Blogging Roller

I feel bad about the FreeRoller outage. I still don't know what the problem is, but I can't help but blame myself. I really appreciate the fact that Anthony Eden is hosting Roller at FreeRoller and giving me the opportunity to see how Roller scales with lots of users. I hope Anthony and everybody else will have patience as we try to track down this problem. I miss those blogs!

Apparently some very evil spirits still lurk deep in the heart of Roller. My attempts at exorcism have failed. I soaked error.jsp in holy water and was able to save FreeRoller from the grasp of the stack-overflow demons, but there is still something wicked going on. FreeRoller is still crash thrashing up and down. Maybe a fresh new build (0.9.6.3-pre) will rid us of the goblins.

As Ed Savage wrote on the Triangle JUG mailing list: this is big news. According to the Business Journal article, Borland is paying $185 million in a combined cash and stock deal.

Borland has been on a bit of a shopping spree lately. They recently bought StarBase which gained them the StarTeam issue tracker/source code control system and the CodeWright editor.

At the Eclipse meeting last night, I noticed that both TogetherSoft and Borland are on the Eclipse steering committee. Will Borland stop TogetherSoft from rehosting inside Eclipse or is Borland considering rehosting all of it's various IDEs and dev tools inside Eclipse? Will Borland help IBM make Eclipse into the universal multi-language tools platform?

I've been meaning to comment on this for a couple of days. Niel Eyde recently posted some words about JSP and MVC. Some people criticize JSP because it allows code-on-page. I understand that concern and I've got scars from dealing with frightening model 1 JSP code before, but I agree with Neil that JSP is not evil.

A frequent criticism that I hear about Java Server Pages (JSP) is that it doesn't strictly separate the presentation logic from the business logic, and there seems to be many solutions developed that aim to force this strict MVC separation. As developers, why should we depend on technology to force adherence to the goals of MVC? It is certainly possible to develop JSP pages that adhere to principles of MVC. If model or controller logic creeps into a JSP page, it our own fault. [Niel Eyde on JSP and MVC]

Greg recently moved off of FreeRoller to his own site at http://greg.klebus.com/blog. He left FreeRoller, but apparently not because he disliked Roller. Thanks Greg!

[thanks to] Dave Johnson and Roller contributors: Matt Raible, Lance Lavandowska. I must admit Roller v. 0.9.6.x seriously kicks ass. It's awesome. Great work. I had been tempted to install Roller on my webserver, but finally decided that the simpler application would be more appropriate.

FreeRoller has been up and down for the past couple of days. After looking at the logs, I that believe Roller has been going into an infinite loop of recursion because Roller's error page error.jsp declares itself to be it's own error page. When an error occurs on error.jsp, error.jsp is called where an error occurs and error.jsp is called where an error occurs and so on and so on. I'm not sure what the first error is or what the error on error.jsp is, but I've given FreeRoller a new error.jsp that should have better behavior. Maybe the new error.jsp will also reveal the root of the problem.

Last time I checked, it appeared that the Triangle Dot-Net Users Group was stillborn. But now, Tri-NUG appears to be cookin'. Recent speakers included Jeff Prosise and Jeffrey Richter, names I remember well from the bad old days of MFC and Windows API.

The RTP Websphere Users Group meeting meeting tonight was great. Eclipse Product Manager John Kellerman gave an excellent talk on Eclipse and covered the Eclipse history, philosophy, capabilities, plugin architecture, and future plans. He went into great detail in his presentation and in his demo before he ran out of time. I've been using Eclipse heavily, both at home and at work, for over a month now and he was still able to point out lots of features that I had not even noticed. Great stuff. Go IBM!

Those in the Triangle area, don't forget the Eclipse presentation at the Websphere Users Group meeting tonight.

Carlos likes the new Roller start page and suggests a much needed enhancement: a spellchecker. Also, Carlos noticed that cut-and-paste do not work in the Ekit HTML editor. You can fix that by putting the ekitapplet.jar in your JRE's lib/ext directory so that it is trusted and thereby allowed to cut-and-paste.

Wow, freeroller has been upgraded! I love the latest front page. . Finally, I can see at a glance which webblogs have a lot of viewership. As expected Rickard's one is on the top of the list. Speaking about improvements to Roller, I saw the otherday Jazzy an LGPL spellchecker written in Java. oh no...looks like this editor blew away what I was writing, furthermore, cut and paste doesn't seem to work.[Carlos E. Perez]

I'm not sure why Ekit blew away Carlos' writing, but I have noticed that the Java plugin can be pretty unstable. On my work machine, Mozilla locks up just about every other time I post with Ekit but on my home machine (same OS, same JVM, and same Mozilla versions) I never see this problem.

Granted that I have not really been following this story since the Apache Sun relationship first blew up, this sounds like an important story:

"Starting Tuesday, it will be mandatory that licenses provide for the possibility of a clean-room implementation," said Onno Kluyt, manager of the JCP Program Office. "A specification leader must offer a test suite independently of the reference implementation. It is required, going forward, that the test suite be available free of charge so that organizations like Apache don't face the hurdle of a license fee." [eWeek: Java Licensing Changes Will Open Door to Open Source]

In response to Russell's dot-net rantations, Kevin O'Neill and Rafe Colburn listed some advantages of Java and J2EE over C# and Dot-Net.  I agree with many of the points on those lists.  I think that Java's cross-platform portability and huge collection of competing open source and commercial dev tools, runtimes, and servers give Java a tremendous advantage.  Even with this advantage, Sun is going to have to push Java hard, fix the problems and open things up even more.

