Blogging Roller

Since I deployed Roller 3.2-dev Saturday no spam has slipped pass Roller's new Akismet plugin, so I've opened up all my past entries for comments again. Spammers, bring it on!

This week I've been working on a new feature for Roller called Comment Validators, which makes it possible for Roller site admins to plugin validation rules to be run against comments. If a comment fails validation it is marked as spam, put into the blog's moderation queue and the blog's owner is notified with a list of the reasons that validation failed.

I commited the work to SVN yesterday, so now we've got an excess-size validator that checks for comments larger than a threshold, an excess links validator that checks for comments with too many links and what may be the most useful validator of all the AkismetCommentValidator -- which checks comments against the Akismet anti-spam service. I'm not sure how stable the Roller trunk is right now, but I decided to risk a deploy so now this blog is protected by Akismet.

Update 1: Yowza. The site crashed last night and after a little googling, I think I may have run into a Hibernate bug (HH-1579). I turned on the JVM -server option. Let's see how that goes.

Update 2: The JVM -server flag seems to fix the Hibernate problem. I wrote a note about the problem on the roller-dev mailing-list just in-case somebody else runs into it.

I mentioned that I've got a new job at Sun and it begins Monday, so I guess it's time to explain.

Since I joined Sun two years ago I've been working in the .Sun Engineering organization, the team that runs sun.com and blogs.sun.com. In that time we've taken Roller through three major releases, made massive improvements to the Roller code-base, helped grow the Roller community at Apache and delivered new features and improvements on a monthly basis. It's been a truly wonderful experience and I've learned a lot from Will Snow's amazing team, but now that Roller has matured and stabilized I'm ready to start working in some new directions.

On Monday I'll move to the Java EE organization (under Tony Ng) where Sun's working on some very interesting and very cool technologies from server-side scripting with Phobos and JRuby on Rails, RESTful approaches to web services and client-side UI goodness with JMaki. I'm very excited about the move and getting a chance to get involved with those technologies, but I can't talk yet about the specific product(s) I'll be working on. I can say this: I'll continue to be very closely involved with Roller development and I'll continue my work with RSS/Atom, ROME and the Blogapps project. And, of course, I'll continue blogging Roller so stay tuned.

I've been too busy with year-end projects to blog over the past couple of days and now suddenly, it's time to say farewell to 2006. So I'll do that with a quick summary of the year.

2006 was a pretty good year for me. I published my first book: RSS and Atom in Action. Roller is still growing, reached 3.0 status and is now very close to becoming a top level Apache project. IBM started contributing to and announced a Web 2.0 product suite that will include Roller. I did my first solo JavaOne presentation and spoke at both ApacheCon EU and ApacheCon US. And, I haven't mentioned it yet, but I also landed a new job inside Sun, which starts on January 8th (more about that later).

On the home-front: the boys (now 4, 8 and 10) are all healthy, happy and doing well in school. We celebrated my dad's 70th birthday and Alex's 10th birthday. We took family trips to Ocracoke, Atlanta, Austin, Northern Virginia and made numerous visits to the in-laws beach house near Topsail Island. Plus, Andi and I escaped from the kids for a week in Ireland to celebrate our 15th wedding anniversary -- our first kidless vacation in about ten years.

I hope you had a good year too and will have an even better 2007. Happy new years!

I'm glad I was able to help Simon get his personal planet back online yesterday. And I'm glad the task was fairly easy. All Simon needed as a new version of Blogapps PlanetTool updated to use ROME 0.9 and I was planning on doing that anyway.

What's PlanetTool you wonder? PlanetTool is a command-line program which reads a set of RSS/Atom newsfeeds and then uses a set of templates to generate a planet site with HTML, RSS, Atom, OPML and other representations. Simon uses it to bring together his personal blog, Sun blog, del.icio.us links and Flickr.com photos into a single webpage and a single feed. If you subscribe to that feed, you'll get just about everything that Simon publishes to the web.

If you're interested in learning more about PlanetTool, here are some of my previous posts on the topic:

• Try PlanetTool, it's easy!
  
• ROME + Texen = PlanetTool 
• PlanetTool internals
• It's also covered in Chapter 11 of RSS and Atom in Action.
  

The above title Try PlanetTool, it's easy! is a little misleading, but it brings me to my point. PlanetTool is only easy if you're a developer or a power-user; somebody who can handle running Java on a server, editing an XML config file and setting up a cron job. Simon could handle it, but I'd like to make planets easier.

In fact, I'd like to make it as easy to create a planet as it is to create a blog. This past week, I've been thinking about how to do that by taking the simple ROME powered Roller-Planet code, which is found in both Roller and PlanetTool, and build it into a multi-user planet server -- kinda like Roller, but for planets instead of blogs. To get my thoughts into digital form I worked up a little FreeMind mind-map on the topic, dumped it to text, added some wiki syntax and some screen-shots. The result is this: a RollerPlanetMindMap that outlines ideas for the future development of Roller-Planet.

