Blogging Roller

Rajendra has developed a blogging plugin for the JDeveloper IDE that enables blogging via Blogger API, MetaWeblog API and Atom 0.3. I wonder if he considered using the RSS and Atom in Action Blog Client library.

I just uploaded new builds of the Blogapps Examples and Blogapps Server. See the announcement on the Manning RSS and Atom in Action forum. There are a couple of bug fixes in the Atom server implementation, a couple of missing C# examples have been added and both downloads are now available in TGZ and ZIP format.

I had thought that TGZ (i.e. gzipped tar) was fine for everybody including Windows users, because last time I checked WinZIP handled TGZ files without a hitch. But I've gotten several complaints about my TGZ only policy, so now I'm offering both formats. I guess I should do the same thing for Roller.

The next release will support Atom protocol draft #10.

Even though we're still stuck at JDK 1.4.2 in Roller-land, I've been trying to come up to speed on Java EE 5. To that end, I bought Pro EJB 3 Java Persistence API by Mike Keith and Merrick Schincariol and I'm glad that I did, it's excellent. If you need to learn JPA, grab a copy and sit yourself down with Netbeans 5.5 beta2 and the Enterprise Pack -- it worked for me.

Mark Woodman has written a thorough review of the new Microsoft MAX RSS reader, which, apparently, is shiny, new, pretty and lame.

APP draft #10 is available. I'm still reading it over, but the major changes appear to be:

• Categories can be specified at the workspace and collection level. Multiple category schemes are allowed and both fixed and free-form categories (e.g. tags) are allowed.
• Collection titles are now specified by an <atom:title> instead of an attribute on the <collection> element.
• A new "slug" header has been added for media posts so that clients can specify the file-name to be used for the uploaded file.

I'm especially happy about the category support -- now Atom protocol can do everything that MetaWeblog API can do, and much more. I'll be updating my client and server implementations during the next week.