Blogging Roller

There will be a OpenSocial Summit: May 14th, at the Googleplex covering the new v0.8 spec changes and all sorts of other interesting things. Wish I could make it, but I'll be happily back home in the old north state. Hopefully, somebody from the SocialSite team will be able to attend.

Struts 2 is my favorite Java web framework these days; it's REST-friendly, simple, easy to use, very flexible and the only thing it has with its creaky old Struts 1.x parent is the fact that it's an action framework rather than a component framework like JSF. As most of my readers probably already know, Struts 2 is based on WebWork/XWork the framework that powers JIRA and Confluence, two of the coolest Java webapps around.

Apparently, I'm not alone in this thinking -- I keep on running into folks at JavaOne who feel the same way. But unfortunately, Struts 2 docs are lacking, so I was very happy to see two new books on Struts 2 at the JavaOne bookstore. There's Struts 2 in Action, a rewrite of the classic Manning book, and Practical Apache Struts 2 Web 2.0 Projects from Apress.

I picked up a copy of Struts 2 in Action on Monday and it looks great so far, but I've only skimmed it. I'll let you know what I think once I dig-in on the flight home.

If you're at JavaOne, check out TS-5739 - Hands-on Struts2 by Ian Roughley (author of the Apress book) today at 10:50 AM in Esplanade 307/310.

One more thing to mention before I hit the JavaOne opening reception: Bobby Bissett submitted a short and to-the-point video on Project SocialSite to the Enterprise 2.0 LaunchPad. Please check it out and help us vote it up

Jamey Wood and I presented our Introduction to Project SocialSite yesterday. We had a much larger crowd than I expected, given the number of concurrent talks -- I'm guessing there were close to 300 people in the room. I hope to be able to post a link to the slides at some point in the near future because right now we've got almost no information on Project SocialSite on the web. Now that we've got permission to talk about the project, I'm going to try to change that.

I spent most of the day in the Sun booth answering questions about SocialSite and demonstrating our widgets and web services in Roller and MediaWiki and talking through some key slides in our deck. At this point, we only have a handful of our widgets implemented and they're pretty bare bones, but folks seemed to "get it" and liked the idea of adding social networking features to existing web applications.

If you're at JavaOne, then please stop by the Sun both and say hi. Look for us under the banner Social Networking for Glassfish. And if you want the full scoop then check out our Birds of a Feather (BOF) session:

BOF-5857: Turn your website into an OpenSocial container with Project SocialSite
6:30 PM on Thursday
Esplanade 307/310

Jamey and I will be ready with slides and demos and answers to (almost) all of your questions and you'll have plenty of time to make it to the After Dark shindig.

As promised, here's some more information about the talk I and my co-speaker Jamey Wood are giving tomorrow at CommunityOne (2:35 PM in Moscone Hall E 135).

Below is the official title and blurb.

Perhaps a better title would have been, "make your webapps social with Project SocialSite" but we didn't have permission to talk about our project until very recently. Now, we're ready to talk about the Project SocialSite widgets and web services and how you can use them to add Social Networking features to your existing Java, PHP and Ruby webapps. We're not ready to talk about product plans, features or schedules but we are ready to demonstrate our work in Netbeans, MediaWiki, Portal, Roller and possibly some other apps as the JavaOne week progresses.

Here's an outline of the talk:

Look for Project SocialSite in the CommunityOne demo area and at the Sun booth in the JavaOne pavillion all week.

There are quite a number of Social Software related talks at JavaOne and CommunityOne this year. You can learn about everything from building Social Networks with the Liferay portal and federated relationships with OpenSSO to creating 3D virtual works and implementing OpenSocial with Java. And, I'll finally be able to talk about what I've been working on for the past couple of months -- more about that later. [Read More]

I remember how freaked-out I was to see the referrer hits start rolling in (pun fully intended) from http://blogs.sun.com/roller. I can't believe it's been four years already. Thanks to Linda for the reminder.

BarCamp RDU 2008 is on!

The date is Saturday August 2, 2008 and, like last year and the year before, the event will be held in Red Hat's offices at the N.C. State University Centennial Campus. Sign-up is already open and the limited space is filling-up quickly, so if you're interested then please go ahead a sign up on the BarCamp RDU wiki.

