Blogging Roller

There are quite a number of Social Software related talks at JavaOne and CommunityOne this year. You can learn about everything from building Social Networks with the Liferay portal and federated relationships with OpenSSO to creating 3D virtual works and implementing OpenSocial with Java. And, I'll finally be able to talk about what I've been working on for the past couple of months -- more about that later. [Read More]

I remember how freaked-out I was to see the referrer hits start rolling in (pun fully intended) from http://blogs.sun.com/roller. I can't believe it's been four years already. Thanks to Linda for the reminder.

BarCamp RDU 2008 is on!

The date is Saturday August 2, 2008 and, like last year and the year before, the event will be held in Red Hat's offices at the N.C. State University Centennial Campus. Sign-up is already open and the limited space is filling-up quickly, so if you're interested then please go ahead a sign up on the BarCamp RDU wiki.

• Skrocki's Blog: WOOHOO Sun Blogs sees its 100,000th blog post!!!
  Pat Chanezon made the first post, not sure who made the 100,000th
• Mark Fortner: how to publish to Roller via Google Docs
  "Google Docs 'publish' feature allows you to publish a doc as a blog entry."
• Chandra Chan: Using wbloggar 4 with JRoller version 3
  "using the new version of w.bloggar version 4.03"


• Jean-Francois Arcand: Jersey 0.7 released...with a tiny taste of Grizzly Comet Support
  "gives us a couple weeks and we gonna have something really amazing"
• Earthly Powers: Jersey 0.7 released
  "many additions and clarifications to the API" plus Comet support
• NetBeans 6.1 RC2: Let the IDE Do The Web Services Plumbing For You
  "brings support for web services from Google, Amazon, Facebook and others"


• ZDNet: Social networking will be biggest enterprise 2.0 priority by 2013
  "smaller businesses aren’t even considering, while the giants are diving in head first"
• Move Over Lotus Notes, SharePoint is Filling Yer Shoes
  "What Microsoft makes look easy — can quickly become a nightmare in the making"
• Joshua Marinacci: know of any good forum software?
  Comments suggest JForum, LifeRay message board and other Java options


• colmmacc: AWS, AppEngine and the future of data
  coping with the "fallout of using a planet instead of a hard-disk"
• Search Guy: Minion open source search engine from Sun Labs
  search "engine that ships with the Portal Server and Web Server"
• Unit Structures: Introducing Freedom
  "I find myself desperately searching out places where I can be network-free"

The Apache Abdera (incubating) project has released a new version of its Atom parser/generator, client library and all new AtomPub Server Framework. Here's the new feature list:

• A simplified server side framework and API for implementing services.
• Server side filter API for intercepting requests and impl. concerns such as security.
• A collection of pre-bundled AtomPub adapters for JDBC, JCR, filesystems, and CouchDB.
• An improved JSON serialization mechanism.
• New extensions such as OAuth support.
• New StreamWriter interface for fast Atom document serialization
• Improved Unicode performance for IRI implementation
• URI Template Support
• HTML Parser
• Many API improvements and bug fixes!

In related news, there's a proposal to use Abdera for the reference implementation of the OpenSocial REST APIs, which are under development by the Apache Shindig (incubating) project.

My former co-worker Linda Skrocki and Program Manager for Sun's community sites (blogs, wikis, planets, forums and mediacast at sun.com) got some well deserved recognition from ReadWriteWeb.com the other day. She was named one of <a href= "http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/seven_leading_corporate_social_media_evangelists_today.php"> Seven leading Corporate Social Media Evangelists. Congrats Linda!

I'm making final preparations for my trip to Amsterdam tomorrow for ApacheCon EU. I've been packing my bags with warm clothes and rehearsing my all-new talk Advanced Roller talk. Below are the details including the abstract and an outline of the slide deck.

Advanced Apache Roller

Apache Roller is a popular open source blog server designed to serve the needs of large multi-user blogging sites and typically used by large corporations, universities and government organizations. This session for managers, sysadmins and developers will goes beyond the Roller installation guide and explores the advanced issues of planning and executing a Roller deployment, including deployment architecture and configuration options as well as options for customization and automation.

• Introduction
  • Goals and Agenda
  • Caveats and disclaimers
  • RTFM
• Advanced Installation
  • Installs now easy
  • Perhaps too easy?
  • Using container managed resources
• TIP: customize the default blogroll
• Caching
  • Page and feed caching
  • Built-in cache implementations
  • Roller's four caches
  • Default cache settings
• TIP: choose themes carefully
• Authentication
  • Authentication options
  • But what about CMA?
  • Authentication limitations
  • User management changes coming in 4.1
• TIP: separate themes directory
• Deployment options
  • Deployment architecture: small
  • Deployment architecture: large
  • Sizing
• TIP: check the Roller Support project
• Caching with Memcached
  • Setting up Memcached
  • Configuring Roller Memcached plugin
• TIP: enable debug logging
• Scripting and automation options
  • AtomPub, RAP and calling Roller's Java API
  • Scripting RAP with Groovy
  • Scripting Roller's Java API with Groovy
• TIP: create your own Roller build
• Plugging in new functionality
  • Ten types of Roller plugins
  • Implementing a Page Model
• TIP: create your own Roller themes
• Questions and Answers

My talk is at 3PM Friday, April 11 and I'll post the final slides then.

The slides are available here:

http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/presentations/advanced-roller-aceu2008.pdf