Blogging Roller

Matt Croydon posted a link to some awesome screenshots of the next version of Visual Studio, codenamed Whidbey, and it's ASP.NET web development tools. Microsoft creates killer tools and it is difficult to imagine how IBM's Eclipse, Sun's Rave, IDEA IntelliJ, or MyEclipse will match the kind of ease-of-use Microsoft can achieve. I have yet to see a WYSIWYG HTML editor, the basis for any web development IDE, written in Java (Swing, SWT, or otherwise) that is worth a damn.

Via Kevin Dangoor: the updated Eclipse 3.0 plan shows that we'll have to wait until June 2004 for a final Eclipse 3.0.

In my work, the most important new features are in the extended Java theme: "Improve support for Java-like source files" like JSP and "Support Java references outside Java code". Unfortunately, there is no indication that JSP support will extend beyond the basic code-completion, refactoring support, and syntax coloring for Java code embedded in JSP files. I'm still holding out some foolish hope that maybe, just maybe, IBM will move Websphere Studio's WYSIWYG HTML/JSP editor and Struts support into Eclipse while reserving the upcoming JavaServer Faces support for paying customers. Please? After all, by June 2004, Struts support will be the old hat to JSF's brand new bag.

Rick Ross has posted what he calls "probable items" for the JRoller terms of service (TOS). I think the items he outlined are quite reasonable. Also on JRoller, Lowem has posted a number of good suggestions for improving Roller including better navigation to past weblog entries, better handling of comments, and showing more weblogs and weblog posts on the Roller main page.

Very strange, very bloody in a Monthy Python Black Knight sort of way, and I enjoyed it. However, I did not like it nearly as much as QT's other flicks: RD, PF, or JB.

I followed up my "not impressed with MyEclipse" post by posting some of the problems I encountered to the MyEclipse "private messages" support forum. That was yesterday. I didn't get a response, so today I posted each of my issues in the Bug Reports and Fixes forum (see below). The MyEclipse site is very slow and I haven't been able to muster the patience to figure out if there is a separate forum for paying customers (like me).

• JSP editor is very slow to start
• MyEclipse's inflexible project directory structure
• Can't remove MyEclipse from project
• JavaScript breaks the JSP syntax coloring
• Can't handle TLDs referenced by URI

What a jackass and he is totally wrong. We don't ship 50 jars, we ship 49! I do wonder how many of those 49 jars could be deleted without affecting Roller. I just got back from Kill Bill, so perhaps it is time for some hack and slash on the WEB-INF/lib folder. Update: I was able to reduce the number of jars from 49 to 34. Of the 34 remaining jars, 9 belong to Struts and 6 belong to Hibernate.

I've only spent a little while working with MyEclipse, so perhaps I'm just a clueless newbie, but... I still haven't figured out how to get the JSP editor to work as expected or to avoid the 5-10 second startup every time I launch the editor on a new file. So far, I am not impressed.

For the links I'm finding today.

• Via Sam Ruby: CSS border-radius property. No, it doesn't work on old legacy browsers like IE6.
• Via redemption in a blog: Longhorn has leaked out and the screenshots are starting to appear.
• Via The Server Side: Bob Lee for having Struts Actions delegate to Struts Forms for presentation logic.

Good news via Werner and just in time too. I was getting ready to back out of Eclipse 3.0 M4 because my MyEclipse order was just approved and I assumed that MyEclipse would not work with M4. Now I don't have to back out.

Apple has roughly 1% of personal computer marketshare, so why am I hearing so much about the new Mac OS release? Seems like everybody I know is excited about Panther and every weblog I read is Panther, Panther, Panther. But no Panther for me because I don't own a Mac. In fact, I've never owned anything manufactured by Apple, until now that is. I went out yesterday and treated myself to a 20GB iPod. What a beautiful and useful device. I'm a little worried that the iPod is like a gateway drug and I'll soon find myself jonesin' for a Powerbook and waiting in line for new Mac OS releases.

I finally got around to installing Roller at work. How did I justify this narcissistic activity? I'm responsible for our product's internal demo site and what better way to keep the sales force up on the latest code drops than a Roller-driven weblog. It took me about 30 minutes to install Roller, get it working with PostgreSQL (my group's open source database of choice), and hack together a nice corporate theme. One minor problem: the Roller main page is broken under PostreSQL, but I don't really need it so I disabled it for now. Maybe somebody else has alredy solved this problem. Anybody else try Roller 0.9.8 under PostgreSQL?

Michael Thomas of the Triangle Internetworkers (INW) has an interesting idea. The Triangle Internetworkers is "a geographically defined, loosely knit group of technology workers who like to get together once a month and socialize." Between monthly gatherings the group hangs out on a busy, sometimes noisy, and comfortable mailing list. Michael sees value in the group's discussions and wants a way to share this value on the web by developing a community website that is driven by content posted to the INW mailing-list.

