Blogging Roller

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.

ApacheCon is coming up fast. I just faxed in my speaker's agreement and I'm starting to update my talk to cover the latest changes in the upcoming Apache Roller 4.0 and 4.1 releases.

I've been four times now and ApacheCon is always a great conference. It's small and cozy enough, but almost all of the Apache projects are represented. So it's easy to find the experts, make new friends and get all of your questions answered. The session line-up looks great this year; here are ones that caught my eye:

• Hacking Atom with Apache Abdera - Garret Rooney
• A little REST and Relaxation - Roy Fielding
• WS-* vs. REST: Facts, Myths and Lies - Sanjiva Weerawarana
• Go Light with Apache Struts 2 and REST - Don Brown
• How to Run a Business Around The ASF - Sanjiva Weerawarana
• Open Source Community Anti-Patterns - Ted Leung
• RIAs using Apache Derby and Comet - Jeanfrancois Arcand & Francois Orsini
• Apache Derby - Saucer Separation - Rick Hillegas
• JCR in Action - Content-based Applications with Apache Jackrabbit - Carsten Ziegeler

Want to go? There's still time to shave a couple of hundred dollars off the conference fees by registering early. Early bird pricing has been extended to Sept. 22, 2007.

And the Weston looks like a pretty nice place for a conference:

It's been a couple of weeks since the last Roller Strong because I've been very busy with 4.0 and some other new projects. Plus, I was getting a little tired of saying "we're still working on 4.0." So now I'm happy to report that release candidates have been made available for upcoming Apache Roller 4.0 release.

It should be very easy to try out the new release because we spent a lot of time focusing on a new easy-install process, plus there is no need to download a separate bundle of Hibernate files as Roller no longer uses Hibernate. With the new easy-install, installation should be as easy as editing four settings in a small configuration file and dropping the WAR into Tomcat or Glassfish.

Below are some links to the 4.0 RC1 release files.

• apache-roller-4.0-rc1.tar.gz (key)
• apache-roller-4.0-rc1.zip (key)
• What's new in Roller 4.0
• Roller 4.0 Change list in JIRA
• Roller 4.0 Installation Guide (PDF)
• Roller 4.0 User Guide (PDF)
• Roller 4.0 Template Guide (PDF)

Keep in mind that 4.0 RC1 is not an official Apache release and is meant for testing only. Even so, this is probably a pretty solid release. The .Sun Engineering team put the code into production at at blogs.sun.com over a month ago and my coworkers on the Sun App Platform team just put the code through a couple weeks of testing.

rollerthemes.com

Big thanks to Gene Strokine! As seen on raibledesigns.com, Gene has been busy with Roller theme development and has started a new site rollerthemes.com to promote his work. Gene is also the newest committer on the Roller Support project at Java.net and has committed many of his themes there (they still need to be upgraded to work with 4.0 though).

Notes on Roller and JA-SIG CAS SSO

And Phillip Rhodes reports success integrating Roller and JavaBB with single-sign on via JA-SIG CAS and has plans for additional identity related work. He has posted his notes on Roller and CAS/SSO to the Roller dev list.

JRoller.com troubles

In the "OK, so maybe Roller ain't so strong" department, JRoller.com has been having problems with Roller 3.1. Matt Schmidt upgraded JRoller.com from Roller 2.0 to Roller 3.1 a couple of weeks back and ran into database connection pool problems, which were resolved by switching back from Tomcat to Resin. Now he's dealing with some explosive memory usage and asking for help from the Javalobby community.

Coming soon: a Geronimo plugin for Roller

Our Geronimo friends David Jencks and Peter Peterssen stopped by the Roller-dev list this month to contribute some code to make it easier for Roller to work in Apache Geronimo. They're cookin' up a Geronimo plugin for Roller and I'm looking forward to seeing it in action.

In other news...

One final note. We've made a bunch of fixes to 3.1 so we also have a new RC available for the upcoming Apache Roller 3.1.1 fix release. You can find the RC files for 3.1.1 in my Apache site and the change list in JIRA.

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.

Lilac-breasted Roller by David Meeker

Not too much to report this week...

Matt Raible gave his Introduction to Apache Roller webinar on Wednesday. Most unforunately, I was unable to break out of my Wednesday meeting marathon to attend. At some point Matt says he'll post his slides to the Roller wiki.

In Roller development we wrapped up work on the new Roller EZ install, which makes it really easy to install Roller -- just set four properties, deploy roller.war and Roller will start up, creating or upgrading tables as needed.

