Blogging Roller

Last year during my family's vacation to Ocracoke, I wrote the first draft of the Roller article. There is not a whole lot to do on Ocracoke Island (which is exactly what I like in a vacation) and I had a lot of time during "quiet time" and in the evenings after the kids had gone to sleep. This year, we vacationed at Folly Beach outside of Charleston. We had vistors during most of our vacation, and we made several trips to Charleston.  So I had enough time to read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy again, but no time for Roller development.

I took a laptop along with me on vacation and I'm glad that I did. Roller mailing-list activity really picked up during the week. In addition to the usual installation questions, several folks are getting serious about contributing to Roller development. Matt Raible contributed an XHTML/CSS based theme for Roller and some new Velocity directives for theme support. Bala Murali is studying the Roller architecture and is very interested in building an "enterprise aggregator" based on and integrated into Roller. JSP expert Lance Lavandowska has also expressed interest in helping out with development - once he untangles the crazy (and quite possibly too complex) Xdoclet web that I have woven.  I'm hoping all these eyes on the code and going to lead to some real improvements in the Roller code base and architecture.  I'm also hoping that some of these smart people are going to become Roller committers in the next month or so.