Blogging Roller

Overall I think java.net looks like a great start, lots of potential there. I think the site could benefit from better navigation because it really is difficult to figure out where things are and how it all fits together. Other than that, the site looks great and there is lots of interesting content there. I'm still exploring.

The open source project hosting looks really cool and it seems to include the same set of project hosting and management features as provided by SourceForge, plus project wikis and blogs. I wonder if Roller would benefit from java.net. It would be a royal pain to switch over from SourceForge, I'm sure, so I really wonder if it would be worth it. What SourceForge features are missing from java.net? I guess this is just the SourceCast vs. SourceForge question. Would a new home there be worth the relocation expenses?

I offered to install Roller for Sun, but noooooooo, they had to go and steal (from O'Reilly) some rinky-dink little blogging package. Sheeesh! Are those blogs for real? They are all identical, no themes. Some of them look a little forced, as in "you will blog now please employee #76654, get to work." The others look and feel like the O'Reilly blogs, you know, the ones where the author is maintaining two blogs: one personal blog and one O'Reilly blog which is generally not worth subscribing to. All the interesting stuff shows up on the author's personal blog and, occasionally, an article or two shows up on the author's O'Reilly blog.

On top of all that, they didn't bother to tie into java.blogs. Shouldn't java.blogs be a federated site? Or, at least a linked site?

Whatever. I'll get over it. Maybe some of those blogs will be successful and truly worthwhile, who knows. At least Gosling's blog looks genuine.

[via Wes Felter] I'm sorry I'm gonna miss this talk. I guess it is not really anything ground-breaking, just a new set of peers, but it stills sounds very interesting and maybe there will be some discussion of the future of Swing and AWT.

AWT on Linux and Unix systems is currently based on the Motif widget set. AWT is often called a Heavyweight Toolkit, because of its Motif-based peers. The construction of one Toolkit on top of another Toolkit can often cause "impedance mismatches" that can lead to sluggish performance due to the excessive layering of code, not to mention quality problems and nightmare bugs. In JavaTM 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE TM) v1.5, AWT will take on a new set of peers that remove the Motif toolkit from underneath AWT. This provides a high-performance and high-quality Toolkit that will be 100% backward compatible with existing JavaTM technology applications.

Reuters: Sun will at its JavaOne conference this week unveil plans for an advertising campaign and new Web sites, featuring singer Christina Aguilera toting a Java-enabled cell phone that plays games, Sun executives said.

Yep, it's for real.

Lookie there, java.net has gone live.

I enjoyed Shlomi Fish's Rules of Open Source Development and Charles Miller's Handling Bug Reports today. I saw a couple of parallels:

Charles Miller: give users empowerment equal to their station.

Rules of Open Source Development: The user is always right unless proven otherwise by the developer.

Customer success is important, but hey, let's get real.

Ok, I've been a bit preoccupied recently and I missed the anniversary by one day, but what the heck. I've been running my blog on Roller for one year an a day. Yay!

Clemens Vasters: Scalability is about building wider roads, not about building faster cars.

I'm interested in open source Java CMS, but my customers run on a 
variety of application servers, not just JBoss.

I read that Nukes is a J2EE app so I assume automatically that it 
will run on other app servers, but I also read that it requires JMX 
and that this makes it difficult to install on other app servers. 
What is the deal?

For example, Weblogic supports J2EE and JMX, so what will it take 
to deploy Nukes to Weblogic?

Still no response. Maybe the blogosphere will be more responsive than the Nukes forum.

I'd like to believe, as Jonathan Peterson does, that blogs would work in IT project management. I'd like to see Mark Pilgrim's <a href= "http://diveintomark.org/archives/2001/10/03/knowledge_management_it_all_sounds_so_good.html"> Knowledge Management (it all sounds so good) proven wrong, but based on my experiences in cubelandia I don't think that is likely.

Merrick Schincariol explains Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and attempts to dumb-it-down to my level. This is not an easy task, but he does it well.

The JBoss guys have ported PHP Nukes to Java, read about it at O'Reilly's place: Nukes: the Open Source Java CMS. Looks interesting, but it is certainly not the first comprehensive open source Java CMS on the market as the author claims. Also, I don't understand why they include a weblog about fashion trends.

Anthony Eden: JBoss Group is causing a lot of problems with the whole Sun vs. JBoss stink and I think a lot of it is due to "management" decisions within the JBoss Group. Having another company offering support for open source development will hopefully bring the JBoss Group to terms with their corporate mortality and will cause them to rethink their attitude. Competition is always a good thing.

Lance Lavandowska: I believe Patrick is our first Switcher from another blog tool. I've seen a few people appear on FreeRoller, stating they came there from elsewhere, but this is the first instance of someone switching their own installation that I'm aware of.

When FreeRoller was attacked the other day, the system slowed to a crawl. I assumed that the problems were my fault and I started to look for performance problems. I noticed that we are running the RequestFilter, which is responsible for parsing the URL and handling request parameters, for every incoming request. The RequestFilter also hits the database to determine if the requested page and user are valid. Since many requests are for simple files, such as GIFs, JPGs, and CSS, this is not wise. So, I changed the Roller web.xml. I replaced this, which causes every request to go through the RequestFilter:

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>RequestFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

With this, which only puts page, rss, comments, *.do, and *.jsp through the ringer:

<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>RequestFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/page/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>RequestFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/rss/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>RequestFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/comments/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>RequestFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>*.jsp</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>
<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>RequestFilter</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>*.do</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

This seemed to have a significant effect on FreeRoller performance and on the MySQL load. I'm still looking at some Java code changes to optimize RequestFilter and RollerRequest, but the above change is easy to apply, so if you are running Roller 0.9.7 (or later), give it a try.

JavaLobby is still working on restoring the FreeRoller machine, which serves several purposes other than just FreeRoller, so FreeRoller will be down again, probably for the rest of the night.

Thanks to the hard work of Matthew Schmidt of the JavaLobby, the FreeRoller is back up and running. The server that hosts FreeRoller was attacked and Matt spent the day in the data center reinstalling/upgrading the OS, restoring FreeRoller, etc. Thanks Matt!

I just got word from JavaLobby that they are going to be taking the FreeRoller server down today for an OS reinstall. FreeRoller will probably be down for the rest of the day.

I had to do some addional work on the RollerWikiPlugin to get the plugin to work for RSS feeds as well as weblog pages. To do this I had to introduce a new concept: the EntryRenderer.

You might have noticed that FreeRoller has been pretty sluggish today and has been down a couple of times. The FreeRoller machine is experiencing some "technical difficulties" and the JavaLobby is working to resolve them as soon as possible.