight new members..."
• A new clarified RSS specificaiton is introduced
  Copyright 2006 RSS Advisory Board
  
• But there's an important question
  "I have to ask, what's Dave Winer's role in all of this"
  
• Harvard distances itself from the RSS board
  "Harvard has no involvement with any of these efforts"
• Dave Winer says RSS Advisory board doesn't exist
  "Winer has now decided that the board doesn't exist and never had authority over the RSS specification"
• News flash
  "And the simple fact is that RSS sucks"
• ...but that's OK because
  "At this point, pretty much everybody supports Atom"

I've been playing with Glassfish and the Java Web Services Dev. Pack (JWSDP)  this week, hoping to learn what's new in WS-* land. But, of course, as soon as I saw the wonderful Glassfish admin UI, I just couldn't resist trying to get Roller up and running. I figured it would be easy.

In the past, we've had problems with Glassfish because it didn't include a JDBC security realm, but we recently switched Roller over to Acegi security so we don't need a security realm anymore. No joy -- right now Acegi doesn't work on Glassfish (and I'm using Glassfish b32, the very latest build).

Amy Roh is working a different angle. Glassfish now has an experimental JDBC security realm and she's trying to get Roller 2.0 (pre-Acegi) working with that. She's running in to problems too.

Roller's a pretty good app server smoke test, eh? I hope we can get both of these issues resolved before final Glassfish.

Update: the Glassfish/Acegi problem has been marked as fixed in Glassfish CVS. Maybe it'll be in build 38?

Ed Burnette: If you really want to ensure true freedom of your code, put it under the control of a Foundation like Apache or Eclipse. Foundations are not controlled by any one company so you can feel comfortable about being on a level playing field with your competitors.

Update: I've gotten a couple of backchannel comments about this post, so I should say that I don't necessarily agree with all quotes I post on my blog. I post quotes representing viewpoints that I find interesting and worthy of consideration.

I do agree with Ed that independent foundations are very important to open source, but I disagree or find fault in some of the rest of his post. For example, Ed seems to imply that GPL is used only by greedy companies. I don't agree with that sentiment at all. Ed also said that foundations can't be bought and (like James) I don't agree with that either. And finally, Ed groups Eclipse Foundation with the Apache Software Foundation and I don't think Eclipse is quite as independent as Apache (and how much does it cost to join Eclipse again?).

• OpenLogic blogs
  Powered by Roller
• Netbeans 5.0 makes 'free' look good
  Mostly positive review, but some reality checks on Matisse
• Why are you uninstalling NetBeans IDE?
  Malcolm Davis points out some Netbeans problems (and see comments for more)
• Kodo goes open source
  "The new project will deliver a free EJB3 impl. based on the Kodo ORM engine" under ASL license!

Kurt Williams: Just one problem. Web 2.0 is done with Web 1.0 technology

Yep. If everybody used Firefox everything would be cool, but there are armies of series four browsers (IE, Netscape, Mozilla, etc.) out there just waiting out there to break your latest JavaScript creation.

John Robb: No, the HUGE problem, the elephant in the room, isn't leaks. Rather, it is in a complete lack of transparency. As we have seen again and again, secrecy prevents the full analysis of alternatives. It shuts down debate and prevents the qualification of sources. It is also the crutch of bad and/or nefarious management.

Tim Bray: To all the excellent Christians and Jews and Muslims out there: I know you exist. But you’re vanishing from view behind the cloud of mucky dust being raised by your lunatic fringe; as of right now, in the twenty-first century, when someone claims to be deeply religious, that’s grounds for suspicion of bigotry, greed, and a predisposition to homicide. Which is one reason my little boy isn’t being taken to church, for the moment.

I wish I had the guts to be so brutally honest on my blog. Tim's right on. And I'll add this: if we don't curb the crazies, we're not going to make it through this century.