Blogging Roller

CQHost took me down for a while because I had misconfigured my web.xml and Resin was trying to write log files to the wrong place. It took a while to get back up and running, but now I'm back.

During the downtime, I configured connection pooling for Roller by using the MM MySQL JDBC driver's MySQLConnectionPoolDataSource and by configuring Castor and Velocity to look up their datasources via JNDI. The performance improvement is wonderful - I've gone from 15-20 second page loads to 2-5 second loads on rollerweblogger.org and down to 1 second page load on my homebox.

CQHost is back up and running now. In other news, I removed the calendar and blogroll components from my page templates because they were too damn slow. Now I have 3-5 second page loads. Those components will be back once I figure out connection pooling and/or page caching.

It looks like Mike subscribed to the Roller RSS feed using Radio, and then did a post. The URLs in his post are all screwed up and it looks like Roller is to blame. Sorry folks. I'll have to work on that.

Mike mentions that OSCache can solve my performance problems in 30 seconds. Yes, that looks like the ticket.

Things are definitely looking up for rollerweblogger.org.  CQHost has completed the Resin 2.1.1 upgrade and now Roller is running smoothly there.  However, I've still got a little work to do before I can go live.  Stay tuned.

Roller goes live! rollerweblogger.org is up and running now and so is Roller.

Still waiting on CQHost...  CQHost said they would upgrade to Resin 2.1.1 on Tuesday. It is now Thursday morning and they are still running production servers on the Resin 2.1.s020430 experimental snapshot. I feel just like Charlie Brown.  I have until June 20 to ask for my money back, I wonder if they will fix this in time.

Shawn Dahlen has implemented the Blogger API for Roller and he tested his implementation by using the w.bloggar blogger client to post to Roller.  Shawn used Apache XML-RPC to do this work. What an awesome new feature for the upcoming 0.9.3 release - this is great!

Now, on to CQHost.  For a brief time yesterday, I was able to run Roller on CQHost.  There were some glitches but things seemed to work, for a while.  Then everything became slow, then the server appeared to crash.  Now I can't run any Servlets or JSPs at all.  So, I'm stuck again. 

Great news: CQHost has finally upgraded to Resin 2.1.1 and my simple Struts example works fine.  Now it is time to deploy Roller.  Wish me luck.

While waiting for CQHost, I've been doing some work on Roller. I'm not ready to make a new (0.9.3) release of Roller just yet, but I am just about ready to go live at rollerweblogger.org. Here is what is in the works.  I've been working on adding support for day and item permalinks, building an import facility for Radio weblog entries, and finishing the editor GUI by adding an XML driven tabbed-menu component (a custom JSP tag).  Somebody else has been working on Blogger API support, so that may also make it into the Roller 0.9.3 release.

I am happy to report that I have some positive news about CQHost.  A human finally responded to my over-a-week old trouble ticket and informed me that CQHost will be upgading to Resin 2.1.1 tomorrow.  I hope this is going to work out.  If it does then CQHost will be the least expensive and possibly the best option for hosting a Roller weblog.

If you know of another inexpensive, Servlet 2.3 capable, and MySQL ready ISP then I would like to hear from you. I've been combing the list at Servlets.COM and I have not found anything that looks reasonable.

[rebelutionary] -> I was thinking about what John Robb said today. Knowing how few Java / J2EE focussed weblogs there are, I decided to create a page listing to all that I have found. Hopefully this list will get larger in time and will help Java bloggers find other Java bloggers! See Java and J2EE Weblogs.

I've been using the commercial Resin 2.1.1 server for all my Roller work for about a week. I have found Resin to be noticably faster than Tomcat 4.0.1, but I have not done any benchmarks.  I also found Resin to be easy to setup, just like Tomcat: unzip the files and run the start-up script. Right now, I have no reason so switch back to Tomcat.  I'll stick with Resin at least until I have time to take a look at the Tomcat 4.1 release candidate.

Resin implements the Servlet 2.3 specification, but Resin also offers some nice non-standard ease-of-use enhancements. For example, if you put Java files in your webapp's /WEB-INF/classes directory, Resin will watch them and compile them when they change. I won't use that, but it sounds kind of nice. Another example: when Resin detects that my webapp's classes or jars have changed it will reload the webapp - with Tomcat 4.0.1, I had to restart the whole server when my webapp's jars changed.
 
Resin allows you to include Servlet Context configuration properties inside your webapp's web.xml file, using non-standard (proprietary) XML tags. For example, you can configure Servlet Authentication by putting a Resin-specific <authenticator> tag within the standard <login-config> tag. This is convenient for developers, but as you write your build and install scripts, you'll need to be aware that non-standard web.xml stuff like that will cause porting problems and will have to be stripped out before deployment on other servers.  Instead of adding new XML tags to web.xml, I'd would rather see them add a separate web-resin.xml file for their stuff.

Maybe it is normal to wait 7 days for your hosting service's tech support department to respond.  Maybe I'm just an impatient jack-ass.  I'm not going to mention this CQHost thing again until I have something positive to say (or I give up on CQHost).