Also, my Guice proposal gained consensus and I merged the work into the Roller trunk just this morning. As of now, I believe we're feature complete for Roller 4.0.

Tune in next week and perhaps I'll have something to say about release. It's about time to start getting 3.1.1 and 4.0 release candidates ready.

I stayed up a little too late last night upgrading this site (rollerweblogger.org) to the latest Roller 4.0 code base, which includes the new Struts2 based Admin UI and a new OpenJPA based back-end. No more Hibernate for me. The upgrade was a bit of a rocky road, but the site seems to be working OK now.

This week was a big week for Roller, development and deployment-wise. As you may already know from Linda Skrocki's blog, Roller 4.0 went live this week at the premier corporate blogging site blogs.sun.com (BSC) with some nice new themes, easier blog customization and a UI that has been completely rewritten to do use Struts2. Check the What's New in Roller 4.0 page to learn more about the upcoming release.

But don't get too excited, you can't download Roller 4.0 just yet. Sun deployed a pre-release version of Roller and if you want to do the same, you'll either have to build it yourself or wait for the official Apache Roller 4.0 release coming out this summer. And don't be too disappointed, that's one of the nice things about Roller: before we make a release, the code is battle tested on blogs.sun.com. Big thanks to .Sun Engineering for that.

A couple folks wrote into to tell me that GIS software developer ESRI is blogging with Roller, something I've been meaning to mention for quite some time. In fact, I've been meaning to mention it for over a year and now it's time to wish ESRI a happy 1st blogaversary. Man, how time flies.

That's it for this weeks installment of Roller Strong. Y'all come back now.

© Oliver Mallich

First, an announcement from Covalent. They've rescheduled their Apache Roller webinar with Matt Raible to June 20.

A couple of new users showed up on the Roller mailing-list this week. One was Ryan Delaplante who wrote about his Roller installation experience and the nice new theme he developed on his blog ryandelaplante.com. Jason Johnson stopped by to tell us about the new Roller-based blogging system at the University of South Dakota blogs.usd.edu. They've got some looking themes there too, check out Astra blue and red.

In the blogs, here's a post for Sun bloggers only from Rich Sharples: OpenID Delegation with Roller (take 2). Rich explains how to setup your Roller-based blog as a proxy for your Sun OpenID account.

In development, we're still finishing up the Roller 4.0 release. Most commits this week are coming from Allen who is working on bug fixes across the board. I've been making slow and steady progress on the Roller easy install work. Also, if you look at the Subversion logs you'll see that I'm working in a separate branch to implement Dependency Injection (DI) in Roller via Google's Guice. I'm almost ready to show-and-tell with a proposal. Denis Balazuc has also created a DI implementation using Spring, so we may have some interesting discussions next week.

No significant news about releases this week. We've probably got enough fixes to justify a Roller 3.1.1 release, but nobody has prepared a release candidate yet. I might be able to do one next week.

That's it for this edition. Have a great weekend.

Roller Strong Disclaimer: this is a personal blog and I do not speak on behalf of Sun Microsystems or the Apache Software Foundation. 

WALNUT CREEK, CA, May 15, 2007 -- Covalent Technologies, the most trusted source for enterprise open source solutions, today announced it is now offering full commercial support for Apache Roller, the open source blog server from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF).

[...]

Organizations are increasingly using blogs as a means of more effectively communicating with their customers and ecosystem, says Mark Brewer, CEO of Covalent Technologies. Consequently, for the enterprise, blog technology is rapidly becoming an important and essential piece of their infrastructure. We are very pleased to be supporting this very worthwhile ASF project. More...

Sun is throwing another JavaOne bloggers bash at Thirsty Bear this year, at 6PM on Wednesday night. I'll be there and I hope to see other Roller users and developers there too.

As usual ApacheCon was a blast. I showed-up on Tuesday, made myself at home in the hackathon room and started reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones. I arrived at the members reception a little late and missed the beer, but was not too late to meet Lars Trieloff of Mindquarry, a startup that's working on an interesting open source product suite that combines content management, task management and wiki functionality. Behind the scenes the product combines Subversion, Apache Jackrabbit and other open source products. Apparently everything is tied together via the Java Content Repository (JCR) API and that's why Lars is interested in the possibility of hooking Roller up with a JCR backend.

