Roller

Daily del.icio.us for December 31st through January 1st:

• ZSFA — Rails Is A Ghetto - Stay tuned for more about Ruby conferences and why they suck, and why the Pickaxe book is what killed Ruby
• InformIT: Using XQuery to Manage XML with SQL Server 2005 > XQuery Advantages - Jesse Smith gives you a crash course on XQuery methods and how you can use them in certain situations to retrieve and update XML data stored in your SQL Server 2005 database
• Open source and the corporate elephant | InfoWorld | News | 2007-12-12 | By John Ribeiro, IDG News Service - More and more open-source developers these days are employees of companies, paid to work on open-source projects, rather than independent programmers doing it for fun. The change raises issues for projects, programmers and employers alike.
• base2 - Google Code - base2 is a lightweight library that irons out all the annoying differences in JavaScript implementations. It provides the additional functionality from JavaScript 1.6+ that only Mozilla browsers implement. It also adds some features from ES4
• How to create a theme for Roller 4.0 - In part one I explained how to create a theme directory and add the required template and resource files. Now I'll wrap things up by explaining what goes into a theme.xml theme definition file and how to deploy your new theme.
• Law Blog - WSJ.com : The Law Blog 2007 Year-End Quiz! - We thought we?d say goodbye to 2007 with a little year-end quiz touching on some of the highlights (and lowlights) of the year in law.
• Automatic blog posts from your Google Reader Shared items « Tzetze Fly - by Dan Woolley - Below is a Ruby script I wrote that does just that. It consumes an Atom feed of your Google Reader Shared Items, formats them, and automatically posts them to your WordPress blog using their XML-RPC interface
• Alfresco Press Releases - Quark And Alfresco Announce New Partnership - This new partnership will enable Quark and Alfresco to provide cost-effective end-to-end content management and publishing solutions based on open standards ? enabling seamless integration with an organization?s existing business system.

Tags: Alfresco, apache, article, blogging, blogs, business, cms, code, content, database, development, dom, ecmascript, enterprise, foss, framework, google, governance, Humor, java, javascript, legal, opensource, politics, programming, quark, rails, rant, reader, Roller, Ruby, RubyOnRails, SQL, sqlserver, themes, webdesign, wsj, xml, xmlrpc, xquery

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• The 53 Places to Go in 2008 - New York Times - What?s on your travel itinerary in the new year? From a new luxury hotel in Laos (where you can take in the view of ancient temples from a chaise lounge by the infinity pool) to the waterfront night clubs of Hvar
• Riding Rails: Rails 2.0: It's done! - Rails 2.0 is finally finished after about a year in the making. This is a fantastic release that?s absolutely stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes. We?ve even taken a fair bit of cruft out to make the whole package more coherent and lean
• PayPal Says Linux Grid Can Replace Mainframes — Linux — InformationWeek - A Linux grid is the power behind the payment system at PayPal
• Ajax View: Remotely Monitoring Web 2.0 Applications - The Ajax View approach is to insert a server-side proxy in-between the web servers and the end-user's browser. This proxy captures the web apps JavaScript code as it is being sent to a browser and rewrites the code to insert extra instrumentation code
• Developer's Guide - Google Chart API - Google Code - The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts. It returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of image can be generated: line, bar, and pie charts. For each image type you can specify attributes such as size, colors, labels
• PayPal Says Linux Grid Can Replace Mainframes — Linux — InformationWeek - A Linux grid is the power behind the payment system at PayPal
• Ajax View: Remotely Monitoring Web 2.0 Applications - The Ajax View approach is to insert a server-side proxy in-between the web servers and the end-user's browser. This proxy captures the web apps JavaScript code as it is being sent to a browser and rewrites the code to insert extra instrumentation code
• Developer's Guide - Google Chart API - Google Code - The Google Chart API lets you dynamically generate charts. It returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of image can be generated: line, bar, and pie charts. For each image type you can specify attributes such as size, colors, labels
• Roller: free and open source Java blog software - Apache Roller 4.0 has been released and is now available for download. This is a major new Roller release which includes easier blog theme customization, a much more simple installation/upgrade process, infrastructure improvements and other small fixes.
• infinitest - Google Code - Infinitest is a continuous JUnit test runner designed to facilitate Test Driven Development. Infinitest helps you learn TDD by providing feedback as you work, and helps you master TDD by reducing your feedback cycle from minutes to mere seconds

