Blogging Roller

via <a href= "http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/jspwiki_and_xwiki_evaluations">Jim Grisanzio: Chris Phelan has done evaluations of <a href= "http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=64619&tstart=0">JSPWiki and XWiki for use on the OpenSolaris.org site. Based on his 32 requirements, XWiki came out on top.

On balance, XWiki wins by virtue of having better support for management, searching, page taxonomies, virtual servers, content export and language translation/localization support.

JSPWiki has slightly better support for identifying orphaned pages and accesskey support (XWiki 1.4 will have support for access keys).

Confluence was not considered because requirement #0 is "the software must be free and open source," which seems like a reasonable request when selecting software for an open source community site.

I'm still working through my backlog of Latest Links posts. First up, the OpenSocial links. I'm following OpenSocial closely because OpenSocial support is one of the key features of the new project I'm working on (Project SocialSite).

There were a bunch of OpenSocial related sessions at Google's I/O conference and they're all online. I especially like this one, OpenSocial: A Standard for the Social Web, which includes Google's Pat Chanezon discussing Project SocialSite, starting at 43:07 and on slides 70 and 71:

Here are the links:

• Google I/O Sessions
  Speaker videos and slides for each. Lots of OpenSocial sessions
• OpenSocial Summit Presentations, Notes, & Videos
  Very nice summary of summit via links
• AOL Joins OpenSocial
  "AOL’s first steps will be to implement Gadgets on myAOL.com."

I'm also following Google's FriendConnect pretty closely, which is a model similar to Project SocialSite -- but, and this is my opinion, for smaller sites that do not want to build and manage their own social graph. It's conceivable that Project SocialSite could one day implement FriendConnect, thereby allowing folks from a Project SocialSite-backed site to join into FriendConnect based sites. At any rate, here's what I've read about Friend Connect so far:

• Google Code Blog: How Google Friend Connect Works
  "how it works on the Friend Connect side with respect to users' information."
• Marc Cantor on Friend Connect, et. al. - I do not compromise
  "They’re all keeping their member’s data on their servers, while sending out tentacles to mesh in with as many outside sites as they can."
• Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Some Thoughts on Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect and...
  "Recently there were three vaporware announcements by Facebook, Google and MySpace"
• A Few Thoughts on How to Improve Google Friend Connect
  "Once people begin using it, gain the ability to add gadgets from other networks or build gadgets based on friend connect, and it catches on — then the show will begin."
• Gigya Socialize Goes Up Against Google Friend Connect
  "a startup known for distributing widgets across social networks, blogs and other social media platforms, is getting into the mix"

Here's another link blog post. In this one I'll explain why my del.icio.us feed is full of guitar tabs. I've been spending some time Away From Keyboard and near to fretboard. Since my 11 year old son Alex is learning guitar I've been doing the same and making some good progress. I've noodled around on bass for years, but never spent much time with guitar. I've always known the basic chords, but that's about it. Now I've finally learned how to string and "sing" at the same time and so I've been looking for good, fun and easy songs to play. Here are the ones I've found so far, straight from my bookmarks feed:

• Animals – (House of the Rising Sun tab)
  
• Connells – 74-75 tab
  
• Connells – Fun & Games tab
  
• Costello, Elvis – (What's So Funny tab)
  
• Creedence Clearwater Revival – (Who'll Stop the Rain tab)
  
• Creedence Clearwater Revival – (Lodi tab)
  
• Creedence Clearwater Revival – (Have You Ever Seen the Rain tab)
  
• Cure – (Love Song tab)
  
• Diamond, Neil – (Solitary Man tab)
  
• <a href= "http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/tabs/g/grateful_dead/friend_of_the_devil_ver2_tab.htm"> Grateful Dead - (Friend Of The Devil tab)
  
• Grateful Dead - (Ripple tab)
  
• REM – (Driver 8 tab)
  

You can probably guess my age now

Here are a couple more kinda sorta related links from the feed.

• Interactive Guitar chord explorer
  Very nice Flash interface for viewing chords, playing them, etc.
• Live review: R.E.M. drives the past into the present
  REM "has come full circle, treating the old and new with the same vigor and precision"
• YouTube - Connells @ Borders: 74-75
  2000 or 2001, in Chapel Hill, NC

I bookmarked that REM review because we attended that show last week. We took a bunch of kids and had a blast. REM played a bunch of their very early songs like 7 Chinese Brothers and Pretty Persuasion. The kids (from 5 to 11 years old) danced like fools on pogo-sticks the whole time.

And finally, here's something here's something not in my bookmarks feed; the Epiphone G-310 I bought for about $230 last weekend.

It's time to catch up on blogging and I'm going to start by going through my backlog of links and adding some commentary, but not in this post; these are miscellaneous links that don't fit nicely into my other posts.

• Slashdot | Why Google Should Embrace OpenOffice.org
  "If Google really wanted to deliver a knockout punch to Microsoft, it would integrate OpenOffice with Google Docs" -- and pump some money into OOo development
• Headius: The Power of the JVM
  "And while JRuby and Groovy will probably spend the next few months one-upping each other, we've both proven something far more important: the JVM is an *excellent* platform for dynamic languages. Don't let anyone tell you it's not."
• SpringSource Blog - Open Source, Open Strategy
  My 141 char summary: open source good, but we need money. we won't relicense existing parts, but we'll GPL the full-stack so we alone can ride it to the bank
• Kohsuke Kawaguchi: GlassFish v3 just got embeddable
  "GlassFish glassfish = new GlassFish(); glassfish.minimallyConfigure(8080);"
• Derby: Using the bulk import and export procedures
  closest thing to mysqldump in Derby land
• Core team statement on replication in PostgreSQL
  "it is time to include a simple, reliable basic replication feature in the core system"
• Distributed Caching with Memcached
  Nice how-it-works article on memcached.

Nick Lothian tweeted about this JavaOne presentation on LinkedIn because it mentions the ROME RSS/Atom feed parser. I'm really sorry I missed it at JavaOne. What's particularly interesting to me are the diagrams that explain how the LinkedIn architecture has evolved to scale up to 22 million users. Here's an example:

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/linkedin-today.png" alt="LinkedIn architecture diagram" />

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/barcamprdu.png" align="right" alt="BarCamp RDU logo" />

After attending two great BarCamps here in Raleigh, I'm just as pleased as punch to be helping out on the BarCamp RDU organizing committee this year.

We put out the call for sponsors a couple of weeks ago and thanks to some generous sponsors including iContact, Canonical, rPath, Brian Russell, OpenNMS and Montie Design we quickly met 65% of our small budget. Now we need to wrap things up, money-wise. If you'd like to get some great positive exposure among the best and brightest in the local tech community by sponsoring, here's your chance.

If you're interested in sponsoring or helping out as a volunteer, contact me via email for more info (dave.johnson at rollerweblogger.org). If you're interested in attending, you'll have to add your name to the waiting list -- at this point we're sold out.