Blogging Roller

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.

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.

On the last day of 2010, I made available the third release candidate for Apache Roller 5.0. The main difference between this new candidate and the previous one is that the new RC3 runs on Java EE 6 servers: Glassfish 3, JBoss 6 and Websphere 8 (currently in beta). Making this happen took a lot more work than I expected and I'll blog about that over the next couple of weeks as it is an interesting case study in Java EE 6 portability.

Here's the announcement:

Apache Roller 5.0 Release Candidate RC3 is now available for testing.
Note that this is NOT a release of the Apache Software Foundation or
anybody else; this release candidate is for testing purposes only and
not recommended for production.

   What's new in Roller 5.0:
   https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ROLLER/What's+new+in+Roller+5.0

   Change list (issues resolved since 4.0)
   http://bit.ly/gAhDWR

   Issues resolved since last release candidate (RC3)
   http://bit.ly/dZ27Nx

   Signed binary and source files. Also, documentation in PDF form
   http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/apache-roller-5.0/

The biggest change in RC3 is the new support for Java EE 6 application
servers: Glassfish 3, JBoss 6 and Websphere 8 (beta). I've been able
to verify that Roller runs on all of those servers, and I updated the
installation guide to explain in detail how you install on Glassfish,
JBoss and WebSphere.

If you would like to help out then please test RC3, discuss the
problems you encounter here and file specific bugs with steps to
reproduce in the Roller JIRA bug tracking system.

Thanks,
Dave

And I mean that in the nicest way possible, i.e. the Codehaus way.

Bob McWhirter: Ultimately all open-source survives and grows based upon goodwill. Tending to the community is required, else you risk alienating your own users. I aim to use my experiences from a variety of open-source projects and communities to make sure the JBoss community is one of which I’m proud to be a member.

Congrats Bob. Sounds like a great new job. This mean you'll be coming to Raleigh more often?