Blogging Roller

Like Matt, I'm working on Professional JSP 2.0 again. The new publisher wants to change things around and I'm fine with that. He has a lot of good ideas about both of my chapters, but the changes are going to keep me busy over the next couple of weeks. On a side note, I'm finding that using a private wiki to organize my thoughts for this book, my weblog entries, and other activities (comparison shopping for example) works really well.

Cameron is doing a great job of blogging The Server-Side Symposium

Dominic Da Silva notes that JBoss has decided to go with JDO for POJO persistence. There is also a nice pair of articles on JDO at the O'Reilly site: JDO Persistence, part 1 and part 2.

Normally I do, but this time I didn't leave quietly. This time I thought carefully about the problems that caused me to resign and wrote an exit letter explaining these problems and my suggestions for addressing them. I tried not to rant, but when I write about things that frustrate it's hard not to get frustrated. I asked a couple of developer friends and my wife to review the letter, but I still think it was a little harsh. If the harsh talk gets the letter noticed, and the suggestions make a difference, that'll be great. Am I deluding myself? Do exit letters ever make a difference?

I'm looking forward to starting my new job next week, but I can't help but feel sad saying goodbye to my old company, old friends, to the promise of the integrated web application development environment to end all others, and (later) to the promise of the "Ariba-class" B2B software powerhouse that never materialized.

Sam Ruby is bringing the community consensus building powers of wiki and weblogs together to help define a new syndication format, an archive format, and an editing protocol for weblogs. Sam kicked off the effort with a discussion of the anatomy of a well formed log entry, opened a wiki for group discussion, and already has reached some consensus on metadata, security, and licence information. Now he is pushing the effort forward through a series of weblog posts to futher explore some of the issues raised on the wiki. This is a very important effort, with real go-energy, and all of the right people behind it. I look forward to implementing the resulting new formats and protocols in Roller.

Hard to believe that it has already been one year. Over the weekend, we had a very nice cookout and party for Leo, who just turned 1, and Mark, who just turned 40. Here is Leo on his brand new rocking horse:

How can you write an article, wait, I mean two articles, about "Wikis & Weblogs in the Java Developer Community" and not mention JavaBlogs.com, FreeRoller.net, Blojsom, Roller, SnipSnap, or JSPWiki? You're making the same mistake that Sun made: ignoring the existing, large, and thriving Java developer community of blogs and wikis.

Dan Gillmor: Sun is doing interesting things with its java.net site, including "community" functions such as weblogs and even Wikis. It's the most ambitious effort I've seen yet by a big company -- even though it's a tech company -- to use the Web in a more conversational way.

Bill Burke - Chief Architect of JBoss: I'm sick and tired of the mud that's thrown at us on a constant basis against the nominal success we've achieved so far. I'm sick of the freerollers who chip at our hard work or try to make a name for themselves by bashing Marc or JBoss or JBossGroup in their ego-centrical Blogs. You don't see any of us writing blogs attacking these people. Hell, we don't even have blogs!

A couple of people have asked me if Roller helped me to land my new job. I'm happy to report that the answer is yes, Roller helped. I'll explain that, but first, realize that when I say "Roller" I mean a number of different things. When I say Roller I mean developing the Roller software, writing the Roller article for O'Reilly, participating in the Roller project, and writing for my weblog.

I must admit that I was a little worried that Roller might hurt my chances of getting a new job. I was concerned that an employer would see Roller, my weblog, and my writings as a diversion that would keep me from getting real work done, or, that some potential employer would read my weblog and either strongly disagree with something I said or decide that I am only rambling nut-job. That is only one small part of my personality. Those who know and love me know that I am much, much more than just a rambling nut-job.

Roller helped me out in several ways. Roller gave me experience with and knowledge of new software development technologies, techniques, and tools. I wouldn't have Struts, Velocity, XDoclet, Castor, and Hibernate on my resume if not for Roller. I also learned a lot about software project managemement including source code control, release management, issue tracking, developer/customer support, etc. This is why I listed Roller on my resume and gave it equal billing with my other previous jobs.

Roller also me exposure, but more importantly Roller exposed my code, my writing, and the ways that I work with others. My new employer did not find me via my weblog, but once they did find me they were able to download and review my code, read my technical writings, and could even have searched the Roller mailing list archives to see how I interact with other developers and end-users of my software.

Roller was certainly not the only factor, as I do have a strong resume even without it, but Roller was an important factor in landing the new job.

I've been reading some interesting comments from .Net guy Brian Wilson, Steve Gillmor of Computer Reseller News, Dave Winer, and Jeffrey Zeldman on Microsoft's recent moves to kill the standalone versions of the IE browser both on Windows and on the Mac. According to the news stories, IE is going to become part of Windows, which means that we will not see another release of IE until the next version of Windows ships in 2005 or 2006.