• Skrocki's Blog: WOOHOO Sun Blogs sees its 100,000th blog post!!!
  Pat Chanezon made the first post, not sure who made the 100,000th
• Mark Fortner: how to publish to Roller via Google Docs
  "Google Docs 'publish' feature allows you to publish a doc as a blog entry."
• Chandra Chan: Using wbloggar 4 with JRoller version 3
  "using the new version of w.bloggar version 4.03"


• Jean-Francois Arcand: Jersey 0.7 released...with a tiny taste of Grizzly Comet Support
  "gives us a couple weeks and we gonna have something really amazing"
• Earthly Powers: Jersey 0.7 released
  "many additions and clarifications to the API" plus Comet support
• NetBeans 6.1 RC2: Let the IDE Do The Web Services Plumbing For You
  "brings support for web services from Google, Amazon, Facebook and others"


• ZDNet: Social networking will be biggest enterprise 2.0 priority by 2013
  "smaller businesses aren’t even considering, while the giants are diving in head first"
• Move Over Lotus Notes, SharePoint is Filling Yer Shoes
  "What Microsoft makes look easy — can quickly become a nightmare in the making"
• Joshua Marinacci: know of any good forum software?
  Comments suggest JForum, LifeRay message board and other Java options


• colmmacc: AWS, AppEngine and the future of data
  coping with the "fallout of using a planet instead of a hard-disk"
• Search Guy: Minion open source search engine from Sun Labs
  search "engine that ships with the Portal Server and Web Server"
• Unit Structures: Introducing Freedom
  "I find myself desperately searching out places where I can be network-free"

The Apache Abdera (incubating) project has released a new version of its Atom parser/generator, client library and all new AtomPub Server Framework. Here's the new feature list:

• A simplified server side framework and API for implementing services.
• Server side filter API for intercepting requests and impl. concerns such as security.
• A collection of pre-bundled AtomPub adapters for JDBC, JCR, filesystems, and CouchDB.
• An improved JSON serialization mechanism.
• New extensions such as OAuth support.
• New StreamWriter interface for fast Atom document serialization
• Improved Unicode performance for IRI implementation
• URI Template Support
• HTML Parser
• Many API improvements and bug fixes!

In related news, there's a proposal to use Abdera for the reference implementation of the OpenSocial REST APIs, which are under development by the Apache Shindig (incubating) project.

My former co-worker Linda Skrocki and Program Manager for Sun's community sites (blogs, wikis, planets, forums and mediacast at sun.com) got some well deserved recognition from ReadWriteWeb.com the other day. She was named one of Seven leading Corporate Social Media Evangelists. Congrats Linda!

I'm making final preparations for my trip to Amsterdam tomorrow for ApacheCon EU. I've been packing my bags with warm clothes and rehearsing my all-new talk Advanced Roller talk. Below are the details including the abstract and an outline of the slide deck.

Advanced Apache Roller

Apache Roller is a popular open source blog server designed to serve the needs of large multi-user blogging sites and typically used by large corporations, universities and government organizations. This session for managers, sysadmins and developers will goes beyond the Roller installation guide and explores the advanced issues of planning and executing a Roller deployment, including deployment architecture and configuration options as well as options for customization and automation.

• Introduction
  • Goals and Agenda
  • Caveats and disclaimers
  • RTFM
• Advanced Installation
  • Installs now easy
  • Perhaps too easy?
  • Using container managed resources
• TIP: customize the default blogroll
• Caching
  • Page and feed caching
  • Built-in cache implementations
  • Roller's four caches
  • Default cache settings
• TIP: choose themes carefully
• Authentication
  • Authentication options
  • But what about CMA?
  • Authentication limitations
  • User management changes coming in 4.1
• TIP: separate themes directory
• Deployment options
  • Deployment architecture: small
  • Deployment architecture: large
  • Sizing
• TIP: check the Roller Support project
• Caching with Memcached
  • Setting up Memcached
  • Configuring Roller Memcached plugin
• TIP: enable debug logging
• Scripting and automation options
  • AtomPub, RAP and calling Roller's Java API
  • Scripting RAP with Groovy
  • Scripting Roller's Java API with Groovy
• TIP: create your own Roller build
• Plugging in new functionality
  • Ten types of Roller plugins
  • Implementing a Page Model
• TIP: create your own Roller themes
• Questions and Answers

My talk is at 3PM Friday, April 11 and I'll post the final slides then.

The slides are available here:

http://people.apache.org/~snoopdave/presentations/advanced-roller-aceu2008.pdf

Fred Stutzman: Most of us are not internet celebrities, but the social software we use assumes we are (or want to be). It's time to rethink this, to build closets and spaces for whispering into social software.

As usual, great insights from Fred. Read the whole thing.

Here's a concept that I've been using to help me both in my blog writing and to filter all the incoming feeds, tweets, photo sharing and social bookmarking items that come in via my feed reader: my A list. It's not made up of famous folks and big blog names like Scoble or Winer or Arrington. My A list is made up of people that I know or work with and that I believe are following me in some way, reading my blog, subscribing to my tweets or working with me on a project. I've got a folder in my feed reader and my A list is always the one I read first. Sometimes I don't get much farther than than before hitting the mark all read button. And when I do blog, that folder helps remind my of who I'm writing for. "A" stands for audience.

