Blogging Roller

Excellent article with quotes from software pioneers and bloggers Dan Bricklin and Mitch Kapor.

CNET: "Web logs (commonly known as "blogs"), message boards and other online forums are becoming increasingly important vehicles for developers to attract customers -- and development talent -- well before an application even enters the beta stage."

It's nice that there are multiple competing Roller sites now.

Carlos Villela: I had to move this blog to another Roller. Sorry guys and gals, but freeroller.net is just too slow, and I don't know if it's a problem in their bandwidth, mine, or if they're just too loaded.

You probably did not notice this, but my site was getting a tremendous number of hits this week. The reason is Scooter. Scooter is the AltaVista search robot. Scooter is persistent but not very smart. Scooter is not content to index a page, follow the links, and then index the linked pages. Scooter tries to guess the URLs to pages on your site and does a terrible job at the guessing game. If Scooter gets thousands of 404 PAGE NOT FOUND errors in one day, Scooter does not care. He just keep on guessing. According to Seach Engine World, he may be here for several months:

Search Engine World The Altavista search engine starts by spidering your entire site with its spider Scooter. Although lately Scooter hasn't been scooting too well. Scooter may take up to three months to spider and index your entire site (if it is going to crawl your site at all). It normally spiders about 2-10 pages per site in any week. Sometimes Scooter needs a good swift kick to get it to index certain pages.

Yep, I would like to give Scooter a good swift kick. Scooter obeys a robots.txt, if you have one. I'm hoping that the following addition to my robots.txt file will make him go away.

User-agent: Scooter/3.3
Disallow: /

User-agent: Scooter/3.2.SF0
Disallow: /

There was a record crowd at the RTP-WUG meeting tonight. Shakeel Mahate presented a nice overview of Struts and Thomas Roche presented an energetic and entertaining overview of the (Eclipse-based) WebSphere Studio's Struts tooling. There was not much time left for Jason Garcowski, who provided a brief demo of IBM's example "Trade" application.

The Struts tools were pretty impressive and included a Struts tag-aware WYSIWYG JSP/HTML editor, a sophisticated struts-config.xml editor, and an innovative Struts Web Diagram Editor or 'Woody' as Thomas called it. If you want to learn more about these tools, visit the WebSphere Studio Zone or check out IBM's redbook titled Legacy Modernization with WebSphere Studio Enterprise Developer. Chapters 4 through 7 provide a good introduction both to Struts and the WebSphere Studio Struts tooling - including lots of screen-shots like the one below.

I mentioned this before, so this is just a reminder. The meeting starts at 6PM at IBM.

According to the trade rags, Borland has licensed the Dot-Net SDK and will include it in Delphi 7, Together, and other development tools later this year. It will be interesting to see what other Borland products target Dot-Net. Borland's Dot-Net page makes it look like they all will. Does the inclusion of Kylix on that page imply a Borland-supported Dot-Net implementation on Linux? I get the feeling that Borland believes that bridging discordant technologies like Dot-Net and Java is a significant business opportunity, so maybe a Java-Dot-Net bridge product is in the works as well. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

InfoWorld: Borland on Tuesday plans to announce it is licensing the Microsoft Windows .Net Framework SDK for inclusion in Borland's Delphi 7 Studio development tool immediately and in other .Net-based products afterward.

ZDNet: The forthcoming Borland product that incorporates the .Net Framework SDK will be an enhancement to TogetherSoft's current .Net product

Sounds like Andy would enjoy Piemaster Pete's BSOD gallery.

Whether you back Java or Dot-Net you have to agree that Carlos Perez's 101 Reasons Java is better than Dot-Net has resulted in some very interesting discussions. I've learned a lot from reading the responses from both camps. The latest and so far the best post on the topic is Ted Neward's 85 of 101 Reasons, Rebutted.

This looks like it could be useful. Congrats to Matt and team. I am looking forward to taking a closer look at the code.

This release is the same code-base that Anthony Eden is currently running on FreeRoller. It includes some minor bug fixes and makes more effective use of caching on the main (index.jsp) page. Get it on SourceForge. Roller 0.9.7 is still a little ways off. By the way, FreeRoller is processing 1,000,000 hits per month, all on a "dinky" little eMachines box.

