Blogging Roller

A drop-in replacement with 50% to 400% speed improvement? That sounds too good to be true.

Matt Raible: The main improvement in Maven 3 is speed. It's been performance tuned to be 50% to 400% faster. Benchmarks (guaranteed by integration tests) include better: Disk I/O, Network I/O, CPU and Memory. Another new feature is extensibility so Maven is a better library rather than just a command-line tool. Now there's a library and APIs that you can use to do the things that Maven does. Plexus has been replaced with Guice and it's now much easier to embed Maven (Polyglot Maven and Maven Shell are examples of this).

Apparently it is not entirely true, at least not yet (Maven 3.0 is still in beta). I tried switching to Maven 3 for the Roller 5 build and hit several build errors related to class-loading and JPA byte-code enhancement.

Here's summary of last week's OpenSocial State of the Union, including news of two new board members: Cody Simms from Yahoo and Jason Gary from IBM:

Mark Weitzel (on behalf of the OpenSocial Foundation): The event started off with introductions of the Foundation Board members and officers. Cody Simms is Yahoo!’s corporate designate. IBM is a new corporate member and has designated Jason Gary as their representatives. Welcome Cody and Jason. The complete list of your Foundation Officers and Board Members is in the FAQs.

In addition to new corporate members of the OpenSocial Foundation Board, there are two community seats available. Anyone is able to serve on the board. The only requirement to nominate or hold the position is that you must be a member of the OpenSocial Foundation. There are no membership fees to join OpenSocial. All you need to do is fill out a simple on-line membership application.

It’s been an exciting year and a half for OpenSocial! We’ve seen continued adoption of the specification as new containers come on line. Perhaps what is more interesting is that we are starting to see OpenSocial adoption outside of “traditional” social networks. This includes adoption by enterprise vendors such as Jive, Atlassian, and IBM.

Ceki Gülcü: Instead of trying to learn from past failures which open discussion is supposed to encourage, Apache forges on in the path of egalitarianism. As time passes, I see attempts at institutionalizing egalitarianism instead of recognizing its inherent injustice. If egalitarianism is really at the core of the Apache way as an absolute value, then the Apache way sucks. Yay!

While the one person one vote principle applies to a democracy in order to run a country for the benefit of all, the one person one vote principle is ill-suited in a purported meritocracy the size of Apache. If it must be "one developer one vote", then the word meritocracy cannot be honestly ascribed to Apache.

Very interesting discussion and comments on the dynamics of meritocracy at the Apache Software Foundation from Ceki Gülcü.

Remkus de Vries: The sixth point is where it get’s tricky however. “People or companies in violation of the WordPress license cannot be accepted as event organizers or sponsors“. Does this mean we have to block out sponsors as Microsoft and the likes? They are clearly not GPL compliant, and don’t get me wrong, I’m very much in favor of the GPL license, but this does not sound right to me. Same goes for speakers, what if you have perfect speaker and he or she is willing to help out, but because they work for a company that does not support the GPL they won’t be allowed to come? That can’t be right. I can understand that we should try to get behind the GPL as much as possible whenever a WordCamp event is being organized, but I don’t think it is humanly possible to conduct a background check on all sponsors and speakers.

Wordcamp as the front-line of Wordpress GPL enforcement measures? Weird, but I don't see the problem with Microsoft because, as far as I know, they don't distribute Wordpress code and thus cannot be violating the Wordpress GPL license.

Ellison says he learned that Sun's pony-tailed chief executive, Jonathan Schwartz, ignored problems as they escalated, made poor strategic decisions and spent too much time working on his blog, which Sun translated into 11 languages.

"The underlying engineering teams are so good, but the direction they got was so astonishingly bad that even they couldn't succeed," said Ellison. "Really great blogs do not take the place of great microprocessors. Great blogs do not replace great software. Lots and lots of blogs does not replace lots and lots of sales."

