Blogging Roller

I took the FreeRoller system down briefly to patch the index.jsp page and then found that, now that it is hosted on a JavaLobby server, I did not have permission to bring it back up (doh!). Later, the system crashed because (somehow) the export-user feature had become re-enabled and somebody tried to use it. BOOM! Export-user is a sure fire way to blow up Roller. Needless to say, I disabled Export-user before I restarted FreeRoller. Other than that, FreeRoller is holding up nicely at JavaLobby.

Export-user was really easy to implement and it worked well for a small data-set (on a machine with no traffic). I used Castor-JDO to load a user object and the user's entire object-graph from the database and into memory: pages, blog entries, bookmarks, folders, categories, etc. Then I use Castor-XML to serialize the entire object-graph to XML. The whole deal is about 15 lines of code which is great, but it locks up the FreeRoller everytime which is not so great.

I'm not sure what to do about export in Roller 0.9.7, or even if we'll have export in Roller 0.9.7. Maybe I should allow users to export blog entries in RSS format, bookmarks in OPML format, and page templates as text. It would be nice to wrap everything up in one nice tidy bundle instead of separate files that must be pieced back together later. Export should probably be an asynchronous operation: you request export and later you get an email telling you where you can download the exported data file - possibly a specially formatted ZIP file that cna easily be imported into another Roller installation. Any ideas? Any volunteers? ;-)