Tags: agile, ajax, ajaxview, apache, api, blogging, chart, charts, debugging, development, foss, google, graph, grid, ie7, java, javascript, junit, library, Linux, magazine, mainframe, microsoft, opensource, paypal, redhat, rhel5.0, Roller, tdd, testing, tools, visualization

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It really is a sad state of affair when it comes to blog server software for Java and .NET. For the last few weeks, I've been working to introduce blogs and the concept of blogging internally at work and trying to pilot the use of blogs instead of the standard project portal. To that end, I figured I should really get the latest offerings from all of the blogging server software out there and put them through the paces to see which one works better than the other.

I've personally only used Blogger, Movable Type and WordPress in the past 5 years. The primary blog ran on Blogger for many years before I finally moved everything to WordPress. To make sure we're eating our own dog food, I decided to download Roller and Community Server (formerly. Text) and give them a whirl.

Being a Java guy, I was excited to download and install Roller, as it's one of the most popular Java blogging software out there. Boy, was I disappointed. I know this is free and open-source but installing and getting Roller running was a royal pain in the neck. The installation is documented fairly well for Tomcat but I have tons of servers running WebLogic and so I tried to deploy Roller under WebLogic. So I configure the appropriate datasources and authentication realms and try to deploy the application. I killed the server before I got a seizure from the fast scrolling stack-trace. Without boring you with all the details, it took me almost 8 hours to get Roller to work correctly under WebLogic. Having worked with J2EE containers for over 6 years, I know the reality of deploy-anywhere but this is ridiculous. How easy is it to create a web application that works on a bunch of different containers? I could not believe the effort it took to get this simple web application deployed. Take a look at Confluence - Java web application that configures itself and runs on every container out there. And other major issue I have with Roller is the lack of support for any other database platforms besides MySQL, PostgreSQL and HSQL-DB. I love MySQL but I have Oracle running internally on big boxes that are backed up several times a day and actively monitored. But I can't use Oracle with Roller as it only supports MySQL, PostgreSQL and HSQL-DB out of the box. With technologies like Hibernate, why do we still have applications written in Java that are so database platform bound? My next mission is to get Roller working with Oracle and then document (and blog) the hacks necessary to get Roller working under WebLogic and Oracle.

Another problem with Roller is the lack of community support and plug-ins. Coming from the WordPress side of the house, there is a plug-in for everything including the kitchen sink. Before you can think it, someone has already written a plug-in for it. (I should really look at Pebble and Blojsom)

Moving to the .NET side of house is not a pretty picture either. The blog engine that used to be named .Text is now rebranded as Community Server. The installation is pretty easy and product looks fairly robust. Telligent Systems is the company that's taken over development of .Text and the new product includes a discussion system, blogging system, and photo gallery system. The same lack of plugins or add-ons exists here and the 3 listed add-ons require a commercial license. Beyond the base blog functionality, there is nothing available.

Roller and Community Server work well once you get them installed. But anything beyond the basic requires custom development and I just feel that is not a good use of my time. To me, blog server software is a commodity and so I want to find something that's easy to use and has the most features. I know I am developer and I can sit down and write anything I need but my company pays me to add value in a different capacity.

WordPress on the other hand is unbelievable. It's written in PHP, which I can hack (if I had to) but all the plugins I've downloaded simply work. Download a plugin and just drop it in the plugins directory and you're off and running. The big deficiency for WordPress in my opinion is that it only supports MySQL as a database platform but the value proposition provided by all the functionality is just incredible. I just hope Roller can catch-up as competition is great and really helps drive innovation.

Tags: blogger, blogs, blojsom, confluence, deploy, java, Java/J2EE, pebble, Roller, Tech, WebLogic, WordPress

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