Blogging Roller: Try Roller 1.1, it's easy!

Try Roller 1.1, it's easy!

To make it easier for folks to try Roller 1.1 and the new experimental Planet aggregator, I've created a standalone Roller demo by bundling Roller with JSPWiki, Tomcat, and the tiny pure-Java HSQLDB database. Everything is preconfigured and ready to run. All you need to do to try Roller is the following:

1. Download roller-demo-1.1.tar.gz from Java.Net (a 22MB download)

2. Unzip the file into a directory on your hard-drive 
   (directory name should have no spaces)

3. Ensure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to point to your JDK

4. Ensure that CATALINA_HOME is NOT set in your environment

5. To start Roller, either:
   - on Windows: open the Roller bin directory and double-click on startup.bat 
   - on UNIX: cd to the Roller bin directory, chmod +x on all files, run ./startup.sh

6. Point your browser at http://localhost:8080/roller

7. Login as nina/nina, admin/admin, or register as a new user

8. Get rollin'

Dave Johnson in Roller • 🕒 11:58AM Apr 20, 2005

Tags: Roller

Comments:

Thanks for the package, it makes trying out jroller very easy. jroller looks good, we are now going to deploy a test version for more investigation.

A couple of questions:

1. Can the demo be used for real work, like a lightweight personal blog/wiki on a personal laptop? -- or are there limits which make this not be a good long term solution.

2. making jroller as easy to install as the demo would be nice ^_^

3. Is jspwiki a Sun sponsored product?

Thanks agian for the neat demo, Sun is doing great by encouraging employees to blog -- and allowing employees to ACTUALLY answer questions. tb

Posted by bill on April 21, 2005 at 03:33 PM EDT #

1. Yes
2. I agree and we're working on that
3. JSPWiki is not a Sun sponsored product

BTW, the product's name is Roller, not JRoller.

Posted by Dave Johnson on April 21, 2005 at 05:10 PM EDT #

Hi! I get: Exception in thread "Thread-1" java.lang.NullPointerException at java.util.Hashtable.put(Hashtable.java:396) at org.hsqldb.HsqlProperties.setProperty(Unknown Source) at org.hsqldb.HsqlProperties.argArrayToProps(Unknown Source) at org.hsqldb.Server.main(Unknown Source) at org.roller.util.HSQLDBUtility$1.run(Unknown Source) when I run startup.bat. I don't understand why HSQLDBUtility is failing to give to the org.hsqldb.Server.main method the right args parameters. Thanks in advance.

Posted by HernÃ¡n on April 22, 2005 at 03:18 AM EDT #

Thanks, the demo works fine for me. A nice bundle with Roller and all the other pieces to do a complete install on Linux Apache would be helpful. It's a little confusing getting through all the Tomcat jargon -- for a newbie. I like Roller, it makes a neat group blog tool.

Posted by bill on April 25, 2005 at 02:09 PM EDT #

Great demo! Liked it enough that I set up my own. In trying the bundled JSPwiki, I could not figure out how the login works? Tried using the Roller logins (nina & admin) and both failed. How does one use a login and where does one create new users for the bundled wiki?

Posted by Marc Rocas on May 05, 2005 at 05:15 PM EDT #

Run roller from a keychain! Look at this article: http://www.javalobby.org/articles/tomcat2go/ This makes it even simpler for users to try out your webapp.

Posted by Roshan Shrestha on May 10, 2005 at 06:18 PM EDT #