Blogging Roller

I've been too busy with year-end projects to blog over the past couple of days and now suddenly, it's time to say farewell to 2006. So I'll do that with a quick summary of the year.

2006 was a pretty good year for me. I published my first book: RSS and Atom in Action. Roller is still growing, reached 3.0 status and is now very close to becoming a top level Apache project. IBM started contributing to and announced a Web 2.0 product suite that will include Roller. I did my first solo JavaOne presentation and spoke at both ApacheCon EU and ApacheCon US. And, I haven't mentioned it yet, but I also landed a new job inside Sun, which starts on January 8th (more about that later).

On the home-front: the boys (now 4, 8 and 10) are all healthy, happy and doing well in school. We celebrated my dad's 70th birthday and Alex's 10th birthday. We took family trips to Ocracoke, Atlanta, Austin, Northern Virginia and made numerous visits to the in-laws beach house near Topsail Island. Plus, Andi and I escaped from the kids for a week in Ireland to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary -- our first kidless vacation in about ten years.

I hope you had a good year too and will have an even better 2007. Happy new years!

Joe Gregorio announces a new Atom Publishing Protocol Spec (draft #12) and he says it might end up being the final. I guess it's time for a new Blogapps release with APP draft #12 and ROME 0.9 support.

Plus, Joe has put together a set of new planet sites for towns in the Charlotte, NC area; all based on feeds from Google Base, Google Blogs, Google News, Craigs List, Flickr and the Weather Service. The sites look useful, but the ads combined with the minimalist design make them look a little spammy on first glance. Perhaps a short "about this site" paragraph is in order.

The Smithsonian Air & Space Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles airport is simply amazing. The center "provides enough space for the Smithsonian to display the thousands of aviation and sapce artifacts  that cannot be exhibited on the National Mall." I could have spent a lot more time there, but not everybody in the family shares my fascination with air, space and military history.

Here's a mosaic I created from some of the photos I uploaded to my Flickr account (I used Mosaic Maker to put this together).

We opened presents in Chapel Hill on Xmas eve, at home in Raleigh on Xmas day and then drove up to Northern Virginia for one last round of paper ripping, twisty-tie unfastening and worship of the one deity that really matters to the kids: the good lord Lego. Lego ruled christmas here again and this year, for our kids the holy trinity is Lego, Star Wars and the Cars movie.

Lego's hegemony over the Johnson playroom has some history. Long time readers may remember the Jack Stone incident. Jack Stone has been replaced by a series of increasingly complex Lego Star Wars vehicles for the older boys and an oddly intense Lego Boba and Jango Fett fetish on the part of our four year old. And Lego is also serving as a gateway-drug -- Alex (10) got Lego Mindstorms earlier this month and has been spending hours building bots and some pretty complex programs.

I had to include the Cars movie in the holy trinity because Leo eats, sleeps and drinks it now. I'm almost too embarrassed to admit that he's got Cars movie plastic cars, die-cast metal cars, carrying case, models, pajamas, a blanket (known as fuzzy), socks, shoes, underwear and pull-ups -- but no Cars movie Legos (yet).

I got a couple of nice gifts too. As usual my brother gave me some user-generated content; his year he put together a wonderful CD full of about 30 Who covers. I also got a couple of books: Innovation Happens Elsewhere and The Innovators Dilemma.

We'll be in the Northern Virginia area for the next couple of days. After a short pilgrimage to the Lego store today we'll head over to the new Air & Space museum at Dulles airport. Tomorrow, we're expecting good weather so we'll head down to DC to check out the National Mall.

Here's a little video gem I found while working on our annual video review DVD; a little spontaneous singing and cuteness from the kids on Christmas eve last year. It's my first YouTube upload:

I'm glad I was able to help Simon get his personal planet back online yesterday. And I'm glad the task was fairly easy. All Simon needed as a new version of Blogapps PlanetTool updated to use ROME 0.9 and I was planning on doing that anyway.

What's PlanetTool you wonder? PlanetTool is a command-line program which reads a set of RSS/Atom newsfeeds and then uses a set of templates to generate a planet site with HTML, RSS, Atom, OPML and other representations. Simon uses it to bring together his personal blog, Sun blog, del.icio.us links and Flickr.com photos into a single webpage and a single feed. If you subscribe to that feed, you'll get just about everything that Simon publishes to the web.

If you're interested in learning more about PlanetTool, here are some of my previous posts on the topic:

• Try PlanetTool, it's easy!
  
• ROME + Texen = PlanetTool 
• PlanetTool internals
• It's also covered in Chapter 11 of RSS and Atom in Action.
  

The above title Try PlanetTool, it's easy! is a little misleading, but it brings me to my point. PlanetTool is only easy if you're a developer or a power-user; somebody who can handle running Java on a server, editing an XML config file and setting up a cron job. Simon could handle it, but I'd like to make planets easier.

