Blogging Roller

Dave Koelmeyer offers a nice step-by-step guide to getting Roller up and running on OpenSolaris, Glassfish and MySQL.

Although WordPress undoubtedly has more bells and whistles, with themes and plug-ins galore, I find Roller quicker and less fussy in operation, with far more comprehensive documentation – and its scalability cannot be denied. This guide will enable you to install and run Apache Roller for the purposes of evaluation and tinkering.

We will be using OpenSolaris snv_134 x64, with Apache Roller 4.01, Glassfish v2.1, and MySQL 5.1.

Tim Bray: What Sun should do: Sun is going through a lousy spell right now. Well, so is the world’s economy in general and the IT business in particular, but this is about Sun. This is my opinion about what my employer should do about it.

It takes a lot of guts to write a piece like that and I'm really glad Tim did it. I'm going to walk out on the same limb and agree with pretty much everything Tim wrote. Tim wants Sun to focus like a laser on providing the best web platform around with Solaris, storage offerings, Java/Hotspot, Glassfish, MySQL and Netbeans for Java, Ruby, PHP, Groovy, etc. tooling. He writes:

It’s easy to understand how our servers, CMT and x86, and the Solaris OS, fit into the Web Suite. All the software, including the HotSpot, GlassFish, and MySQL runtimes, needs to be obsessively tuned and optimized to run best in the context of the Suite. Obviously, the Suite will also include Ruby and Python and PHP runtimes, similarly tuned.

All of Sun’s software tooling should have a laser focus on usability, performance, and ease of adoption for the Web Suite.

I agree, but as a web geek I guess I'm pretty biased.

Tim doesn't shy away from the critical question of what Sun should stop doing. Tim says Sun should give up on the client-side, dropping JavaFX and JavaME (and OpenOffice too, I presume). Here's Tim on JavaFX:

For actual business apps, the kind that our servers spend most of their time running, the war for the desktop is over and the Web Browser won. I just totally don’t believe that any combination of Flash and Silverlight and JavaFX is going to win it back.

I can't say I disagree with that either. Cutting JavaFX and JavaME would be extremely tough and painful decisions, but somebody's going to make to make some of those. Looking at things from Tim's web-platform-only point of view, they make sense. Sun needs only enough client-side software to keep Solaris attractive to developers and to support great development tools on all the platforms that web developers love.

My old Sun w2100z workstation died a couple of weeks ago. So I ordered a brand new Sun Ultra 24 and installed a whole heap'o Sun software on it -- everything I need for SocialSite and Roller development. Here's a rundown of my initial experiences with my new primary development system.

• Roy Fielding [ogb-discuss]: please dissolve the Desktop Community
  "there is absolutely no reason for this organization to exist if all decisions are going to be made by Sun."
• Ian Murdock [ogb-discuss]: re: please dissolve the Desktop Community
  "You have to be joking? I don't even know where to begin.. This is like Robert's Rules of Order run amok"
• Jim Grisanzio: Two Great Linus Quotes
  "(1) one person or company shouldn't control the entire community, and (2) the real value of community development comes over the long term and results from many small contributions, not one big one."


• Ed Burnette: Sun/Google Android “fight” overblown
  "I’m here to tell you, it’s all bunk"..."However Google did make one big mistake with Android"
• Slashdot: Google, Sun Headed for Showdown Over Android
  Pure FUDtastic speculation based on Stefano's blog post
• robilad: QOTD: Google's license for the Android SDK
  "you may not extract the source code or create a derivative work of the SDK"
• Javalobby: Is Google the New Microsoft?
  Dalibor's comment: "Google will keep Android as proprietary as they can for as long as they can, while letting people believe something else"


• David Heffelfinger: Eclipse Veteran Switches To NetBeans
  "NetBeans has now surpassed Eclipse in usability. Count me in as a new convert."
• Stuck in the middle : Weblog
  Rickard Oberg is blogging at JRoller.com again
• Alan Burlison's Blog: How to leave Facebook
  "try mailing them, quoting the clear precedent they have set by closing my account"
• Symphonious » Why Support OpenSocial?
  "However, if OpenSocial gets support outside social networks it has the possibility of attracting developers who actually care about their users, not just their advertising profits and install count"
• ZDNet: Firefox 3 Beta 1 has landed
  "Improved performance with more than 300 memory leak fixes."

Congrats to Mark Pilgrim on his new job at Google, where he'll be working on the "right" vision for the future of the web. I assume the "wrong" vision, in Mark's mind, comes from the W3C and specifically the W3C's semantic web activities. Mark's comment pointing to his earlier The Overton Window post seems to back that up. I think it's interesting that Mark will be working remotely; that's a rare thing at Google.

And congrats to Debian Linux co-founder Ian Murdock on his new job at Sun, where he'll be working on all things OpenSolaris and, I hope, helping to make it as easy and fun to use as Debian or even Ubuntu.

Paul Murphy: By the end of the year the OpenSolaris community will be widely recognised as larger and more active than the Linux community - and every competing OS developer community except Microsoft's will have copied the key ideas including its organisational structure, the core provisions in the community development license, and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.

That's a nice way to start the new year. No doubt plenty of Sun bloggers will be linking to Paul's predictions.