Ouch! I guess Ellison isn't going to be signing up for an account on blogs.sun.com anytime soon. At least he acknowledges the "really great blogs."

Lot's of activity in the OpenID and OAuth space recently. Both OAuth and OpenID have suffered from bad user experience, bad developer experience and low adoption. Now they're in the process of re-invention and folks from both Google and Facebook are involved. Here's my reading list so far on the topic:

• IETF OAuth working group - The OAuth 2.0 Protocol - draft-ietf-oauth-v2-05 is the latest draft of OAuth 2.0, published about two weeks ago.
• Eran Hammer-Lahav - Introducing OAuth 2.0 is an excellent overview of what's different and new about OAuth 2.0, listing the six new flows that are supported including a username/password flow.
• David Recordon (Facebook) - OpenID Connect: A strawman... is a proposal for "OpenID Connect" a standard way to do what Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect today, allow users to login sites with either their Facebook, Google or other identity provider credentials.
• Chris Messina (Google) - Combining OpenID and OAuth with OpenID Connect covers the thinking behind OpenID Connect and the expansion of the "OpenID brand."
• Michael Calore (WebMonkey) - New ‘OpenID Connect’ Proposal Could Solve Many of the Social Web’s Woes covers motivations behind OpenID Connect, problems with OAuth and OpenID.
• Joseph Holsten - Your New New Web Identity another nice overview of the new OpenID and OAuth ideas, pushes back against dropping/reinventing of OpenID Attribute Exchange.
• Tantek Celic - I'm calling bullshit on #OpenID Connect. Still too complex, ... is about one run-on tweet's worth of contructive criticism

IBM is going to be at Google I/O again this year, talking about OpenSocial and giving demos of new OpenSocial features in IBM products. Randy Hudson of IBM/Rational will be there to show how OpenSocial Gadgets can be used in Jazz-based product dashboards (introduced in Jazz Foundation 3.0 Milestone 5).

And IBM's Mark Weitzel, who happens to be an officer of the OpenSocial Foundation, will participate in panel discussion on Best practices for implementing OpenSocial in the Enterprise.

Best practices for implementing OpenSocial in the Enterprise

Social Web, Enterprise - Mark Weitzel, Matt Tucker, Mark Halvorson, Helen Chen, Chris Schalk

Enterprise deployments of OpenSocial technologies brings an additional set of considerations that may not be apparent in a traditional social network implementation. In this session, several enterprise vendors will demonstrate how they've been working together to address these issues in a collection of "Best Practices". This session will also provide a review of existing challenges for enterprise implementations of OpenSocial.

Session type: 201
Attendee requirements: General understanding of OpenSocial technologies. Some Enterprise experience is also recommended.
Tags: OpenSocial, Enterprise
Hashtag: #socialweb7

Date: Thursday May 20
Time: 1:00pm-2:00pm
Room: 9

It's kind of surprising to me that JIRA does not have a "REST API." Looking on the bright side, this may be an opportunity for Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) to show its value, so back in March I made a little pitch in the appropriate JIRA issue:

JIRA-19796 - REST API for JIRA

Dave Johnson added a comment - 10/Mar/10 9:24 AM - edited

You should consider making the JIRA REST API conformant with the Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) interface for Change Management (OSLC-CM). This would allow JIRA to integrate with ALM tools from IBM, Oracle, Rally, SourceGear, etc. The Mylyn folks are already involved. Here's the link to the OSLC-CM home page: http://open-services.net/bin/view/Main/CmHome. OSLC-CM v1 is the current spec and work on v2 is underway. It's an open effort and we'd love JIRA and/or JIRA users to join in and help us define v2.

Congrats to Simon Phipps on what sounds like a great new job at ForgeRock and on his new column in ComputerWorld.UK.

One of the key benefits to customers of the source code becoming open source is that, in the event a product is discontinued by its owner, a group of people from the community can simply pick up the source code and keep on maintaining and improving it. That's a radical change from proprietary products, which can be killed stone dead with no appeal. With open source, the company may fold but the community carries on.

