Blogging Roller

In my quest to get Roller running on the latest in Java EE servers, the last server I tacked was the WebSphere Application Server. Unlike Glassfish and JBoss, WebSphere's Java EE 6 offering is not available in final form yet. Java EE 6 support is coming in WebSphere 8. So, for this exercise I used the WebSphere 8 beta, which was made available in July 2010. In this blog I'll describe how I approached the problem what I learned along the way.

In my quest to make Roller work on Java EE 6, the next server that I tackled was JBoss 6. In this blog I'll describe how I approached the problem what I learned along the way.

Tested with Hibernate JPA

Roller uses JPA for database storage and specifically the Apache OpenJPA implementation. I knew that JBoss uses the Hibernate JPA implementation and I suspected that there would be JPA portability problems, so I decided to run Roller's JUnit tests against Hibernate JPA. There were many test failures and fortunately, the failures were easy to fix.

In my quest to make Roller work on Java EE 6, the first server that I decided to tackle was Glassfish 3. In this blog I'll describe how I approached the problem and what I learned along the way.

Tested with EclipseLink JPA

Roller uses JPA for persistence and specifically the Apache OpenJPA implementation. I knew that GlassFish uses the EclipseLink JPA implementation and I suspected that there would be JPA portability problems, so I decided to run Roller's JUnit tests against EclipseLink JPA. I wanted to find and fix those problems before even touching GlassFish. The tests ran and there were many JPA related failures and errors, most due to differences in the way that EclipseLink handles bi-directional relationships and the use of unmanaged objects.

It's hard to believe, but I've been dorking around with Roller, the blog software that powers this site, for almost 10 years now. I started in summer 2001. In the past couple of years, I've had a lot less time to work on Roller. I devoted some of that time to mentoring student developers, which was fun and rewarding. I also spent time making Roller more consumable for developers by making it easier to build, run and deploy to modern Java app servers, which was not really fun but was definitely educational, bloggable even.