Blogging Roller

Evans Data Corp. is doing a survey on Web 2.0 development and they've included some interesting questions on social networking:

• How is your organization using Social Networking?
• What is keeping your organization from using Social Networking now?
• Why are you planning to use Social Networking technology?
• Which of these Social Networking APIs are you most interested in developing with?
• What are your plans for OpenSocial?
• What are your plans for developing Facebook applications?

I mentioned the Social Software for Glassfish (SSG) EA2 release before the winter break, but I never got around to posting any details. Since then some documentation has appeared, Manveen Kaur blogged it, The Aquarium too and now screen-cast master Arun Gupta has created an excellent Social Software for Glassfish screencast that walks you through the features in this very early access release. Now I don't have to say nearly as much.

In case you're not following the Blackbox blog, the Sun Modular Data Center is coming to the Triangle on March 12, 2008. The event will be hosted at the SAS Institute campus in Cary, NC. Here's the blurb:

Join us and enjoy presentations and tours throughout the day of Sun's Modular Datacenter, the world's first datacenter in a box - a 6.1 meter (20 foot) shipping container. Also known as Project Blackbox, this is a virtualized datacenter optimized for extreme energy, space, and performance efficiency. It applies Sun's trademark innovation and network computing infrastructure expertise to engineer out complexity and provide a whole new alternative for quickly adding datacenter capacity anywhere it's needed, with the ability to move it as business needs change. Because of its modular, high density design, the Sun Modular Datacenter packs more heterogeneous compute power in less space than a traditional datacenter, and can be configured, deployed, and quickly modified and redeployed for another project virtually anywhere worldwide.

Interested? The sign up is here.

I've been very happy with the choice of Struts 2 for Roller, but I still follow JSF because it's the Java standard. A couple of articles by Ryan Lubke about what's coming in JSF 2.0 got me thinking about JSF again.

• Ryan Lubke's Blog: JSF 2.0 New Feature Preview Series, pt. 2.1: Resources
  "Previous versions of JSF had no facility for serving resources"
• Ryan Lubke's Blog: JSF 2.0 New Feature Preview, pt. 1: ProjectStage
  "the JSF 2.0 EG has given a nod to Ruby on Rails' RAILS_ENV functionality"

One of my problems with JSF is REST. REST fans say JSF is inherently RESTless because every JSF request is a POST. JSF advocates say JSF can do GET and bookmarkable URLs if necessary and that's good enough.

• Bill de hora on JSF and REST
  "JSF is clearly not focused on or suitable for working in the REST style to the extent REST principles seem to be actively excluded from the design."
• Gavin King on JSF and REST
  "On these community sites that claim you can't build restful application with JSF. I mean it is total nonsense. It is not even remotely true."
• Gavin's JSF bookmarkable URL example
  In the comments thread of an anti-JSF story at The Server Side.

Fortunately, the plans for JSF 2.0 indicate that REST improvements are coming:

• Java.Net TWik: JSF 2.0 Requirements Scratchpad
  Mentions REST API (JSR-311) and navigation without using POST
• JSR-314: JavaServer Faces 2.0
  "Allow JSF application resources to be accessed via REST" and "Add support for REST (JSR 311)"

Unfortunately, it sounds like all they're planning to do is make it easier to create bookmarkable URLs and add some support for the JSF-311 REST API. Why can't the goal be to make JSF applications RESTful by default? Why can't JSF ensure that POST is only used when required by the application (not the framework) and JSF URLs are simple, clean and always bookmarkable.

Michael Kimsal did an informal survey of computer language use and religion on his blog a couple of weeks ago. The results don't seem very surprising to me. Like Alan Turing, Linus Torvolds and Richard Stallman, most developers are either atheists or agnostics.

Here's Michael's pie chart for Java:

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/godlesshackers.jpg" alt="pie chart showing half of Java developers are atheists" />

• More on MySpace’s Open Development Platform - GigaOM
  "made up of three APIs — primarily Open Social and extensions we’ve added"
• ZDNet.com: Progress report on the OpenSocial Web
  Summary of latest OpenSocial news and hackathons from Dan Farber
• Facebook to Punish Stupid Applications, Reward Good Ones - ReadWriteWeb
  "Metered messaging based on user engagement could save the Facebook Platform from a growing sense of app fatigue"
• Roumen's Weblog: Android plug-in for NetBeans
  "the screenshots look promising"
• Rob Williams' Blog: finally ditched LifeRay
  "we have finally ditched Liferay in favor of JBoss Portal. So far so good. It is much more stable. The code base is not a rat's nest of untested Struts goop."
• Indoor WiFi Signal Booster by Meraki
  "Meraki Mini is a small, easy-to-use wireless mesh repeater."

Apparently, CISCO has a pretty active internal blog server and it's running Roller. I can tell from my referrer logs. If any CISCO folks are reading this, drop me a line. I'd love to know how Roller and internal blogging in general is working out for you.

Via social media maven Wayne Sutton, I learned about this interesting event:

Ignite Social Media blog: Our discussion leader this month will be Lee White, who will guide us in a conversation about social media and Enterprise 2.0. Lee brings his expertise from GlaxoSmithKline where he was the Sr. Manager of Social Media Development and will be speaking of how to “Re-imagine the Organization with Social Media”. Here are the crucial details:

Location: Calvert Holdings - 1225 Crescent Green, Suite115 Cary, NC 27518
Date/Time: Wednesday, February 20th @ 5:30pm - 6:30pm
Topic: Social Media and Enterprise 2.0

Follow that link and RSVP if you are interested in attending. That's what I did.

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/perse.jpg" alt="tiny image of Persepolis movie poster" align="left" hspace="10px" border="0" />

Yesterday, I saw Persepolis. I thought it was great. The artwork was beautiful, the characters Marjane and her grandmother were wonderful and the story really took hold. I dragged the older boys (10 and 11) along and that was probably mistake, not because of the occasional bad language and a couple violent images -- but simply because of the subtitles. The whole thing is in French and they had a hard time following along, especially at the start. I wonder why the Galaxy didn't show the English-dubbed version, because there is one with the voices of Iggy Pop and Sean Penn. Guess that's a good excuse for watching it again when it comes out on DVD.

Kenai was announced yesterday at the Sun Analyst Summit (SAS 2008):

It was mentioned in Software VP <a href= "http://www.sun.com/events/sas2008/docs/07_Green_Software_SAS_2008.pdf">Rich Green's presentation.
I think that's just about all I can say on the topic.

And by the way, the audio and slides for all of the SAS 2008 presentations are online now. Ian Murdock's presentation is especially good, as Redmonk's James Governor tweeted yesterday "Ian Murdoch (the ian of debian) is doing a phenomenal job of explaining what Linux, and distributions are. A great education for analysts."

I missed this one in my social networking API link-fest yesterday: Google announced version 0.7 of the OpenSocial API, some of the data APIs are outlined in the spec and they're still using AtomPub protocol (just like GData).

I had heard there was some push-back against AtomPub, but I really don't know what is going on because there is no transparency at all in the specification development process. So, who knows, but I really don't think they have time to invent an all new protocol. In fact, they'd better wrap things up tout de suite because Google's planning to go live with OpenSocial on Orkut during the last week of February.

Here are my links for the past week or so and notes about social networking APIs, using the web itself as a social network, JMaki, Abdera and more. [Read More]