Charles Ditzel has taken the time to write a thoughtful article in the form of a weblog entry on Swing versus SWT. For those who have been stuck on the server-side for their entire Java careers: Swing is Sun's emulation-based Java UI toolkit and SWT is IBM's native widget-based Java UI toolkit. Charles works for Sun, so you can expect to find a little bias in the article. For example:

Charles Ditzel, Comparing Swing and SWT: Swing can provide a look and feel that exactly matches that of the platform, provides a more consistent cross-platform story, and offers a level of flexibility far and beyond what is possible with SWT.

I have yet to see a Swing-based GUI that exactly matches the Windows look-and-feel. There is always some noticable difference, and where is that Windows XP look and feel? Other than that, he has some good points (disclaimer: I know Swing, but not SWT). If you care about Java GUI development then the article is well worth a read.

One thing that Charles fails to point out is that Swing is intended to be a general purpose GUI toolkit whereas SWT is intended to support Eclipse. SWT/JFaces may grow into a world-beating general purpose GUI toolkit someday, but right now Swing is the choice for general purpose Java GUI development. Maybe that is why the payware version of Eclipse (Websphere Studio) supports GUI building with Swing and AWT and not with SWT.

Mena Trott (of Movable Type fame) posted an very nice set of photos from her trip to Japan and some interesting weblog entries as well.

I had to laugh when I saw the post on Matt Croydon's site, especially since it was my fault. The basic problem here is that Roller weblog entries are run through Velocity before they are displayed. I added this feature so that user's could use Roller macros within weblog posts to do things like displaying images. Now I'm thinking that Velocity is overkill. Velocity is perfect for the Roller page templates, but for the weblog posts themselves? Lance's "hotwords" idea is probably more appropriate.

A. O. Van Emmenis: "Even outside the Eclipse Workbench, JFace's pluggable design still allows you to develop sophisticated GUIs with surprisingly little code."

Stuart Halloway: "Those few differences that will continue to matter are those of programmer culture."

We have about 3 inches of snow here in Raleigh and the white stuff is still coming down. Schools are closed, kids are happy, and I'm not going on the roads today. The universities in the are open except for N.C. State where students are still sleeping off hangovers from the the "We beat Dook" parties last night.

Frank Boosman: At some point, chance will result in the intersection of a great journalist, a dramatic event, and mobile blogging. When that happens, blogging's prominence in popular culture will skyrocket.

Lance has resolved his Velocity difficulties and is well on the way to providing a full set of Velocimacros for Roller. This will make it much easier for Roller administrators and users to customize Roller. It will also bring Roller in line with Velocity best practices.

Via Wes Felter's Hack the Planet:

The latest GNOME summary includes a note from Sun that they've finally written a Swing PLAF that looks like Gtk+, to be included in Java 1.5.

The RTP Bloggers lunch today was enjoyable and pretty thought provoking. Three new faces appeared at the table: Frank Boosman, Jay Thrash, and a reporter named Karen Mann from the Raleigh News and Observer. As Bruce Loebrich said (and see Bruce's post for full list of the attendees), the reporter kept us focused on blogging. So we discussed questions like: where is blogging going in the next five years, how will blogging effect the mainstream media (see Katy Loebrich's story on that topic), how do you reconcile bloglife with worklife, can a newspaper run successful weblog, and what is the difference between blogging and journalism.

I'm not going to try to recount all of the conversations because I did not hear them all (and I'm too lazy). As Rafe Colburn observed, our group is getting a sort of large and unweildy. I'm glad Andy Oliver was at the other end of the table because I think he spent the whole time raggin' on Roller ;-)

I was fortunate to sit across from the new guys, Jay Thrash and Frank Boosman. Frank was eager to answer the reporters questions about the future of blogging. Frank believes that blogging, or more accurately moblogging, will become pervasive. Blog entries will be shorter, often just pictures, or video snippets. Sony Blogman, right Joi? Frank also believes that, within five years, a talented author will blog some major event and the whole world will tune in... think Into Thin Air except written real-time by a moblogger. I'm not sure if those ideas are all Frank's or not, but I'm subscribing to Frank for more stuff like that. I'll also be watching Jay's brand new blog, with a name like javahead.org how can he go wrong?