Blogging Roller

First, Mark Pilgrim is blogging again. He said he'd return when hell froze over or Rogers switched to Atom. Fortunately for us, hell froze over (i.e. Bootcamp) and Rogers made the switch.

Second, Microsoft has kindly answered my questions about the Feeds API. I was wrong; they were just too busy to answer sooner.

Third, Raleigh's own Red Hat is aquiring JBoss. I always knew they'd start doing some Java stuff someday.

And finally, of course, there was that stuff last week about our president being the source of the leaks he supposedly hates so much, but we already knew that so big woop.

Over the weekend I finished the second of two new chapters I promised for RSS and Atom in Action. The first one covered Windows RSS. The one I finished late last night is the new Chapter 7 on "The ROME newsfeed utilities." Here's the outline:

• Introducing ROME
• How ROME works
• The SyndFeed model
• Parsers, generators and converters
• The parsing process
• The generation process
• ROME limitations
• The ROME subprojects
• Parsing newsfeeds  with ROME
• Parsing to the SyndFeed model
• Parsing funky RSS
• How to handle Dublin Core
• How to handle <content:encoded>
• Parsing to the RSS model
• Parsing to the Atom model
• Fetching newsfeed with ROME
• How the ROME Fetcher works
• Using the ROME fetcher
• Generating newsfeeds with ROME
• Extending ROME
• The ROME plug-in architecture
• Adding new modules to ROME
• Overriding ROME
• Summary

I also updated the book's example code, which you can find on Java.Net here: http://blogapps.dev.java.net.

There's a new layout on the Roller project blog, which uses Roller built-in Planet aggregator to display blogs from Roller committers, wiki changes, and recent issues.

Here's what I think Microsoft should fix in the Windows RSS Feeds API:

• Support feed and item ids. The item.id property does not reflect the RSS <guid> or Atom <id> of the item/entry in the original feed. Plus, it's an integer -- not the right type for a URN. If you want to get the actual feed or item/entry id you have to parse the XML. Make it easy to get the real id if there is one
  
• Item objects should have description and content fields. Currently, the object model can't completely repesent Atom, Wordpress style RSS or Typepad style RSS -- they have both description and content elements. So, add description and content and get the mappings (and content model) right for Atom, plus regular, funky and 1.0 style RSS.
• Allow parsing of feeds from file system. Apparently, you can only parse a feed named by URL and you can't parse feeds on your hard disk. That can't be right. Make it possible to subscribe to and parse feeds from the file-system.
  
• Cough up a spec for the Common Feed Format extensions. The normalized format used to store all feeds includes some new elements in the same namespace as the Simple List Extensions (SLX), but they're not mentioned in the SLX spec. Fix that.
  

Tags: topic:[ie7], topic:[rss], topic:[atom], topic:[vista]

Roller doesn't yet provide a blog export facility, but you can do just about anything with Roller templates if you know what you're doing. For example, Debashish Chakrabarty explains how to use Roller templates to generate the RSS required to move a blog from Roller to Wordpress. He was able to get all of his blog entries and all comments out of JRoller.com this way, he imported his entries to his new Wordpress blog, but he couldn't find a way to import the comments.

As Josh points out, a US congressman showed up at our last meetup. Which local blognitary could it be this time? John Edwards? Maybe Mark Pilgrim will appear to announce his return to blogging. Or maybe it'll be Dr. Jim Goodnight, who'll ask how to get his employees blogging about SAS Institute products (did you hear the news?) instead of IBM ones.

JavaOne sessions have been scheduled. I'm speaking on Tuesday at 11AM, a much better time slot than last year when Patrick, Kevin and I were stuck with a lunch-time slot on the last day for our Beyond Blogging session.

    Session Id: TS-1756
    Session Title: Java™ Technology and REST: Implementing the Atom Protocol
    Track: XML and Web Services; Web Tier
    Room: Esplanade 301
    Date: 16-MAY-06
    Start Time: 11:00

In related news, I also submitted two proposals for ApacheCon EU 2006 in Dublin.

Seema Alevoor explains in great detail how to install Roller on the Sun Java Web Server.

Tom Stroobants figured out how to get Roller working on OC4J -- something I'd done once before, but I wasn't able to offer much help because that was almost four years ago and painful memories fade fast.

I mentioned that Scoble had hooked me up with Sean Lyndersay and Walter VonKoch of the Windows RSS team and they had offered to help out with questions about the Windows RSS platform. Unfortunately that's not working out. I sent in a list of questions last week and despite continued prodding of all parties, I can no longer penetrate the cone of silence or even get a response. Oh well. I'm not sure if I blew it with my FeedsManager.Bastardize() post, they're afraid of talking to a "competitor" or they just don't have any good answers for those questions. I'll get over it. I'll post the questions here later and hope for a (highly unlikely) lazy-web response.

Update: The cone of silence was apparently a cone of extreme busy-ness.  Check my newer post Windows RSS answers for Q&A with the RSS team.

We just returned from a most excellent spring-break trip down to Georgia for some sight-seeing in Atlanta and a family re-union in Callaway Gardens. I had hoped to get some serious work done on my ROME chapter, which is due Wednesday, but that didn't work out so well. I did get some work done, but I'm definitely gonna blow my deadline. That's OK, I had fun instead. The kids did too. We did the new Georgia Aquarium, which was incredibly crowded but well worth the effort. The next day, the kids managed to sit still through the Cyclorama, which you'll find interesting even if you have only a passing interest in Civil War history. We also had a wonderful dinner at Mu Lan with my parents, thanks in part to little Leo, who slept right through dinner.

Callaway Gardens was beautiful and the villa we picked was the perfect spot for a small family reunion and multi-birthday celebration -- we celebrated my dad's 70th, my grandmother's 90th birthday and others. We visited the butterfly house, the vegetable gardens and then I ducked out on the birds of prey show to get some work done. We also pored over a small mountain of unsorted memorabilia and most of the items pictured on this page about my great great great grandfather James Mason.

Now it's back to the grind. The ROME chapter is a little more difficult that I had thought as I'm finding some deficiencies in ROME (some are my fault) and fighting an overwhelming urge to fix them or at least document them in depth.