Raible Designs

Tuesday February 12, 2008

Added a Tag Cloud I added a tag cloud to this site tonight. Thanks to Rich Sharple's Hacking Roller : Tag Clouds, it was pretty easy. It's currently located in the bottom-right corner. Here's a glance at this site's most popular tags:

acegi appfuse denver grails gwt hibernate ibatis java jsf maven maven2 myfaces rails roller skiing spring springmvc stripes struts struts2 tapestry tomcat travel webframeworks wicket

Enjoy! Posted in Roller at Feb 12 2008, 10:04:07 PM MST 4 Comments

Wednesday January 09, 2008

Tech Meetup in Silicon Valley next week? Dave's going to be in California next week:

I'm going to be traveling to California next week (Jan 13-18) to sync up with my co-workers at Sun HQ in Santa Clara. I'll be in town Sunday through Friday and though my days will be pretty busy, I'll probably have some free time in the evenings for a meet-up or two.

Coincidentally, I'll be out there as well (Tuesday - Friday @ LinkedIn). Sounds like an excellent excuse to meetup and have some beers. Wanna join us? Posted in Roller at Jan 09 2008, 03:16:40 PM MST 3 Comments

Sunday December 09, 2007

Upgraded to Roller 4.0 This site is now running Apache Roller 4.0. If you see anything funky, please let me know. As part of the upgrade, I did a bunch of spring cleaning, so it's possible I deleted some files I shouldn't have. As far as upgrading, the only issue I know of is this one where my categories are no longer in the same order. Since it didn't seem possible to fix easily, I decided to not worry about it and go ahead with the upgrade.

If you'd like to take Roller 4.0 for a test drive, you can use the Test Blog on this server. Username is test, password is roller.

I dig the new entries and comments counter:

Posted in Roller at Dec 09 2007, 09:40:25 PM MST 8 Comments

Monday November 05, 2007

Roller and Struts 2 BOF at ApacheCon next week Are you going to ApacheCon in Atlanta next week? If so, you might want to mark your calendar for the Roller + Struts 2 BOF on Wednesday night. It's from 8:30 - 9:30 in "Room 3" (whatever that means) and free beer will be sponsored by Atlassian. Thanks Guys!

Apparently, projectors aren't provided for BOFs, so we are in need of a projector to do a small presentation. If you happen to have a "projector connection" in Atlanta next week, please let me know. Posted in Java at Nov 05 2007, 08:25:26 AM MST Add a Comment

Tuesday October 23, 2007

Apache Roller, Acegi Security, LDAP and JA-SIG CAS Earlier today, I delivered my talk on Apache Roller, Acegi Security and Single Sign-on. As part of this talk, I put together a couple of tutorials you might find useful:

• Roller 4.0 with LDAP and CAS
• Roller 4.0 on Geronimo

NOTE: These tutorials are using Roller's trunk as we found some things to simplify LDAP integration tonight.

You can download a PDF version of my presentation from my publications page.

During the presentation I did a number of demos:

• Installing Roller on Tomcat
• Integrating Roller with Apache Directory Server
• Integration Roller with CAS
• Integrating CAS with LDAP

Rather than saving the demo for the end, I did it as the first part of my presentation. This worked extremely well - especially since I didn't have to worry about running out of time.

If you're using Roller, have you integrated it with LDAP or another SSO solution? If so, is it working well for you? Posted in Roller at Oct 23 2007, 01:38:40 AM MDT 4 Comments

Monday September 24, 2007

Colorado Software Summit - are you coming? Are you coming to the Colorado Software Summit this year? I'm excited to go because I wrote new presentations and I think they'll be a lot of fun to deliver. Also, as I've said before, I really enjoy this conference because it's so relaxing. It's a full-week long, which is a tough commitment, but I like to think of it as a vacation. You do have to deliver your talks 3 times each, so you still have to work every day, but there's also a great opportunity to learn from other speakers. And you don't feel rushed since each talk is given 3 times. This means you can treat some days like real vacation days where you only work a couple hours and others you can pack it in and get a brain full of stuff.

Here's my Choosing a JVM Web Framework abstract?

One of the most difficult things to do (in Java web development) today is to pick which web framework to use when developing an application. A few years ago, there were over 50 Java web frameworks available, most of them open source. Since then, the number hasn't gone down, but the quality of choices has certainly improved. Should you use the standard JSF, or something like Tapestry or Wicket? What about Struts' successor ? is Struts 2 better than Spring MVC or Stripes? And what about the slick-looking applications that Flex and OpenLaszlo can create? Should you use Rails on GlassFish or Grails with Groovy? Is ZK really the next best thing? Where does RIFE fit into all of this? The choice hasn't gotten easier over the years.

