Blogging Roller

The value of Project SocialSite is that it allows you to add social networking features, including the ability to run OpenSocial gadgets, to existing web sites and have those sites all using the same "social graph" of data about people and relationships. To demonstrate this, I've deployed SocialSite to my site, http://rollerweblogger.org, and finally implemented those things I described in my August 2008 Social Roller post.

My site includes a blog and a wiki, Roller and JSPWiki, so it's a pretty good candidate for demonstrating how SocialSite. It's not perfect because it's got only a very small number of users, less than a dozen and because it's private; you have to login to see the social features. It'll have to do. In this post, I'll explain the steps you have to take to add SocialSite to a multi-application web site and I'll illustrate the steps with examples and screenshots from my work on this site.

I'm off to ApacheCon EU 2009> tomorrow in Amsterdam to speak on the topic of Shindig for Blogs and Wikis. I'm really looking forward to catching up with my Apache friends and colleagues. That's the conference venue in the photo on the right, the Movenpick hotel (in the background behind the music hall).

I'm staying a couple of extra days, so I hope to have time for bicycling around the city as I've done in the past (see also: Flickr photo sets for 2007 and 2008). Unfortunately, the weather forecast stinks. There's a 60% chance of rain every day that I'm in town. Oh well; guess I'll have plenty of time for blogging.

Speaking of blogging.This week, I'll be posting some blog entries to highlight the work that I've done in preparation for my talk. Here's what I plan to cover:

* Monday: OAuth for AtomPub in Roller
* Tuesday: OAuth for ROME Propono
* Wednesday: SocialSite on rollerweblogger.org
* Thursday: OAuth everywhere (continued)
* Friday: the future of Project SocialSite

If you plan to attend my talk, at 4:30PM on Friday March 27, then you should follow along. Pay special attention to the SocialSite on rollerweblogger.org and OAuth everywhere (continued) posts, which will include detailed background info. I'm looking forward to seeing you there.

The day before the layoff axe fell at Sun, I blogged about my upcoming Shindig for Blogs and Wikis talk at ApacheCon EU in March. Since then, I've been working almost non-stop on finding a new gig and have had little time to work on my presentation. That's not good, because I have fairly ambitious plans for this talk. I'll explain.

I want to be able to show how to add social features including OpenSocial support to a blog server and a wiki server by using plain old Shindig and then Project SocialSite. I'm targeting Roller and JSPWiki because they're the blog and wiki source code bases that I know best right now and they're both Apache efforts, but the same techniques should work with other systems like Wordpress or Drupal. If I have time I might be able to demo those too (but I wouldn't count on it).

I'm not sure how far I can go with plain old Shindig because, like most blog and wiki servers, neither Roller nor JSPWiki has detailed profile data, social relationships or activities. I should be able to get Google Gadgets working via Shindig, but OpenSocial Gadgets will take a lot more thought and effort.

I'm much more confident in the Project SocialSite approach. SocialSite provides for storage of detailed profile information, groups, activities and app data as well as the necessary UI. I'm confident enough that I'm going to deploy it on this site. So, stay tuned. I hope to have something to show by the end of next week.

Oh, and by the way. Today is the last day to register for ApacheCon EU with the early-bird discount. So sign-up already!

Janne Jalkanen: We are now beginning a whole new era with becoming an Apache project and JSPWiki v3, which will signal the first major overhaul of the entire software since v2.0 in 2002. We've got a bunch of good committers (with a new one added this weekend - welcome, Florian!) and a bunch of pretty exciting things we want to do.

I'm so happy to see JSPWiki thrive at Apache, even in the incubator. You may remember that I wrote to Janne back in Summer 2007 and suggested the move, and I've crowed about it before, but Craig Russell is the one who stepped up to mentor the project and, from what I've seen, he's doing a great job.

via <a href= "http://blogs.sun.com/jimgris/entry/jspwiki_and_xwiki_evaluations">Jim Grisanzio: Chris Phelan has done evaluations of <a href= "http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=64619&tstart=0">JSPWiki and XWiki for use on the OpenSolaris.org site. Based on his 32 requirements, XWiki came out on top.

On balance, XWiki wins by virtue of having better support for management, searching, page taxonomies, virtual servers, content export and language translation/localization support.

JSPWiki has slightly better support for identifying orphaned pages and accesskey support (XWiki 1.4 will have support for access keys).

Confluence was not considered because requirement #0 is "the software must be free and open source," which seems like a reasonable request when selecting software for an open source community site.

<a href= "http://www.amazon.com/dp/1932394494?tag=bloggingrolle-20&link_code=as3&creativeASIN=1932394494&creative=373489&camp=211189"> The next releases that I'd like to announce are the Blogapps 2.1 Examples and the Blogapps 2.1 Server.

If you'd like to learn more about the Blogapps examples and server then read The Blogapps Project article at Java.net. Here's a quick summary:

The Blogapps project hosts a collection of useful RSS and Atom utilities and examples from RSS and Atom In Action by Dave Johnson. They're designed to be useful even if you haven't read the book and they're available under the Apache License 2.0 so you can use the code in your applications and you can modify and redistribute them as you wish.

What's changed since 2.0? The examples have been updated to include the latest version of ROME Propono, which means that most of them now support the final Atom protcol spec. The server has been updated to include Roller 4.0 RC5, which also includes Atom protocol support and JSPWiki 2.4. And of course, various bugs have been fixed. Here are the release files, installation instructions and release notes.

• Blogapps server install instructions
• Blogapps Server-2.1.tar.gz
• Blogapps-Server-2.1.zip

• Blopapps example release notes
• Blogapps-Examples-2.1.tar.gz
• Blogapps Examples-2.1.zip

This blog entry was posted via Atom protocol and the MatisseBlogger blog-client, which you can see in the screen-shot below (which was also posted via Atom.

What's next? Not sure at this point, but I will do another Blogapps release once ROME 1.0 is released.

Congrats are also in order for the JSPWiki team. As Janne Jalkanen notes, JSPWiki was accepted into the Apache Incubator yesterday. I'm proud to be one of the four mentors who will guide the project through the incubation process. Janne and the JSPWiki team put together a great proposal and I think it was clear to everybody involved in the vote that these folks know what they're doing. They'll master the Apache way in no time.