There's still time to get those proposals in. I ended up submitting three proposals for technical sessions related to RSS/Atom and one for a Roller birds-of-a-feather (BOF) session.

Here's the link to submit proposals: http://www.cplan.com/sun/javaone07/cfp.

• snellspace.com: Rollin' on with Roller
  More good news for Roller. We seem to be picking up some momentum
• jMaki framework, Phobos and jRuby on Rails on Java EE...
  Ludovic announces jMaki 1.0 beta and new Phobos plugins for Netbeans
• Phobos module for Netbeans
  Embedded Grizzly enables easy server-side JavaScript debugging in Netbeans
• Jezzly or Gretty? Running Jetty on top of Grizzly
  Grizzly-Jetty integration cound bring Grizzly to JBoss, Jonas, Geronimo, etc.
• Understanding Grizzly part I: Embedding Grizzly HTTP Web Server in 5 lines
  Light weight alternative to Jetty

• People Over Process: IBM SWG: Lotus "Ventura"
  "the most exciting thing I've seen at the event is IBM's 'Ventura' project"
• Elias Torres: A New Ventura
  "The experience of taking something built by the community and making it a product has been incredibly rewarding"
• snellspace.com: chmod 777 ventura
  "Sprinkled throughout the entire suite is support for Atom and the Atom Publishing Protocol"
• The lost outpost: Ventura is revealed
  "I've been a user of IBM's internal blogging platform - known as BlogCentral, and based off of Roller - for well over a year now."
• Mixing Dojo and Roller
  "category chooser that uses Dojo (a powerful JavaScript library) to create a Fisheye effect"

Hmmm... That link to Cote's People Over Process blog is now a 404. I'll let Cote explain that if he wants to. You can find details similar to those that Cote posted in Luis Suarez's blog post titled IBM Lotus Ventura: IBM's Take of Social Software within the Enterprise. Here's an excerpt: 

Lotus Ventura is supposed to be IBM’s adventure (Pun intended ) into the social computing world for the enterprise. Yes, once again, that IBM 2.0 thing. And as you may have been able to read already over at Cote’s weblog post Ventura would be an application that will integrate a number of different social software tools that, as James mentioned, some of us, inside of IBM, have been using for years now!:

1. IBM’s BluePages (a.k.a. IBM’s employee directory): So that expertise location within the enterprise can be easier than ever having access not only to knowledge workers but also to the information behind those same knowledge workers. That is, their information.
2. Dogear: IBM’s social bookmarking application: and which I have talked about over here a few times already.
3. Activities: Of which you would be able to read some more about on the presentation I shared yesterday over here from Mike Roche (Slides 6, 23, 46 and 49) and of which I will talk about some time later on.
4. Communities: Given my role as a community builder and knowledge manager, this is actually one of the components that I will be really looking forward to and that, as time goes by, I will be able to share some further details on it.
5. Roller: Or, as we all know, weblogging; yes, that is right. Ventura will have a component that would connect knowledge workers with the world of weblogs using the Roller weblogging engine, which is basically what we have been using as well inside IBM with Blog Central. I have been keeping my Intranet weblog over there for nearly three years and it would be an incredible experience to be able to see it integrate nicely into Ventura’s other components. Nifty!
6. Integration with other components: Like search or Lotus Sametime 7.5, amongst others. Actually with the inclusion of that integration with Sametime 7.5 we would be getting the best out of both worlds, synchronous and asynchronous collaboration. And all that available from a single point of entry. Can it get better than this ? Hummm. I don’t think so.

One of the things that new bloggers tend to complain about is theme customization. It's just too hard to customize the look and feel of your blog. And that's true even if you just want to make a couple of minor tweaks like changing a banner image, changing a background color or adding a "widget" to your sidebar. In this post, I briefly review how a couple of popular blog servers enable blog customization.
[Read More]

The second installment of James Snell's developerWorks article on Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) is online. In part 2 he shows how to post to an Atom server and one of his examples is Roller. If you want to try Snell's example code with Roller, but you don't want to go through the trouble of installing full-on Roller/Tomcat/MySQL, try the super easy-to-install Blogapps Server bundle.

Here are links to parts 1 and 2 of Snell's article:

• Getting to know the Atom Publishing Protocol, Part 1
  Create and edit Web resources with the Atom Publishing Protocol
• Getting to know the Atom Publishing Protocol, Part 2
  Put the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) to work

And now, both parts of RSS and Atom in Action Chapter 4: Newsfeed Formats are online at WebReference.com. The chapter includes a history of RSS and Atom newsfeed formats and diagrams that illustrate the elements each format.

