Blogging Roller

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.

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/rome-logo.png" alt="ROME logo" align="right" vspace="10px" hspace="10px" />

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.

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.

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

• ROME #66 BUG - don't expect entry to be returned from update (FIXED)
• ROME #67 BUG - handle relative URIs in Service Doc
• ROME #68 BUG - handle out-of-line categories in Service Doc
• ROME #69 RFE - use pluggable auth. scheme w/Google and WSSE support
  

And here are the Roller APP server issues:

• ROL-1393 BUG - attributes in service doc should not be namespaced (FIXED)
• ROL-1394 BUG - wrong content-type for service doc (FIXED)
• ROL-1395 BUG - support slugs for entries too
• ROL-1396 RFE - RSD support, auto-discovery for APP
• ROL-1397 BUG - null byte 0x0 getting into entry contents

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.

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. [Read More]