In fact, I'd like to make it as easy to create a planet as it is to create a blog. This past week, I've been thinking about how to do that by taking the simple ROME powered Roller-Planet code, which is found in both Roller and PlanetTool, and build it into a multi-user planet server -- kinda like Roller, but for planets instead of blogs. To get my thoughts into digital form I worked up a little FreeMind mind-map on the topic, dumped it to text, added some wiki syntax and some screen-shots. The result is this: a RollerPlanetMindMap that outlines ideas for the future development of Roller-Planet.

Isn't the USPTO supposed to run at least a quick check for prior art before granting a patent? I guess the answer is no hope the answer is yes because Microsoft has filed for and apparently was awarded a patent on something called a "content syndication platform" for which there is (and was at the time of filing) a giant amount of prior art. 

The two key claims on the patent application on the USPTO site seem to be #1:

A system comprising: one or more computer-readable media; computer-readable instructions on the one or more computer-readable media which, when executed, implement: an RSS platform that is configured to receive and process RSS data in one or more formats; and code means configured to enable different types of applications to access RSS data that has been received and processed by the RSS platform.

Sounds like a feed reader, like Net-News-Wire, News-Fire, Feed Bandit , Feed Daemon, PlanetPlanet, Radio Userland, O'Reilly Meercat, etc. etc. All of which existed before Microsoft started prowling around RSS.

And the other is #10:

A system comprising: one or more computer-readable media; a set of APIs embodied on the computer-readable media, the set of APIs comprising one or more methods that enable at least one application to access RSS data that has been processed and stored in a feed store; and wherein said at least one application does not understand an RSS format in which the RSS data was originally embodied.

Now we're talking about a feed parser, which parses all formats of feeds and presents to a programmer in an abstract way. You know, like the Universal Feed Parser, ROME and the Jakarta Feed Parser, which again, all existed well before Microsoft started working with RSS and Atom technologies.

Some of the guys listed on the patent are Microsoft bloggers, so perhaps Sean, Walter and the other Microsoft Team RSS bloggers can explain how Microsoft can claim to have invented the RSS feed reader and RSS feed parser.

Via John Robb's blog. Dave Winer has posted about it too.

Update: Niall Kennedy has posted an excellent In depth analysis of Microsoft's patent claim that explains that the patent has not yet been awarded, digs into each of Microsoft's claims and discusses the prior art.

• Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use - LinuxWorld
  #6 Atom API: "it's rapidly displacing proprietary blogging and posting APIs"
• Atomic Firefox add-on
  "An Atom protocol client for creating and manipulating Atom feeds (e.g. blogs)"
• eXist: Open Source Native XML Database
  "eXist is an Open Source native XML database featuring efficient, index-based XQuery processing"
• eXist DB: Atom Publishing Protocol Support
  Intro to APP and it's use in the eXist native XML database
• Atom API for AOL Journals
  "Journals exposes a very complete API for creating and managing blogs, entries, and comments. "

I was tagged by Sam. Sure, I'll play along. Here's five things you probably don't know about me:

1. Apart from software developer, the only other job I've ever had is free-lance scientific illustrator working with pen and ink on a drafting table.
2. I play bass guitar (for some definition of "play") and once performed in a Grateful Dead cover band.
   
3. I lost my wedding ring in one of the hundreds of little pools in Dunns River Falls and amazingly enough, a couple of reward-seeking snorklers were able to find it about an hour later.
   
4. I was a serious trekkie and once shaved part of my hair to have a more Captain Kirk-like hair-line.
5. I lived in Haslingfield, England for a year when I was 9 and I remember those radio telescopes well. 

I'm tagging Raible, Noniko, Skrocki, Josh and Mike.

There's still time to get those proposals in. I ended up submitting three proposals for technical sessions related to RSS/Atom and one for a Roller birds-of-a-feather (BOF) session.

Here's the link to submit proposals: http://www.cplan.com/sun/javaone07/cfp.

If you dig blogs, wikis, feeds, Java and Solaris then you might be interested in the fact that we're hiring. Linda Skrocki's got the scoop on the job opening in Sun's Community Software Engineering team.

The 2007 JavaOne Conference is May 8th-May 11th and this is the perfect forum to share your technology expertise at Sun's Worldwide Developer Conference.  This year, the conference is being expanded so that while Java is at the core, with a significant emphasis on Java ME, SE and EE, there will be ample opportunity to present your technology or ideas in such areas as open source & community development (which includes Java, OpenSolaris, OpenOffice and others), next generation web or "web 2.0" technologies, web services and platform integration, consumer technologies and how to leverage Java and other technologies for businesses (including start-ups).

So if you have a hot topic, specific tips or tricks that you believe will help developers, then please go to http://www.cplan.com/sun/javaone07/cfp and submit your session abstract.

I've got a trio of proposals just about ready to go. Hopefully, at least one will be accepted and I'll be attending my 4th JavaOne next year and my 3rd one as a speaker.

