Blogging Roller

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.

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]

Newsgator, makers of FeedDemon and NetNewsWire, have launched a Java ME powered RSS/Atom feed reader. Here are some details from the press release: 

NewsGator Go! for BlackBerry and NewsGator Go! for Java were developed in a technology partnership with FreeRange Communications, the leading developers of mobile publishing and mobile RSS solutions, and is available for BlackBerry, Sony Ericsson, Nokia, and most other MID-P 2.0 mobile phones, including Samsung, Sanyo and LG. NewsGator Go! is available for $29.95 or $14.95 if bought with any of NewsGator’s desktop readers, including FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and Inbox.

Via Randy Morin.

The Sun Web Developer Pack (SWDP) finally uncloaked today, so I can talk a little more openly about what I and my Java EE co-workers have been working on. You can get the full scoop at the SWDP site, but basically SWDP is a bundle of technologies to help developers build "Web 2.0" or next-generation web applications on the Java platform. Ajax, scripting languages, REST and of course RSS/Atom are all part of that. The RSS/Atom bits are ROME 0.9 (Beta), Blogapps 2.0 (Early Access) and a ROME-based Atom Server kit based on code from Roller.  There are also example Atom server implementations in the REST API and Phobos components of the pack.

I'm pretty excited that we're putting some resources behind ROME and that both ROME and Blogapps are part of SWDP R1, but I'm even more excited about the next release. In R2 we'll drop the Atom Server Kit and Blogapps BlogClient and we'll replace them with ROME Propono a brand new Atom protocol client and server library that we're getting ready to contribute to the ROME project.

I haven't had a whole lot of time to experiment with the various components in the pack, but I have played with Phobos and I think it's pretty compelling. Phobos is a "lightweight, scripting-friendly, web application environment." It's not just for creating server-side JavaScript applications, but that's the angle the I find interesting. So many developers are creating JavaScript/Ajax applications these days that working in JavaScript on both client and server-sides makes sense -- especially when you can debug into JavaScript code in your IDE as you can with the Netbeans Phobos module. Also note that the jMaki Ajax components work with JSP, PHP and Phobos -- jMaki and Phobos look like a winning combination.

 

I'm very happy to report that my talk was accepted for JavaOne 2007. I'll be giving a thoroughly revamped and updated version of my Beyond Blogging talk (aka Johnson on Feeds), which adds in-depth coverage of ROME and ROME Propono. I'm excited about going to JavaOne again, but I'm also feeling a bit frazzled. I'm swamped with work right now and I've got a stack of deadlines clustered around the March 20 due date for the slides.

I helped out with the session selection for the web-tier track this year so I can say with some confidence that at least one track is going to rock -- we've got a wonderful set of talks lined up, so don't miss it. The full session schedule isn't online yet, but registration is open.

Placeblogger is a new blog and aggregation site that's all about local blogging from Lisa Williams and friends. It's powered by Bryte, which is based on the Drupal content management system and offers blogs, feed aggregations, photo galleries and polls.

You can help build the database by submitting your favorite place blogs. The database supports a number of different "blog types." You can add aggregations, so Joe's local planets would be suitable, and you can add community sites so Orange Politics would fit right in too. I submitted Raleighing.

Here's some more reading on the topic:

• Wired: Get Your Local Fix
• Jay Rosen: Check out Placeblogger.com

Rich has put together a interesting blogapp that pulls all entries from a blog and turns them into a book, using either cups2pdf or OpenOffice.org Writer. I had the same idea when I was writing RSS and Atom in Action, but I was going to go the DocBook route and eventually dropped the idea because DocBook seemed a bit too complex.

I don't think Rich's work is Roller-specific. Rich used Grabber to get the entries out of Roller and into simple HTML files, so the approach should work with other blog servers that support the MetaWeblog API.

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.

A new release of the RSS and Atom Utilities (ROME) project ROME 0.9 (beta) is now available on the project's Java.net website. This new release includes fixes to Atom relative URI resolution, easier parsing for RSS feeds that use <content:encoded>, better support for mapping of RSS to and from Atom and numerous small fixes. [Read More]

• Sam Ruby: Atom AutoDiscovery
  Comments seem to indicate we may see a shared RSS and Atom spec, which would be good
  
• Atom Autodiscovery spec
  M. Pilgrim and J.Snell, Ed.
• RSS Autodiscovery spec 1.0
  Rogers Cadenhead, James Holderness and Randy Charles Morin
• The Cafes: RELAX Wins
  "Among the XML cognoscenti, the debate is effectively over"
• Time for ROME 0.9?
  New release coming soon with fixes to content/summary handing, relative URI resolving and date parsing

The ROME mailing list has been a little quiet lately. I'm hoping to change that. Roller's built-in planet aggregator uses ROME, Roller's Atom protocol implementation does too and I recommended ROME in my book, so I'd really like to see ROME continue to improve and grow. Now that I'm focusing on a standalone version of Roller-Planet, I've got some time to devote to those goals. Last week I cleared the bug list, this week I committed some improvements to ROME's summary/content handling and next I'd like to start pushing for a ROME 1.0 release. If you'd like to see ROME thrive, please join the fun.

In my off-hours, I've started work on Blogapps 2. Blogapps is a collection of RSS/Atom utilities and applications based on the code from RSS and Atom in Action. You can read more about the project in my recent Blogapps article on on Java.net. Up until now, I've been working alone, but now the project now has a couple of committers. Ramesh Mandava (of the Java WSDP team) joined to help with the Blogapps 2 effort.

We're starting with some renaming. Instead of using chapters-oriented directories and package names, we're more logical and intuitive application names. We're also switching from package name com.manning.blogapps to org.blogapps. Later, I hope to update some dependencies (e.g. Apache XML-RPC 3.0), consolidate/streamline some of the utilities and explore alternatives to Tomcat/HSQLDB for the Blogapps server.

The Server Side posted an excerpt from RSS and Atom in Action last week. Chapter 2: Development kick-start explains how to setup the Blogapps Server and how to post to just about any blog server via MetaWeblog API from Java and C#. And if you're interested in that, then you'll also be interested in The Blogapps Project, which was published on Java.net last month.

On the O'Reilly site, Mark Woodman's How to Build an RSS 2.0 Feed is now available as an O'Reilly Short Cut, a 56-page PDF for $7.99. Marks says that he covered RSS 2.0 from the perspective of the RSS Advisory Board Profile (aka RSS 2.0.8), which seems like a good idea. And he covered ROME too.

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

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. 

Looks like Elias had a fun weekend creating Pundit's Monitor, a political blog monitoring tool using a heap of Java tech: the Nutch search engine/web crawler, Burton's TailRank FeedParser for auto-discovery and ROME for feed parsing (though he doesn't mention that in the post). 

Nick Lothian wrote to tell me about the Education.au blog, an aggregated site that uses the PlanetTool example from Chapter 11 of RSS and Atom in Action.

My Java.net article on the Blogapps Project just went live today.

The Blogapps project provides what is essentially a complete RSS and Atom development kit, which includes feed parsers, generators, blog client libraries, an Atom protocol implementation, a set of ten useful blogapps, and an easy-to-install blog and wiki server. This article explains the project's purpose and how to install and use the project's products, the Blogapps Examples and Blogapps Server, to jump-start your RSS and Atom development.