• cgwalters - A software tsunami
  "OpenJDK is finally changing that. Now, you can write a library using Java, it can be sensibly integrated with Free operating systems"
• Countdown for IBM Project Zero | Reg Developer
  "bringing the feedback typical of an open source project without any of the obligations to give the resulting technology back to the community."
• Soviet-era JCP needs change, concedes top commissar | Reg Developer
  Patrick Curran has reached a firm conclusion on his organization: "We have to change," he said. "No more smoke-filled rooms."
• Glynn Foster: Why Our Governance Doesn’t Work
  "There’s no substitute to JFDI - or improving our governance model so that it doesn’t get in the way of suitably motivated people who want to contribute."


• Skype Journal: Skype and the Social Network Stack
  "We need a new stack to sort out social media's plumbing"
• An Open Letter to American Express ~ Chris Pirillo
  "You know, for all the buzz that FaceBook gets… I get far more value out of Twitter."
• buddypress - Google Code
  "suite of plugins that will completely transform a vanilla installation of Wordpress MU into a fully functional social network platform"


• App Platform Strategies Blog: Looking for SOA success stories
  "SOA is not working in most organizations"
• OLPC News: Negroponte Says XP on XO in 60 Days
  "the end of a dream".
• Atlassian Dev Blog - Maven in our development process. Part 4.
  "Maven users need training."

It's not a new runtime or a component model or some bastardized chunk of code yanked from the guts of the wombeast, it's just Netbeans 6.1 beta, the latest revision of a good solid and Jolt award winning IDE.

So I'm here telling you to download it, install it, try it out and blog about it because the Netbeans team really wants and, in fact, needs your feedback. Plus, you could even win some money.

I can't win since I'm a Sun employee, but I downloaded 6.1-beta today and started using it for development. I put it through its paces with some heavy refactoring work without single crash, a stack-trace or any of the usual things a beta brings. Of course, YMMV. I did see a weird-ass anomaly in the Mac OS X activity monitor.

I asked for Google Summer of Code (GSOC) ideas for Roller a couple of days ago. Below are links to the proposals I thought were good enough to volunteer as possible mentor for and to submit. The deadline is tomorrow, so you've still got time to suggest additions to the list.

• Roller OpenID: Open ID support for Roller blog server, for user accounts and comments
• Roller Mobile: Mobile interface for Roller blog server
• Roller Activities: Simple Social Networking for Roller blog server, Twitter-like activities
• Roller Abdera: Abdera-based AtomPub implementation for Roller blog server
• AtomPub Export: AtomPub Export for Roller blog server, export all!
• Roller Shindig: Google Gadget support in Roller blog server themes via Shindig
• Roller Photo Gallery: Better photo and file upload features in Roller blog server

Here's the full list of Apache GSOC proposals.

Henry Yandel: I continue to grapple with the concept of how to treat users of Open Source projects. Should you be cruel, or kind?

It sounds like a dumb question - rude hackers who rip users apart for daring to ask a question in a not perfect way are just arseholes who need to get off their high horse. Right?

I’m not convinced. And I’m someone who usually over worries about being polite. Mostly because the voice inside my head is, I suspect, the kind of stormtrooper who after the Death Star blows up for the second time, will be found out of uniform at the Rebel party selling little burgers of ‘forest meat - mind the blaster marks on the fur’. Read more...

Insightful and fun post from Apache board member Henri Yandell. Worth a read for folks trying to grow an open source community of contributors.

As you can tell from the links below, I've been goofing around with the Twitter API and JavaFX. The Twitter API looks pretty nice and very easy to use. JavaFX looks cool to this old Swing geek, but I'm a little surprised at the state of the docs and the absence of apps. I expected more after the hyped-up launch last year. Oh, well. The Netbeans plugin is pretty nice. I'll stick with it and maybe I'll be able to squeeze a Twitter Client or at least a Java.net or O'Reilly article out of my late night JavaFX noodlings.

• Twitter API docs
  Documentation for the Twitter API
• org.json Java API docs
  Easy to use JSON library for Java
• Sven Drieling, "JavaFX -- Beispiele"
  Nice set of JavaFX examples, even if you don't know German
• Introduction to JavaFX Script
  Nice introduction to JavaFX in the German version of O'Reilly
• openjfx: downloads
  JavaFX documentation, tutorials downloads, demos, Netbeans plugins, etc.
• Jim Weaver's JavaFX blog
  Jim Weaver is the author of the Apress JavaFX book
• JavaFX Script Language Reference
  Reference for the scripting language, seems kinda spotty, w/lots of TODOs
• F3 Classes
  JavaFX class docs, out of date but I've found them useful

Daffodils
Originally uploaded by snoopdave

It's still a little chilly around here, but the flowers and trees are starting to bloom.