In the rather unlikely case that you read my blog and don't know it yet, Java SE 6 was released today. The Sun bloggers are blogging it up and Danny Coward has posted a very nice top ten new features list with links to related blog posts and articles and such. Maybe someday I'll be able to upgrade.

A new release of the RSS and Atom Utilities (ROME) project ROME 0.9 (beta) is now available on the project's Java.net website. This new release includes fixes to Atom relative URI resolution, easier parsing for RSS feeds that use <content:encoded>, better support for mapping of RSS to and from Atom and numerous small fixes. [Read More]

• snellspace.com: Rollin' on with Roller
  More good news for Roller. We seem to be picking up some momentum
• jMaki framework, Phobos and jRuby on Rails on Java EE...
  Ludovic announces jMaki 1.0 beta and new Phobos plugins for Netbeans
• Phobos module for Netbeans
  Embedded Grizzly enables easy server-side JavaScript debugging in Netbeans
• Jezzly or Gretty? Running Jetty on top of Grizzly
  Grizzly-Jetty integration cound bring Grizzly to JBoss, Jonas, Geronimo, etc.
• Understanding Grizzly part I: Embedding Grizzly HTTP Web Server in 5 lines
  Light weight alternative to Jetty

We celebrated a milestone tonight, Alex's 10th birthday. He's grown into a great kid, smart, healthy, eager to learn (math) and questioning everything. We're very lucky. It's hard to believe 10 years has gone by since we started building this family. Seems like yesterday, a dream and an eternity ago all at once. I didn't have a blog back then of course, but I had a web site and I posted a birth announcement with photos, measurements, foot-prints, doctor's names and this little stroller that I drew for the printed announcements: 

 

Abdera is an open source Atom parser, generator, client and server tool-kit for Java. James Snell announced a new version of Apache Abdera (incubating) the other day and the feature list is impressive, especially for a "0.2.0" release. Here's an excerpt:

The goal of the Apache Abdera project is to build a functionally-complete, high-performance implementation of the IETF Atom Syndication Format (RFC 4287) and Atom Publishing Protocol (in-progress) specifications. [... incubator blah blah blah ...]

• A reworked API that improves usability
• Decoupled extensions from the underlying parser implementation
• An Atom Publishing Protocol client implementation
• Updated support for the current Atom Publishing Protocol draft specification
• Added support for Internationalized Resource Identifiers (IRIs)
• Improved Thread Safety
• Fixed a number of Classloader issues that kept Abdera from working properly in application server environments.
• Improved Javadocs
• Added test cases and sample code
• Added experimental Bidirectional Text support
• Improved implementation of OpenSearch v1.0 and v1.1 extensions
• Implementation of MediaRSS extensions
• Implementation of Feed Paging and Archiving extensions
• GoogleLogin Authentication Support

We might have to steal that IRI support for ROME. Actually, that's something that should be built right into the Java platform. Apparently IRI support was considered for Java SE 6 and something was implemented, but then rolled back.

Roumen: Visual tools for web development are a double-edged sword. They have their advantages and disadvantages. Some users love Visual Web Pack for what it provides but some of them go crazy because by using visual tools they lose a bit of control or they don't fit their development environment. So I'd like to discuss this topic, so that you can decide whether Visual Web Pack is for you or it is not.

A very thoughtful and balanced post from Netbeans evangelist Roumen Strobl that examines some of the reasons you might or might not want to use the new Netbeans Visual Web Pack.

In the past we've had up to ten attendees. A US congressman, an actual female and once even Sam Ruby showed up, but since Cafe Cyclo shutdown and we moved to Helios it's been just Josh and I. That's fine and all, Josh's a great guy, but we'd really dig some company. So come on down and entertain us with stories of your fascinating blog-related legal troubles, sinister government conspiracies you've exposed via podcast, that band you saw last night or maybe just the time you forgot the HTML tag for making text blink. Did I mention they make a great latte at Helios? They have beer too.

When: First and third Tuesdays of every month at 6:30PM

Where: Helios Coffee (Map)

413 Glenwood Avenue
Raleigh, NC 27603
919.838.5177

In case you haven't heard the news or followed my Latest Links: at an analyst conference last week IBM announced a new server-side product suite called Ventura that includes blogging, social bookmarking and social networking. Ventura is Java EE-based, runs on Websphere (with DB2 or Oracle) and the blog server component is based on Apache Roller (incubating) 3.1. That's the very same version of Roller that we're currently running at blogs.sun.com.

So how do I feel about it? I'm thrilled to see IBM contributing to, building on and supporting the Roller project. No matter how you cut it, that's good news for Roller users including those at blogs.sun.com who are already benefiting from IBM's contributions (e.g. tagging support in 3.1). Of course to be honest, I'm also a little disappointed that Sun isn't shipping and supporting a Roller distribution -- that's always been one of my goals. Sun has put heck of a lot of engineering time into Roller, helped to grow the community in the Apache incubator and benefitted greatly via blogs.sun.com -- it sure would be nice to share those benefits with our customers by offering service and support.