That's all fine in theory, but does it actually work? I intend to find out. Starting this week, I'm joining ForgeRock as chief strategy officer.

Be nice to your software

Unfortunately, she's right on the money with that remark.

Funny that "buy your own damn computer" can be spun as a benefit, but it works for me.

Apple Insider: Following the general trend away from top-down, centralized corporate computing monoculture, Kraft Foods has initiated a "Bring Your Own Computer" program for its employees, providing new support for employees who want to use a Mac.

Kraft's new employee initiative "gives you the freedom to choose the right computer for your lifestyle," according to the fact sheet the company distributed to employees. The program is described as "best suited for employees who want to use a particular type of computer that isn’t currently supplied or supported by Kraft Foods, such as a Mac," and prefer to take their work system home, "have the experience and know-how to take care of their own technical support," and "work out of the office on a regular basis."

Mac-based weblog editor MarsEdit v3.0 has just been released by Red Sweater Software.

Because MarsEdit v3.0 supports the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), it works with Apache Roller 5.0RC1's new and improved AtomPub support right out of the box. I'm writing this post in MarsEdit right now and publishing to Roller 5 via APP.

MarsEdit includes a rich text editor and supports image upload via drag-and-drop into the editor. You can edit a draft post locally or use Send to Blog to send the draft to the server for further editing before publish. You can specify multiple tags for your post and MarsEdit will send them to Roller as tags.

Generally, I prefer to edit my HTML by hand but for somebody who wants simplicity and a familiar Mac interface, MarsEdit v3.0 looks like a great choice. And the HTML it generates doesn't look too bad.

Here's a screenshot that shows what MarsEdit looks like when editing a post:

Here are the settings I'm using (URLs changed to protect the innocent).

MarsEdit is $39.95 and there's a 30-day free and fully-function trial version available too.

Dan Yoder's 10 reasons are all good ones, but I'm still on Facebook. My take: if you assume that *everything* you do and share on Facebook is public, and you know how to hide the annoying games, then Facebook ain't so bad.

Dan Yoder: While social networking is a fun new application category enjoying remarkable growth, Facebook isn't the only game in town. I don't like their application nor how they do business and so I've made my choice to use other providers. And so can you.

It's been a while since the BETA (over 6 months) but we now have a release candidate for Apache Roller 5.0 available for testing. This site is running Apache Roller 5.0 RC1 right now, as you can see in the itty bitty screenshot below:

Here's a What's New in Roller 5.0 page that summarizes what has changed since 4.0. One thing I forgot to mention on that page was that Roller now uses ROME Propono 1.0 for AtomPub and Roller 5.0's AtomPub support has been successfully tested with MarsEdit and Windows Live Writer.

I like the approach and wonder why XML RPC and JSON RPC don't work this way.

James Snell: Step one is to realize that HTTP is the envelope. You don’t need a special new XML data format, you don’t need new security token formats in custom must-understand headers, you don’t need special endpoint description languages that describe exactly how to tell your software development code to automatically generated client code for you. You just need a URI, HTTP, a request message and a response message.

Interesting essay by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on the huge shift we're experiencing in the computing/tech industry with wide spread adoption of mobile tech, social web and cloud computing.

Marc Benioff: Facebook’s success, as well as the rise of other new technologies like YouTube, devices like the iPhone and the iPad and models like Cloud Computing are evidence of a huge shift happening in computing — and it’s bigger than anything we have seen before. And although Microsoft is a casualty, it certainly is not the cause. This is the fundamental nature of our industry in which every 10 years or so a radical new paradigm of computing emerges. From mainframes (70s) to minicomputers (80s) to PCs and LANs (90s) to Cloud 1-the desktop Internet (2000s) to Cloud 2-the mobile Internet (2010+), we can safely say that the only constant in the last 50 years of computing is change. And no company or individual can escape the velocity of change of our industry.