Blogging Roller

It's been a while since I did a status report, so here are some updates on the public projects I'm working on at work and in my off-hours.

Roller 1.3 released: it's been announced on the project blog and is now available on Java.Net. It's a minor bug fix release and I expect that most sites will want to wait for Roller 2.0 instead of installing 1.3.

Roller 2.0 release on the way: blogs.sun.com has been running a Roller 2.0-based build for a couple of weeks now, but the Roller project still hasn't packaged up a final release. We've been testing a release candidate of Roller 2.0, doing final testing and debugging. We may be able to release 2.0 within the next week, depending on how testing goes. Unfortunately Javalobby is running into some problems will the upgrade process and they may turn out to be 2.0 bugs. Want to know more about Roller 2.0? Check the Roller 2.0 documentation summary page.

Roller 2.1 development starting: it will focus on spam prevention/management and performance improvements, for details check the Roller 2.1 proposal page.

The Roller@Apache move: Roller has been in the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Incubator for about five months now. Roller code is in ASF's Subversion repository, a status page is in place, dev/user discussions take place on the ASF mailing lists and our ASF mentors are listening in and advising us. The Roller dev community seems to be growing, thriving and recently, really pulling together to get 1.3 and 2.0 out the door. That's all good, but there have been some hold-ups.

Nothing is holding up Roller development, but we've been waiting for ASF's new LGPL license policy. We will eventually have to deal with our LGPL dependency, but until ASF announces its new LGPL policy, we won't know exactly what we need to do.

Recently there was some question about whether we should be allowed to make the Roller 1.3 and Roller 2.0 releases, since they contain and depend on LGPL licensed components (most notably Hibernate). We resolved that bit of controversy and are now cleared to release Roller 1.3 (which we did) and Roller 2.0 (coming soon). Since we're in the ASF Incubator, our releases are not official/endorsed ASF releases.

RSS and Atom in Action still in limbo: the book is delayed because the Atom protocol is not complete. Draft 06 wasn't bad, but it was missing important pieces, like category support. Unfortunately, Atom protocol is not just incomplete, it's also in flux. The working group is having a very hard time dealing with introspection and discovery. So, I can't finish Chapter 8, but we've have been moving the rest of the chapters through production.

Blogapps project born: I started a Java.Net project called Blogapps for the RSS and Atom in Action examples and uploaded the code, but I haven't made a release yet. I hope to release the examples bundle and the Blogapps Demo Server, which is a super easy-to-install blog/wiki server based on Tomcat, HSQLDB, Roller and JSPWiki.

Note that this blog is my personal blog and I don't claim to speak for my employer, my publisher, the Roller project or the ASF.