Talks began Wednesday and I sat in the business track for most of the day. I particularly enjoyed Rebecca Hansen's talk Better than free: Strategic opportunities in open source and Bill Stoddards talk on Best Practices for Incorporating Open Source Code in Commercial Production. I also enjoyed Alexandru Popescu talk on Up to Speed with Java Content Repository API and Jackrabbit. I attended Stefano Machacci's excellent Community Building Practices talk again -- I think it should be required for all Apache contributors.

Thursday night was the Sun party at Lloyd Hotel, which was was quite successful. I had an interesting Roller-related chat with Paolo Castagna of HP, who is investigating new ways to integrate blogs, planets and wikis -- so we had a lot to talk about. I'm hoping he'll find that Roller is a good foundation for his work and encouraged him to collaborate with us via the Roller mailing lists. By the way, like Lars Trieloff, he is also interested in JCR as a back-end for blog/wiki data.

My talk Roller and blogs as a web development platform was scheduled for 10:30 Friday morning. It didn't go so well. Power went out at around 10AM and didn't come back until about 20 minutes into the talk. That left me a bit frazzled and feeling rushed, so I don't think I gave my best performance. If you'd like more information on the talk, you can find the outline here and the slides here (1.6MB PDF).

Vacation is over and it's back to work today. I rode the tram up to Amsterdam Central Station to see Andi off, checked out of our vacation hotel and made my way up to the Movenpick Hotel for ApacheCon EU.

I'm in the ApacheCon hackathon room now working to clear my in-box, catch-up on blogs and figure out what work things need my (rather limited) attention this week.

Vacation was wonderful, by the way. I didn't do any travel blogging on this trip, but I've taken about 200 photos and uploaded some of the best to my Flickr account. I took a bunch of nice shots of the Queens Day festivities yesterday. and the ad hoc boat parades. I've also been building a Google map of our travels, annotated with photos and comments. I'll share that link later this week once it's more complete.

It's hard to believe it's been three years since the blogs.sun.com (BSC) launch. Sun bloggers are having a birthday party of sorts around the tag bsc3years, so check out all the posts. My favorite is Linda's, which sums up the successes and reasons for the success of BSC. I think she's right on the money with her comments about employee blogging. Let me add this: you don't need a marketing team or a blog consulting firm to write your company's blogs. Trust your employees. Encourage them to blog and, if you can, provide the enabling infrastructure. I think I may have said that before

I still remember how amazed, surprised and pleased I was to learn that Sun was using Roller. I found out on May 5, 2004 via Roller; I noticed referrers from blogs.sun.com and just couldn't believe my eyes. Shortly after that I wrote to Tim Bray, who introduced me to Will Snow and soon I managed to become part of the BSC phenomenon. I'm proud to have played a part in the BSC success, but the success was certainly not due to the Roller software; it's the bloggers who made BSC. So here's to the BSC bloggers: happy birthday!

Finally! Roller has graduated to become a top-level Apache project and we've shipped the long awaited Apache Roller 3.1 release. You can find the full announcement on the Roller mailing list and on the Roller project blog and our new top-level site at http://roller.apache.org.

Today is the fifth anniversary of this blog, which I started on April 11, 2002 to promote the Roller blog software that I had just finished writing.

Roller wasn't really ready for deployment at the time, so I started blogging using Userland Radio radio.weblogs.com. You can find my first post on Radio here FIRST POST!!! You can also find the original Roller 0.90 user guide on the old site, complete with screen-shots. A couple of weeks later, my article on Roller was published at OnJava.com and folks started to take notice of Roller.

Now, five years later, Roller has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become Apache Roller, blog-tech is my full-time job at Sun and I'm still Blogging Roller. Thanks to Roller users and contributors everywhere for helping to make this possible.

We haven't released the standalone Roller-Planet application yet, but the .Sun Engineering team quietly deployed the latest bits at planet.sun.com a couple of weeks ago in response to requests from the Glassfish, SWDP and other teams for planet-style web sites. You can follow the links on the main page to find planets for Glassfish, SWDP, Sun India, Sun Alumni, Sun Java System Web Server, web services and globalization bloggers.

What's Roller-Planet? It's a community aggregation server, similar to Planet-Planet but with some key differences: it's got a web UI that enables groups of users to run their own planet sites, it's based on Java and it uses the ROME feed parser and fetcher. I've written about it before. We don't have a release plan yet for Roller-Planet so if you really want to try it you'll have to fetch and build it from the Apache Roller SVN repo.