Brian says this means that Microsoft has given up on the web, no longer sees the need to innovate there, and is already starting to lose browser share.

Steve says that IE fell victim to internal Microsoft politics and the "Allchin" tax.

Dave and Jeffrey say that Microsoft now owns the web, has it locked in the trunk of the car, and is driving it off a cliff somewhere.

I have to agree with Matt, this stuff won't have an effect on us poor schmuck web developers for a years to come.

The Swiss edition of InfoWeek features what looks like an interesting article on weblogging by Urs Bertschy: New Kids on the Blog that covers weblog features like trackback, referers, blogging clients, and RSS. Too bad I don't read German. The Babelfish translation only goes so far, literally. The article mentions Roller and lists my weblog in a section titled "Interessante IT-Blogs". Nice.

After you resign it is really difficult to get motivated to work on anything.

I just resigned from my current job and I will be starting a new one July 1st. I'm very excited about this new job, but because I try not to mix work and blog I'm not going to go into specifics. I will tell you that I'll be staying here in Raleigh, I'll be doing J2EE application development, I'll be working for a large and very stable software company, and my title will be Senior User Interface Developer.

Checking in with java.blogs on a Monday morning via SharpReader. It is very cool to find new releases: Ant 1.5.3, JBoss 3.2.1, Hibernate 2.0, Netbeans 3.5, and Struts 1.1RC2. It is not so cool to recieve a popup from Ammai.com every time I click on a news item and to find that most of this news is over a week old. SharpReader needs a popup blocker.

Matt has the RollerWikiPlugin up and running. He has also created a very nice new JSPWiki theme and started his own Wiki to support his weblog, AppFuse, and StrutsResume projects.

I caused a little stir yesterday with my "oh the shame" post, Sam Ruby picked up on it and several others took notice. I think most people realize that I was just having some fun with words and ranting. I know Sun didn't actually steal anything from O'Reilly and I don't really think O'Reilly's weblogging software is rinky-dink. However, there was some truth there. I do think the java.net blogs would benefit from more advanced blogging features. I'd like to help and I would (obviously) love to see them use Roller.

If the blogs on java.net are just provided for simple project news and RSS feeds, then I can understand the desire to keep the blogging module simple. If, on the other hand, these are going to be real weblogs with the personality and character of the blogs we read on java.blogs, then something better is needed.

Part of the java.net charter is to support the open source Java community and foster open source Java projects. I'd like to see java.net eat it's own dogfood and use open source Java rather than the open source Perl, PHP, Python, or whatever else it is that they are using now. Instead of the O'Reilly blog software, why not use Roller, Blojsom, JSP Wiki, or Snipsnap? If these aren't good enough, let's figure out why and make them better.

By the way, I have registered http://roller.dev.java.net (pending approval) to reserve the name and to start exploring the java.net features. If it looks good, I may migrate the Roller CVS, downloads, and mailing lists from SourceForge.

Sun's new web application development tool, Rave, sounds really cool. Here what the bloggers are saying about it:

Simon Brown: Anyway, if you've done any programming with a 4GL environment like PowerBuilder, VisualBasic, etc then this is pretty much the same, albeit for the web. You can drag and drop components on to the canvas (the web page) and hook them up with event listeners, datasources and web services. All in all a very quick way to build webapps and certainly aimed at the corporate developer market that Sun is trying to bring over to the Java world in an effort to significantly increase the developer community. Good demo, nice tool.

Dehashish Chakrabarty: Sue Spielman has some more details on Project Rave. The key phrase here is "simplified development model",  in accordance with Sun's aim of  "lowering the barrier and entry point for the corporate developers" and "sucking up the VB corporate/IT programmers into the Java platform". It's another thing that, as Sue reported, a 404 error surfaced during Hammerhead's demo at JavaOne.  Rave uses NetBeans Platform as its base (though visually it will be different) alongwith JavaServer Faces and JDBC Rowsets standards. And if you didn't know Sun has no plan to make this project open source.

Cedric Beust: I have to say I was quite surprised by the slickness of Rave, until I realized why: it doesn't seem to be based on NetBeans. Well, that's my impression. I was a bit far from the screen to be sure, but it certainly didn't look like the standard NetBeans interface to me.

Andres Aguiar: Project Rave is a tool for those guys. It looks cool, and it's fast, as they built it with no extensibility hooks as other more ambitious IDEs (NetBeans, Eclipse). Right now it just supports Web applications, and it's not targeted to the EJB developer, it's for guys that want to access their database directly, with tools to do data binding directly from the database, etc. It targets the same people as ASP.NET Web Matrix.