Blogging Roller

It's been a while since my last status, CC:World post, so here's an update on the things I'm working on these days.

RSS and Atom in Action. Because I added those two new chapters on Windows RSS and ROME, Manning had to renumber about 3/4 of the book. That took a bit longer than expected, but now the work is done and I've got the whole book in one big PDF file. I'll do one final review this weekend and, if we can quickly wrap up the loose ends and the index, we'll be off to the printers before the end of June.

Blogapps is the Java.Net project that I started to manage and support the Java and C# example code for RSS and Atom in Action. Now that the book is essentially done, it's time for the Blogapps 1.0 release. I'll create a 1.0 branch so that I can do bug fix releases like 1.0.1, 1.0.2, etc. -- but the code in that 1.0 branch will always match the code in the book.

Once Atom protocol is complete, I'll make the changes necessary to support it in a separate branch of the Blogapps project, because those changes may diverge significantly from the code in the book. Perhaps I'll call that branch Blogapps 1.5 or even 2.0 depending on how different the new code is. After that, I hope to continune to improve the apps but making use of newer releases of ROME and perhaps Abdera.

Roller@Apache. Roller has been in the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) incubator for almost a year now. We've been in limbo because Roller depends on a 3rd party library (Hibernate) that is licensed under the LGPL and ASF doesn't like LGPL, but it's still not clear if that LGPL dependency will prevent Roller fom graduating from the incubator. Recently, our ASF mentors told us that we can temporarily depend on LGPL components, but we cannot ship them. So we removed Hibernate from the release, added instructions to the installation guide explaining how download Hibernate separately and, thanks to Craig Russell, we've got the beginnings of a plan to eventually replace Hibernate with either JDO or EJB3/JPA.

Apache Roller 2.3 (incubating). We've been trying to get the 2.3 release out for quite a while, ever since 2.2 in fact. Now that we've removed Hibernate from our release, we've been cleared to release 2.3 via Apache infrastructure (i.e. make the release files avialable on an apache.org site). That should happen very soon.

Apache Roller 3.0 (incubating). The 3.0 release isn't due for deployment or release until July, but this week I've been working like crazy to get the new Atlas frontpage stuff into a usable state so we can get some early feedback. Tomorrow is my self-imposed deadline and I'm just about ready to put together a test build.

ApacheCon EU 2006. I'm giving a talk titled Roller: an open source blog server, which is essentiually a primer for new Roller users and developers. It's the same talk I gave at ApacheCon US 2005, but I'm going to update it to cover the major changes in Roller since then (and fast, the slides were due last week).