This session is a discussion about choosing the best tool for the job. Not only will various frameworks and their features be discussed, but so will important factors for choosing a web framework. Is ease of development more important, or future maintenance? Is the project community an important factor? All of these questions will be discussed and answers will be provided. If you are about to choose a web framework, or if you have an opinion about a web framework, this session is for you.

I think it's important to note that this talk is going to be a discussion. I don't plan on offering my opinions as much as I plan on extracting them from others. This talk probably wouldn't work with the Norway crowd (they don't like to participate much), but I think it'll work with the Colorado folks.

If you're attending ApacheCon this year, which talk would you rather attend - Comparing or Choosing? Or maybe "choosing" would fit in better as a BOF? Posted in Java at Sep 24 2007, 06:44:03 PM MDT 9 Comments

Friday August 03, 2007

Roller Themes Eugene Strokin has been doing an excellent job migrating Free CSS Templates to Roller Themes. So far, he's done 10 and it doesn't look like he's stopping any time soon. Well done Eugene! IMO, nice-looking themes for Roller has been one of its biggest missing features.

Now if we could only use Roller to power the Apache project site... Posted in Roller at Aug 03 2007, 12:26:56 PM MDT 2 Comments

Monday June 18, 2007

Webinar on Wednesday: Introduction to Apache Roller If you're not doing anything this Wednesday, you might want to checkout my Introduction to Apache Roller Webinar. It's sponsored by Covalent and has the following agenda:

11:00: Introductions
11:05: What is Apache Roller 
11:10: Installing Roller
11:20: Roller Architecture
   - 11:25: Blog Customization
   - 11:35: Server Customization
11:40: Other Features: Using Weblog Clients and Planet
11:50: Q & A

Heck, even if you are doing something, you should still check it out - especially if you're planning on installing Roller for yourself or for your company. Here's the details and how to signup:

To register, click here and follow the provided steps.

About Covalent and Roller
Covalent recently announced it is offering full commercial support for Apache Roller, the open source blog server from the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Apache Roller drives the Covalent blog, Sun Microsystem's blogs.sun.com blogging site, IBM DeveloperWorks blogs, the Javalobby's 10,000 user strong JRoller Java community site, and hundreds of other blogs world-wide. Roller is a Java Web application that is run on any Java EE server and any relational database.

<Sidenote/>
I think it's important to point out that JRoller and Roller are not the same thing. JRoller is a service provided by JavaLobby that provides free blogs, whereas Roller is the software that powers it. There's been a lot of negative press about JRoller in recent months and from talking to folks, it sounds like most of it is well-deserved. The service is down a fair amount and when it's up, it's extremely slow.

The good news is these problems should go away in the near future. From Matthew Schmidt in a recent JavaLobby Newsletter:

DZone Network Server Upgrades Coming
Over the weekend, Rick and I started the long and painful process of finally upgrading our three-year-old servers to some hardware that should let us scale and meet the needs of the network for the foreseeable future. With these new servers, comes some upgrades that many of you have been trying to beat into my head for months now, including an upgrade to a recent a version of Roller (powers JRoller) as I can find, and an upgrade to the latest and greatest Codebeamer (powers JavaForge). In addition, there's also going to be a much-needed make over to Javalobby and EclipseZone. Of course, these changes won't happen immediately and we'll be migrating to the new hardware first, but keep your eyes open for some nice updates to nearly all our communities. These upgrades have already started and we'd appreciate any feedback you have on whether things like Javalobby and EclipseZone are working properly. Drop me a line if you notice anything not working properly or feeling slow.

IMO, JavaLobby has been mostly mute about its stance on JRoller, and I've heard from folks there's virtually no support. My guess is this is because they've been concentrating on DZone so much. Maybe they need some volunteers to make JRoller more robust? Or maybe it should be moved to other servers that can make money off the service and re-invest it (like wordpress.com)? Hopefully nothing has to change and JRoller can become a higher priority for JavaLobby in the near future.

Update: The webinar went quite well - thanks to everyone who attended! You can download the PowerPoint (or PDF) and audio from Covalent's Webinars. Also, I mentioned a couple of Dave's presentations in my talk. You can download those by clicking on the links below:

• Roller: An Open Source Java EE Blogging Platform
• Roller and blogs as a web development platform

Posted in Roller at Jun 18 2007, 04:13:28 PM MDT 4 Comments