Blogging Roller

I have a new Servlet ISP that is quite simply awesome: Kattare. I'll talk more about Kattare and the new Roller 0.9.3 release later. Right now, I need to get outside for a while.

Spotted JState which looks interesting. It could be useful when putting together an open source workflow system. James Strachan

JState does look nice. JState is currently at Revision 0.2.1 and licensed under the LGPL.

Sometimes you just won't feel like writing tests, especially at first. Don't. However, pay attention to how much more trouble you get into, how much more time you spend debugging, and how much more stress you feel when you don't have tests. We have been amazed at how much more fun programming is and how much more aggressive we are willing to be and how much less stress we feel when we are supported by tests. The difference is dramatic enough to keep us writing tests even when we don't feel like it. JUnitTest Infected : Programmers Love Writing Tests

I really like this idea of using unit tests as a safety net for development, so I guess I need to learn more about JUnit and the Extreme Programming ideas behind it. Up until now, Roller development was done without a net.

Red Hat CMS [Content Management System] is delivered with the source code and is J2EE compliant, allowing easy extensibility and customization of the implementation by Red Hat, or by the organization's own developers.

Excellent! I'll add that to <a href= "http://rollerweblogger.org/page/roller/20020618#a_href_http_radio_weblogs2"> my list of open source Java CMS sofware. The license sure looks like open source. Via BeBlogging via Rebelutionary via rc3.org

I'm very happy to announce the birth of Leo Michael Johnson - our third son. Leo was born at 1:45pm on Friday June 21, 2002, weighed 9 pounds 11 ounces, and measured 22 inches long. Leo will join the Roller project as the VP of Human Resources and has already started a major new personnel initiative. He wants to push back project schedules across the board so that all Roller team members can enjoy more family time. He has my full support!

Mike's post about open source Java workflow engines highlights a trend I've noticed recently. You've heard a lot about open source Java software at the tools level - class libraries, appservers, IDEs, code generators, and build tools. But recently, open source Java has been moving up the chain - towards the business application area. You won't find a complete and ready for deployment open source Java e-biz solution yet, but you will find some key components.  Here are some of the pieces:

<table cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" border="0" width="80%" align="center"> Business Processflow/Workflow
OSWorkflow
Powerfolder
Open Business Engine
OFBiz Workflow Engine

e-Business software suite
Open For Business Project
Content Management Systems
RedHat CMS (added June 21)
Cofax
Slide

Portal servers, search engines
Jetspeed
Lucine

After keeping their Servlet engine up for a record 4 days, CQHost (the ISP that hosts rollerweblogger.org) went down again yesterday and stayed down for about 20 hours.

I can understand that it might be difficult for CQHost to provide anything near 99% uptime for only $12.50 per month. What I cannot understand is their complete refusal to provide any Servlet engine status information on their Server Manager web page. They don't even give you access to your logs in the Server Manager. When the Servlet engine goes down, it would be very reassuring to read "JSP support is down now, we are working to restore service" or something like that. I guess they prefer to wade through piles of "SERVER DOWN!" trouble tickets.

Other ISPs provide detailed status information. How nice. I wish those other ISPs also offered Servlet support.

you need to decide whether you want an object model for your application or not. If not, use JDBC, if you do, consider JDO.

David Jordan of Object Identity following-up his talk on the Triangle Java User's Group mailing list. FYI: Roller uses Castor JDO, which is quite different from Sun's JDO.

I just enjoyed a nice lunch with fellow Triangle area bloggers Rafe Colburn, Joe Gregorio, Mark Pilgrim, and Sam Ruby, at Fortune Garden in RTP.

Here is that Roller Roadmap that I mentioned yesteday. If you have some suggestions about the roadmap, or (more importantly) if you'd like to help out - please let me know.

Mike's right, it sounds like WebGain is just throwing Visual Cafe over the wall to the open source community. But, I don't see anything wrong with that. I'd rather see old software products released as open source than see them disappear into oblivion.

Java trivia: some consider Visual Cafe to be the first Java IDE, but I think that distinction belongs to Rogue Wave's JFactory - which was introduced in January 1996 and has since disappeared into oblivion (along with the zApp C++ GUI library).

The deal will also means WebGain will halt all development and sales of its market-leading IDEs Visual Café and WebGain Studio - the latest version of which is currently in beta. WebGain hopes the IDEs will be picked-up by the open source community, carrying the product forward.

From The Register's May 6th article WebGain to exit tools, Oracle to buy TopLink. If the above quote is true, it means there will be three major open source IDEs (I'm assuming that Visual Cafe and Webgain Studio are really the same thing): Netbeans, Eclipse, and Visual Cafe. And four if you count jEdit.

It's true that SWT is not yet available everywhere. But Eclipse 2.0 works with Windows, Motif, and GTK+ (Gimp Toolkit) 2, and operability on Mac OS X seems imminent. Unlike Swing-based software, Eclipse works immediately with native features such as Windows XP skinning. "Microsoft has lots of programmers and so does Gnome/GTK," Grindstaff says. "So why not leverage that?"

From a very interesting InfoWorld article on Eclipse via Sam Ruby. I prefer Swing, but if the Eclipse SWT approach means that vim could be embedded into the Eclipse IDE then Eclipse will be the IDE for me. I need to download the Eclipse 2.0 beta and take it for a spin.

Shawn Dahlin and I have been working on a roadmap of future Roller features. I just sent it out to the Roller dev list and I will probably post a link to it here later today.

I've enjoyed Mark Pilgrim's accessibility writings so far. Today he finally explained what he is doing. Some say he is being too preachy. I don't agree, but even if he is being preachy - this is a topic that needs some serious preaching.

Most of the work is already done and in CVS, so I'm hoping I can package this up in the next couple of weeks. Here are the new features:

• New tabbed menu in editor interface (already in CVS)
• Better day and entry permalinks (already in CVS)
• Blogger API support (almost done - some of it in CVS)
• New website setting: Enable Blogger API
• New website setting: Category for Blogger API posts
• Add Resin servlet engine to installation guide (to be done)
• Add javax.sql.ConnectionPooledDataSource setup to installation guide (to be done)
• Three nice themes (to be done)

Rendering a weblog page at rollerweblogger.org (an Intel-based Linux box) seems 4-5 times slower than rendering that same page on my homebox (an AMD Athlon 1600 box running Windows XP). I wonder why that is. I wonder if I can improve this situation by using database connection pooling. If that does not help, I'm going to have to do some kind of page caching. 10 seconds to load a page is just not acceptible.

The Server Side is reporting that Intalio will stop support for all of its OSS projects, except for Castor. I'm not sure what this means, but it does not give me any warm fuzzies about Castor. But, the fact that a new release of Castor v0.9.3.19 is now available for download is somewhat reassuring.

to the Roller project! Shawn contributed Blogger API support and a bunch of cool ideas for building up Roller in the "community server" area. Among other things, he suggested adding meta-data to each Roller website to help workgroups categorize and build directories of Roller websites, improving the very primitive newsfeed aggregation features, adding better access control, and supporting editor, guest, and administrator roles.

In case you are wondering, the artwork on this page comes from a bookcase that I painted for my 5 year old son Alex. I also painted an armoire for my mom using the same theme - the $1.69, doll-house variety armoire, that is.