Blogging Roller

One year ago on this day I wrote that Sun Microsystems is willing to contribute Project SocialSite" to the Apache Software Foundation. My contacts at Sun told me it was OK to make that announcement because a VP approved. One year later, we have established Apache SocialSite (incubating) project, setup user accounts, put up a status page and setup source code control but we still have no code from Sun.

Since March 2009 I've been exchanging emails with my helpful contacts at Sun and trying to help them move forward with the contribution, but because of the ongoing Oracle/Sun merger things have moved incredibly slowly. Finally in late December 2009, my Sun contacts had permission to actually release the code to Apache, but there was a problem.

When Sun said that they were willing to contribute the SocialSite code to Apache, I figured that they would do so using the standard Software Grant agreement that was used for Roller and all other projects entering Apache via the Incubator. Unfortunately, the Sun lawyers did not want to use the standard Software Grant agreement and Apache did and does not want to devise a new legal agreement just to accommodate Sun. That's where we stand today. Sun committed to contributing SocialSite to Apache and now we're waiting for Oracle/Sun to follow through on that commitment.

Meanwhile, others have been making some progress with SocialSite. A major sports brand has launched a SocialSite based network with a million-plus users. A couple of developers have rewritten the build script to use Maven, others have "ported" to JBoss and there is still interest in and a need for what was Sun's Project SocialSite. Neither effort has contributed code back to SocialSite-proper and because of legal concerns are waiting for the main code to appear at Apache.

SocialSite is a small project and it will not survive for much longer with resources spread across multiple sites and a community working separately. So, I'm asking again and publicly: Oracle, please follow through on your commitment and grant the Project SocialSite codebase to Apache.

I've been switching around between the Eclipse, Netbeans and IntelliJ IDEs at home and at work. I've found that fiddling around with multiple IDE specific project configurations and launchers and class-paths is no fun at all. That's one of the reasons I got interested in Maven. Yes, Maven is a build-system but it's also a sort of IDE portability solution. Maven projects can be loaded right into all the major Java IDEs as you can see in the screenshots below. IDEs can find your sources, resources, dependencies and via the Maven Jetty plugin even run your Java webapps from the IDE -- things that are not possible if you're using a custom Ant build-script as we were doing before with Roller.

Here some screenshots that show the various Maven IDE plugins and their dependency graph feature.

Here's Roller loaded into Eclipse via the Maven M2 Eclipse plugin.

<img src="http://lh4.ggpht.com/_gRyDsh__fr0/S5JXdBQRLNI/AAAAAAAAAdE/nlZukqREyjI/s288/e3-roller-maven.png" alt="Roller / Maven Eclipse 3.5 / M2Eclipse" />

By the way, if you want detailed instructions for getting Roller 5 up and running in Eclipse with the Eclipse Web tooling, check-out Harald Wellman's helpful blog on the topic: Setting up Eclipse for Roller.

Here's Roller loaded into Netbeans as a Maven project.

And here's Roller loaded into IDEA IntelliJ as a Maven project.

I'm not sure which I prefer yet.

I was a Maven hater and resisted it for a long time but over the years Maven has gotten much better, it's well supported in IDEs and as far as I can tell, Maven has replaced Ant as the de facto build system for Java projects. If you want new developers be able to easily build, debug and run your code via command or their favorite IDE then Maven is the way to go, and that's especially true for open source projects like Roller.

That's why I spent a couple of weekends learning Maven and converting Roller's build process from Ant to Maven (ROL-1849). The process of conversion wasn't too difficult. Getting dependencies under control was a pain, but it believe it will be a one time pain and a worthwhile one. What took the most time was figuring out how to get Maven to start Derby, create the Roller tables and then run Roller's JUnit tests. Also, getting Maven's Jetty plugin setup to run Roller was a little tricky but hopefully also a one-time pain. The result is that Roller now uses a standard and well known directory structure, dependencies are managed and it's easier for developers to get started with the codebase.

If you have Maven and Subversion installed on your computer then these commands will fetch the Roller source code, compile the code, run all JUnit tests and then build the Roller webapp:

   svn co https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/roller/trunk roller_trunk
   cd roller_trunk 
   mvn install

And once all that is done, the following commands will start the Jetty app server, start the Derby database and start Roller at http://localhost:8080/roller, ready for testing, experimentation, etc.

   cd weblogger-web
   mvn jetty:run-war

I think that's pretty damn useful.

Here are some articles/links that influenced my thinking on Maven recently:

• Comparing Build Systems - Adrian Sutton concludes that Maven is too much work but "the consistency in how a project is built that the Maven project has brought to the Java would is absolutely revolutionary"
• Maven in our development process - Sherali Karimov explains how Atlassian and says the need for Maven training is "the most important and most overlooked issue of all."
• Sonatype - The Maven Company. Founded in 2008 by Jason van Zyl, the creator of Maven. Offers training, support and the Nexus Professional repo manager.