Blogging Roller

Apache Roller 5.0 RC1

Dave Johnson — Mon, 3 May 2010 08:39:13 +0000

It's been a while since the BETA (over 6 months) but we now have a release candidate for Apache Roller 5.0 available for testing. This site is running Apache Roller 5.0 RC1 right now, as you can see in the itty bitty screenshot below:

Here's a What's New in Roller 5.0 page that summarizes what has changed since 4.0. One thing I forgot to mention on that page was that Roller now uses ROME Propono 1.0 for AtomPub and Roller 5.0's AtomPub support has been successfully tested with MarsEdit and Windows Live Writer.

OAuth for ROME Propono

Dave Johnson — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I wrote about OAuth support in the upcoming Roller 5.0 release. Today I'm following up with a post about OAuth support in ROME Propono.

As you may remember, ROME Propono is a subproject of ROME, the Java-based RSS/Atom feed library. ROME Propono includes an AtomPub server library and an AtomPub client. I added OAuth support to the AtomPub client and in this post, I'll show how you can use it to post to the Roller 5.0-dev (i.e. the snapshot build that I made available yesterday).

ROME 1.0 and coming soon: ROME Propono 1.0

In case you haven't already heard, thanks to the recent hard work of Nick Lothian, ROME 1.0 is now available. You can find downloads at rome.dev.java.net and a list of changes in the Change Log there. To celebrate this momentous event, I'm planning on releasing ROME Propono 1.0 as well, and in preparation, I've made a release candidate available. The new Propono includes ROME 1.0 and support for OAuth. You can get it via the links below:

rome-propono-1.0RC1.tar.gz (2.0 mb)

rome-propono-1.0RC1.zip (3 mb)

Posting to Roller via AtomPub and OAuth

To use the Propono AtomPub client, you place the Propono jars in your Java VM classpath and then call the AtomClientFactory to get started, as described in the ROME Propono 1.0 Javadocs.

Below is a Groovy example that shows how to post a blog entry to Roller via AtomPub and OAuth. You can get the consumer key, secret and URLs you need to call your instance of Roller from the OAuth Credentials page in the Roller admin interface.


  import com.sun.syndication.propono.atom.client.*
  import com.sun.syndication.feed.atom.*

  def authStrategy = new OAuthStrategy(
    "roller",                               // username
    "55132608a2fb68816bcd3d1caeafc933",     // consumer key
    "bb420783-fdea-4270-ab83-36445c18c307", // consumer secret
    "HMAC-SHA1",                            // key type
    "http://blogs.example.com/roller-services/oauth/requestToken",
    "http://blogs.example.com/roller-services/oauth/authorize",
    "http://blogs.example.com/roller-services/oauth/accessToken")

  // get the AtomPub service
  def appService = AtomClientFactory.getAtomService(
    "http://blogs.example.com/roller-services/app", authStrategy)

  // find workspace of my blog
  def blog = appService.findWorkspace("Blogging Roller")

  // find collecton that will accept entries
  def entries = blog.findCollection(null, "application/atom+xml;type=entry")

  // create and post an entry
  def entry = entries.createEntry()
  entry.title = "TestPost"
  def content = new Content()
  content.setValue("This is a test post. w00t!")
  entry.setContent([content])
  entries.addEntry(entry)

If you have questions or feedback about ROME Propono 1.0 RC1, please post them to the ROME dev mail list and I'll do my best to respond there.

Atom protocol has been finalized

Dave Johnson — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:21:09 +0000

Good news today from Tim Bray: Atom protocol has been finalized. The final version of the spec is going to be Atom protocol draft #17.

Instead of staying up until the dawn hours (not naming names) reading the final Harry Potter book, I spent most of the weekend working on bringing Propono in-line with the draft #17 and in particular adding support for out-of-line categories and relative URIs. I've got code ready to commit that passes Tim's Ape tests, so hopefully we'll have a new Propono 0.6 release ready very soon that supports the final spec.

Roller's Atom protocol implementation is already up to date and passing Ape tests, so Roller 4.0 will be Atom protocol ready. I still need to do a little work to document the setup.

APP interop follow-up

Dave Johnson — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 19:59:19 +0000

Following up on the APP interop event last week, here are the ROME Propono APP client issues we found:

And here are the Roller APP server issues:

I plan on fixing the Roller issues for this summer's Roller 4.0 release. I won't have time to fix the Propono issues for the upcoming Propono 0.5 release (due this week), so they'll be in 0.6 sometime after JavaOne.

@JavaOne: Beyond Blogging: Feeds in Action

Dave Johnson — Wed, 4 Apr 2007 17:32:34 +0000

As promised here's some more info on my JavaOne 2007 session. It's based in part on the Beyond Blogging presentation that I presented to a tiny audience at the local Tri-XML conference last year. Tim Bray didn't attend my talk, but he read the slides and called them "the single best introduction and overview I've ever seen about feeds and syndication and RSS and Atom and all that stuff." I shouldn't brag. Had he attended the talk he might have had an entirely different opinion, who knows. Anyhow, the presentation has been updated, stream-lined and large portions rewritten to cover ROME and ROME's new Propono sub-project. Here's the outline:

The web is bloggy
    Blogging, XML and web services
    Feeds on the web today
    Feeds as an integration technology
    WS Death Star
Understanding RSS and Atom
    The birth of the RSS
    The RDF fork: RSS 1.0
    Elements of RSS 1.0 (abridged)
    Feed Extension Modules
    The simple fork: RSS 0.92 â€“ RSS 2.0
    Elements of RSS 2.0 (abridged)
    RSS limitations
    Atom Publishing Format
    Elements of Atom (abridged)
    RSS and Atom feed family tree
Consuming feeds with ROME
    It's just XML
    ROME RSS/Atom feed utilities
    How does ROME work?
    ROME SyndFeed model
    How to fetch feeds
    Fetching a feed with ROME Fetcher
Producing feeds with ROME
    Serving feeds: generate XML
    Use your favorite XML tools or...
    Generating Atom with ROME
    Serving feeds
    Cache cache cache
    Serving Atom with ROME
    Feed auto-discovery
    Serving valid feeds
Publishing with ROME Propono
    Atom Publishing Protocol (APP)
    What does APP do?
    How does it do all that? The REST way
    APP Service Document
    An Atom collection <feed>
    Getting an APP collection - with paging
    ROME Propono
    ROME Propono Atom Client API
RSS/Atom trends
For More Information
Summary
Q & A

And for the folks who've written to me about Propono, the new ROME subproject devoted to publishing via Atom protocol (and the MetaWeblog API): I hope to commit the code to ROME and starting blogging about it this week.