Russell said some pretty nice things about Dot-Net in his most recent anti-Microsoft rant, take a look:

• I've got some old coworkers and blog pals who are doing some really cool stuff with Dot-Net
• Many of the dumb ass things in Java have been fixed [by Dot-Net]
• [Dot-Net] means that you can program in any "language" that you want
• [Dot-Net Studio] is still the best IDE there is
• [Dot-Net's] WindowsForms kicks Swing's ass
• In as little as 4 or 5 years, Java could be a niche language like COBOL
• [The Dot-Net] CLR is going to be faster on M$OSes than the JVM

This sounds like a pretty bad situation for us Java advocates. Versions of our favorite open source Java tools are being ported to C#. The GNOME folks are working feverishly to port C# and the CLR to UNIX. To top it all, the chairman of our revered Jakarta Project is a Dot-Net blogger.

My thoughts on this? Nobody knows who what technologies will win out in the short term or in the long term so my advice to you is: hedge your bets.

After reviewing the video of the Triangle JUG's J2EE Container Shootout, Andy Oliver has posted his summary. Andy's summary of the shootout is much more detailed than the one I posted last month. He has written up five of the questions so far and promises to get to the rest soon.

Like Dominic, I have no idea what "Greenbaum" means. So Rickard, please dumb-down your sniper conspiracy theory a little so that us under-educated Americans can understand it.

Roller 0.9.6's referer tracker already ignored hits from pages in the same weblog, now Lance has added an ignoreHosts option so that a Roller admin can configure Roller to ignore hits from different hosts. That is cool, but I want a little mre control over what should be ignored. For example, I got hits today from file://<some file path>/penis.htm today. Ouch!

I think the Roller referer tracker needs a both ignoreStartsWith and ignoreContaining parameters (each being a list). You could use ignoreStartsWith to ignore hits from your own host, other hosts, and from protocols such as file: or mailto:. You could use ignoreContaining to ignore hits coming in from URLs containing certain keywords.

Searching on ignoring referers I found an interesting post from Mark Pilgrim about an old Manila bug and the importance of properly escaping HTML displayed from referers. I think I need to address this issue in both the Roller Editor UI and macros.showReferers().

FreeRoller.net and now Matt Raible have upgraded to Roller 0.9.6.1. There is also a Roller 0.9.6.2 release that fixes one additional glitch. The release looks good and I encourage you to upgrade now if you want to try all the new Roller features.

Matt and I have noticed one small problem with Roller's RSS output. If you have HTML in your Roller website description or in your weblog entry titles, you may produce an invalid RSS feed. A later Roller 0.9.6.x release will fix this problem by removing all HTML from website description and weblog entry title elements in the RSS output.

Danno Ferrin commented on the new Roller features today. He likes the HTML editor, the new validating RSS2 feeds, and the referers macro.

UPDATE: Roller 0.9.6 looks good and FreeRoller.net is up and running with it.

I'm happy to announce the release of The Roller Weblogger Version 0.9.6. This release adds better support for multi-user sites like FreeRoller, lots of weblog editing enhancements, new macros, valid RSS 2.0 output, and support for creating pages that validate as HTML 4 or XHTML1. Also, lots of bugs were fixed. Thanks to committers Lance Lavandowska (LL) and Matt Raible (MR). Thanks to all the folks who participated on the devlist, reported bugs, as well as those who made suggestions and complaints regarding Roller. Special thanks go to my darling wife who puts up with all of this nonsense.

You can download Roller 0.9.6 at SourceForge (thanks VA Software!). Make your contribution to Roller by reporting any problems that you find to Roller's JIRA issue tracker (thanks Atlassian!).

Here are some more convenient download links:

roller-0.9.6.2.tar.gz - All you need to run Roller (on Tomcat)

Summary of new features:

   Multi-user :    
   - Admin UI for deleting users (LL)
   - New start page with sortable table of all weblogs on the site (LL)
   - Referer ranking table, page and RSS hit counter in Editor UI (DJ)
   - Plugin authenticator (DJ)
   
   Weblog editing enhancements:
   - Option to save weblog entries without publishing them (LL)
   - Better control over weblog entry publish date (LL)
   - Supports creation of websites that validate as HTML4 or XHTML1 (MR)
   - Ekit HTML editor applet is available as an option to users (DJ)
   - Mitchell's DHTML editor now available as an option to IE users (LL)
   
   New and improved macros:
   - Referer ranking macro with page and RSS hit counter (DJ)
   - Big Calendar macro shows month-view with entries for each day (DJ)
   - Control over number of weblog entries displayed (DJ)
   - Protection from recursion in includePage and showWeblogEntries (DJ)
   - Expand/collapse feature in Bookmark and Newsfeed macros (MR)
   
   RSS related features:
   - Syndicator now outputs RSS 2.0 (DJ)
   - Multiple RSS feeds for each weblog, one for each category (DJ)
   - RSS feeds available with full-text or excerpts only (DJ)
   - RSS aggregation features may now be disabled (DJ)

The User Guide has not yet been updated, but it will be.

Neil Eyde has released a new version of PersonalBlog, his Struts/Tiles implementation of Russell Beattie's MiniBlog. It also includes the Mitchell HTML editor.