Blogging Roller

Want to learn about parsing and producing RSS and Atom with Java? You're in luck. New ROME contributor Randy Ray has written an excellent intro titled Taking a tour of ROME and published it on Java.Net.



And in case you missed it I'll say it again: ROME v0.8 is available! This new (beta) release adds support for Atom 1.0 support and a bunch of new modules including "Content, iTunes Podcast, Slash, Google Base, Creative Commons, and MediaRSS."

Every time I emerge from my office, the kids ask "is the book done, is it done dad, dad! is it done!?!" so here's a little status report on book progress.

The state of the book is strong. I spent the past weekend reviewing the typeset copy for Part I and now I'm onto Part II. I'll wrap up my Part II proofreading this weekend, write the front-matter and  with luck I'll be completely done by the end of next week. I still need to get a new release of the Blogapps examples and server out there, maybe I can squeeze that in this weekend too.

You know what I'm gonna do when I'm finished? I'm gonna fire off a rocket.

Thank goodness the book is almost done, 'cause I've got lots of cool new software to play with:

Netbeans 5.0 is finally out. Thank goodness for that. I was getting tired of the constant stream of betas, q-builds and RCs. Those Netbeans guys are relentless fanatics, so watch out Eclipse.

NeoOffice 1.2, the X11-free Open Office port for the Mac, is now available. It's got the ability to read Open Document Format files (but it can't save them yet?).

ROME 0.8, the Java newsfeed wrangler (as Tim Bray called it), is available with the ability to parse and produce Atom 1.0 format newsfeeds. And ROME bloggers, please send me your feed URLs so I can add you to Planet ROME.

Jeff Blattman, of the Sun Portal team, has submitted a patch for Roller Atom Admin Publishing Protocol, which is an Atom-like protocol for managing users and blogs. Need to evaluate that and figure out how to get it into Roller.

IBM's Phay Tac Lau and Elias Torres have contributing tagging support to Roller. Elias commited the code into a development branch and  I'm hoping we can land it into the trunk in time for the next release (2.2).

Roller 2.1 is still waiting in the wings. We've got a release candidate that looks good to me, but I'm not sure anybody else has checked it out.