To make it easy for mailing-list subscribers to opt-in to the website and to ensure that the mailing-list's unique eco-system remains intact, Michael wants to develop a system based on simple markup-language that subscribers can use, or choose not use, within their email messages. The markup will indicate the message content and message meta-data like title, category, etc.  He's written up the requirements and the motivations behind this idea and some initial design ideas.

Michael's requirements and design do not mention weblogging even once, but this is obviously a weblog application.  By using a weblog the Internetworkers will have complete control over site layout and design, categorization, permissions, RSS feeds, Blogger API, comments, etc. Somebody has got to have done some mailing-list weblog integration work already, but I can't find anything except a plea for mailing-list weblog cross-polination from Tim O'Reilly. Finding nothing, I decided to come up with some suggestions on my own:

• One approach would be to write a program that can itself subscribe to the mailing list. This program will receive each email message, parse the markup, and use some logic to decide what to do with the mail message. This program will use the widely-supported and XML-RPC based Blogger API to post and publish messages to a weblog. Using the Blogger API, messages could be "posted" and then the owner of the weblog could choose whether or not to publish them via the weblog's administration pages. Or, alternatively, all messages could be "published" automatically without intervention of the weblog owner. You could write this thing in Java, Python, Perl, C# or just about anything. It would be helpful to have a XML parser, or better yet an XML-RPC client library (there are many implementations), or best of all a Blogger API client library. The advantage of this approach is that you don't have to modify the weblogging software, so you would have the option of hosting your blog on one of various inexpensive or free blogging sites like Blogger.com, Typepad.com, or one of the free Roller sites.
  
  
• Another approach might be to start with Moblogger. The open source Moblogger, developed by Russell Beattie, is a program that  "runs as a background process that monitors a POP3 email account for new email, then downloads it, detaches any files such as pictures, sound or video, uses the Blogger API to post the text in the email to your blog and uses FTP to post the files to your server." If you are a Java developer, this would be the quickest way to get up and running. It does almost everything you need, but of course, you would have to modify  Moblogger to plugin your markup processor and post/publish logic.
  
  
• The custom blog approach: start with an open source weblogging package that supports weblogging via email, hack it so that it can subscribe to your mailing list and can understand your email markup language. There are a couple of disadvantages with this approach; it limits your choice of weblog software and requires you to pay for an ISP to host your own weblog. The first two approaches use the standard Blogger API to communicate with the weblog server, so they can be used with just any blogging software or blogging service.

Any other ideas? Has anybody implemented this type of system before?

Roller 0.9.8.1 is just a bug fix release. Change-list, source, and binaries are available on SourceForge. Thanks to everybody who took the time to submit a bug and to Atlassian who helped us manage the issues. Don't forget: report JRoller account and sys-admin issues to the JRoller JIRA and report Roller Weblogger bug reports and enhancement requests go to the Roller Weblogger JIRA.

I finally got around to reading Rod Johnson's Introduction to the Spring Framework on The Server Side and that inspired me to read the Rod Johnson interview.  I also read Patrick Peak's Dueling IoC post comparing the Inversion of Control support in the Spring and WebWork2 frameworks and some interesting comments on Matt Raible's Web Frameworks - which one should I learn post. Looks like there are some very useful things in Spring, but without actually using it, it's hard to tell whether Spring is a cohesive and elegant framework, or a hodge-podge of book examples and helper code for AOP, IoC , MVC, and JDBC. It did, after all, start out as example code for the book Expert One-on-One J2EE Design and Development. Spring deserves further study and because Springs features can be used a la carte (as demonstrated by the days old Struts Spring project), learning about Spring could pay off even for existing applications.

I also read Mark Pilgrim's excellent new XML.com column The Atom API.  The column reviews the history of weblogging APIs and then provides details of the new Atom API. The article makes it pretty clear that the Atom API is a better solution than the XML-RPC based Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs. It is easier to implement and it takes advantage of XML features like namespaces and schema. Atom is simple and elegant, yet it remains SOAP compatible; a great example of a web services API.

In other weblogging tech news, two competing proposals for website newfeed discovery have appeared: FDML from Sam "it's just data" Ruby and friends and shortly after that myPublicFeeds.opml from Dave "it's just an outline" Winer. These proposed standards could be pretty useful to sites like Java.blogs that aggregate multiple blogs and JRoller which host a community of blogs.

I spent a lot of time last week painting fishies and even more bubbles. I might just have to bid on the table myself.

Any similarity to Disney characters past, present, and future is purely coincidental.

Simon Brown: I must admit that while XDoclet is very useful when building EJBs, I'm not sold on the idea of using for the web tier myself.

Larry O'Brien: But what really proved .NET's value proposition to me was when I saw how the subsystem was integrated. Web services may be a buzzword in semidecline, but when you witness the ease with which minimally experienced server-page programmers can successfully participate in developing a scalable distributed application by consuming Web services developed by more experienced programmers, you become a believer.