Blogging Roller

I didn't bring my normal assortment of carry-on sauces, lotions, juices and pastes today so air travel was no problem at all. I made it to Austin and ApacheCon around two, checked in and made myself comfortable in the hackathon. Within minutes I was talking tech; bitching about my recent JSF experience with one of the MyFaces developers and discussing the upcoming Velocity release with members of the Velocity team. And hey look, there's the afternoon beer delivery. This is gonna be fun.

• URI Templates
  Interesting new piece in the REST-based web services puzzle
• Revise the RSS 2.0 Specification
  Cadenhead: "I propose that the RSS Advisory Board adopt the following document as RSS 2.0.9"
  
• One Small Step for the Blogosphere...
  Schwartz: "Usage of this or [any other] company blog or web site should be considered sufficient in satisfying the objectives of [Reg FD]"
• Sun PR: Planting the Flag in Second Life
  "We're the first Fortune 500 company to hold a press conference in [Second Life]"
• GlassFish at ApacheCon US 2006
  Eduardo: "Ken and Jim are travelling to ApacheCon next week"
  
• Desktop Java [doing well]. Thanks for asking.
  "Calling Swing a toy is just not serious"

ApacheCon kinda snuck up on me and now its suddenly time to pack. I'll be in Austin from Monday thorugh Sunday, attending the hackathon and the conference. This is my fourth ApacheCon so I know I'm gonna have fun, but I also hope to get some Roller 3.1 work on during the hackathon and try to knock off some of the minor issues that are still keeping the project from graduating from the Apache Incubator.

I'm speaking on Thursday at 3PM on the subject of Roller. The talk is similar to previous talks I've given on the topic, but it's been improved and updated to cover all of the cool stuff in Roller 3.0. Here's the abstract and an outline of the talk with a couple of bonus links.

Session title: TH18 - Apache Roller: an open source Java blog server
When/where: 3PM in Salon E

Roller is the open source Java blog server that drives the popular Sun's employee blogs at blogs.sun.com, IBM developerWorks blogs, JRoller.com and numerous other blog sites. Currently making its way through the Apache incubation process, Roller is built on a host of Apache technologies including Struts, Velocity, Lucene, Jakarta Commons, XMLRPC and more. This overview, a primer for Roller users and contributors, covers the Roller feature set, the all-new Roller 3.0 page models/macros, Roller 3.0 architecture, lessons learned, project status and future plans.

• Roller history
• The O'Reilly article (link)
  
• FreeRoller and JRoller and...
  
• Roller features
• Standard blog stuff
• Blogs per user, users per blog
• Blog client support
• What's new in 3.0
• New URL structure
• Front page is a blog
• New models and macros (see roller30-template-guide.pdf)
• Why choose Roller
• Roller limitations
  
• Roller community
• Developers, admins and bloggers
• Community challenges
• Release cycle
• How to add a feature
• How to make a release
• Why is Roller still incubating?
  
• Roller internals: backend
• Architectural overview
• POJOs: users, blogs and entries
• POJOs and XDoclet markup
  
• The manager interfaces
• Today Hibernate, someday JDO, JPA ...?
  
• Roller internals: frontend
• UI archtecture
• Struts actions and XDoclet markup
• Page and feed rendering
• Changes in Roller 3.0
• New template models and macros
  
• The pager interface
• $site and $planet models
• The new macros
• Customizing Roller
• Roller futures
• Tagging (Roller 3.1, coming soon)
• Modular Roller (and Modular Planet)
  
• Protected weblogs
  

I'll post the slides once I made the final changes.

Update: here they are ApacheConUS2006-TH18-RollerBlogServer.pdf

It's that time again...
 
For details, check the Raleigh bloggers wiki.

Looks to be a beautiful evening to sit outside and talk blogs, podcasts and other geekly goodness.

The sun sets over Silver Lake, Ocracoke Island, NC