Blogging Roller

So far, I've had a great time at ApacheCon. In fact, I'm already ready to say BEST CONFERENCE EVER! -- just based on the pre-conference activities. I've never been to a conference that focuses so much on coding. I spent Sunday in the "Hackathon" which a big ballroom full of tables, power strips, a big whiteboard, and wireless internet access for all. Every couple of hours, somebody brings in mass quantities of pizza and sodas. A perfect environment for hacking, collaboration, and geekly fun.

An introvert at heart, I sat down at an empty table and started working on testing Roller's new Atom API implementation with Ecto, but the table soon turned into a mini-Haus party when Brian Topping, Bob McWhirter, and Dan Diephouse showed up. Later the room started to fill up and I met more people than I'll try to list here but the first batch of people I remember is Ben Hyde, Sam Ruby, Ted Leung. Topics of discussion included RDF, Atom, XDoclet2, LGPL, Maven, and pros and cons of being an Apache project. Eventually, a bunch of us headed out check out the Freemont Street light show.

Roller gained at least one new fan today. Brian Topping just happened to be looking for blog engine for one of his current project, so when I told him about Roller he immediately hit the Roller CVS and started reverse engineering the Roller data model using MagicDraw. He wants to pull Roller into his existing project's data model, which is expressed in UML which is used as the basis for code generation. He generates everything from the model. I'm very interested in seeing where he goes with this. As we start to add features like publishing workflow and auditing, the Roller data model will grow more complex and Brian's model-driven approach might become very attractive for Roller. My biggest problem with this is the fact that UML tools like MagicDraw cost money and are not open source -- we can't require Roller developers to buy tools to participate in development. Maybe ArgoUML is an alternative?

Brian also started working on a Maven build for Roller. Maven looks very cool, but I've never had the time or inclination to Mavenize Roller. Personally, I think that anybody doing serious development with multiple projects, modules, and inter-dependencies needs something like Maven and I've seen Maven like systems before. For smaller projects, Maven may be overkill. Perhaps Roller is one of those smaller projects, but when Brian finishes his Maven script, we should consider adding it to Roller (in the post-1.0 main branch).