• Newsfeed Formats, Part 1
  From the Birth of RSS to the Nine incompatible versions of RSS
• Newsfeed Formats, Part 2
  the new standard: Atom

It's fairly easy to navigate to your old blog entries on a Roller system, but we don't provide an archive page like some blog servers do. Today on JRoller.com, Alex Ruiz explains how to add a nicely styled archives page to your blog using Roller's "big calendar" macro.

By default Roller 3.0 provides provides Atom 1.0 and RSS 2.0 format feeds for each blog, but you can easily add other formats. In his latest blogs.sun.com post, Henry Story explains how to add an RSS 1.0 feed to your Roller blog using the new Roller 3.0 macros. 

We deployed the Roller 3.1 codebase to blogs.sun.com yesterday so Sun bloggers have got Web 2.0 taggy goodness now. The rest of the Roller-using world will have to wait for Roller 3.1 to make its way through the Apache Incubator release process. Want to know more about 3.1, here's the Roller 3.1 What's New page.

But be warned. If you stand outside the Apache software factory waiting for Roller 3.1 to emerge onto the loading dock, you'll be somewhat disappointed. The next release due out is Roller 3.0 (here's the Roller 3.0 What's New page) -- we just got the votes to make the release so you can expect it in the next couple of days.

You've already heard the news about the Netbeans 5.5 release yesterday, so I won't bore you with that. Instead, check out the new Netbeans 5.5 theme on the Netbeans Profiler blog at JRoller.com. Very nicely done. And it scales too, Watt will like that.

• OpenSolaris distributions show promise | eWeek
  "these distributions point to intriguing new directions for Solaris"
• New file system boosts the already excellent Solaris 10 | eWeek
  "One of the most impressive things about ZFS is how easy it is to use"
• Sun narrows loss significantly | InfoWorld
  "Stronger sales of its Solaris 10 operating system helped..."
  
  
• blojsom/Google Maps template mashup
  "You're looking at blog entries 'rendered' on a map of the earth"
  
  
• Open-Source Portal Initiative at Sun, Part 1: Overview
  Overview of plans to transition Sun's portal server to an open source project at Java.Net
• Open-Source Portal Initiative at Sun, Part 2: Portlet Repository
  Overview of Open Source Portlet Repo, which includes RSS feed viewing and blog editing portlets
  
  
• The dictator's free cookie day?
  Opening Move podcast with Simon Phipps, David Van Couvering and yours truly
  
  
• Wiley::Professional Apache Geronimo
  by Bruce "this one time, at band camp" Snyder, Jeff Gerender and Sing Li
• RSS and Atom in Action: Newsfeed Formats
  Excerpts from Chapter 4 of RSS and Atom in Action, at WebReference.com

We're testing release candidates of Roller 2.3, so expect a release in next week or two. This release is a big one because we skipped 2.2, so we've got twice the normal monthly dose of features. Plus, we're shooting for full Apache license compliance. Read on for more [Read More]

Looks like WolfBlogs is live and my alma mater N.C. State University is blogging with Roller. I don't know the specifics of the setup, but I believe they are running on a cluster of Solaris/SPARC servers and using a pretty standard Roller configuration (i.e. Tomcat and MySQL).

Tom Stroobants figured out how to get Roller working on OC4J -- something I'd done once before, but I wasn't able to offer much help because that was almost four years ago and painful memories fade fast.

I've used code from the excellent Pebble and Blojsom blog servers in the past (and given credit in the Roller CREDITS file). I'd love to be able to contribute back and now there's an opportunity to do that. So to Simon and David (or anybody else hacking those servers), if you want to get Atom protocol working in your server, the easiest way might be for you to bring in some code from Roller. I specifically designed our Atom protocol implementation to allow for sharing and to be free of Roller dependencies.

For example, here's how you'd do it for Pebble:

• Bring the classes from the package org.roller.presentation.atomapi into Pebble (except for RollerAtomHandler, you won't need that one).
  
• You'll also need to bring in the ROME and JDOM jars if you're not aleady using them.
  
• Implement the interface AtomHandler with calls to the Pebble backend, call it PebbleAtomHandler or something similar.
  
• Change one line of code in the AtomServlet method createAtomRequestHandler() to create your new PebbleAtomHandler instead of the Roller one.

And feel free to pepper me with questions along the way. I'd be happy to help and happy to make changes to make this sharing easier. I'm also considering the idea of an Atom Server Kit package in my Blogapps project (on second thought, ROME might be a better home).

When you're done, head over to the #atom channel on irc.freenode.net so we can do some interop testing with MatisseBlogger and other Atom protocol clients.

I updated the Roller User Guide for Roller 2.0 today. The new user interface and group blogging features are documented with plenty of screenshots. Comments, corrections and suggestions for improvement are welcome.