Raible Designs

The Future of Roller.

To answer Dave's questions:

1) What do you want Roller to be?

I want it to be my personal portal, my weblogger, and my corporate website. I'm also interested in adding a wiki to my website for new projects. But I don't expect or need wiki functionality in roller. I'm planning on adding a new roller page with an iframe to a wiki such as Very Quick Wiki. The iframe gives me the ability to view another site/app with the current skin being used.

2) What are you interested in working on?

• Converting the editor UI to use Tiles instead of including header/footer JSP pages.
• Making the editor UI XHTML-compliant, while maintaining some backwards compatibility with Netscape 4.x.
• Adding the ability to collapse/expand folders for bookmarks.
• Adding search capability to weblog entries and entire site pages, either using Lucene or just 'like' SQL statements.
• Investigating XDoclet and Castor and how it's being used so I can use them on my next project.
• Adding an option for drop-down menus for editor UI (alternative to tabbed menu). I know there is a "Struts Menu" that has been converted to use CoolMenus, so maybe use this.

3) What features would you like to see added to Roller?

• The ability to search weblog entries.
• Ability to include an anchor name for each weblog entry, i.e. <a name="entryId..." id="entryId..."></a>. This would be convenient for other webloggers who are referencing your posts.
• Ability to use other blogging client-side software to post to roller, besides just w:blogger.
• Ability to edit (x)HTML via a web interface - in both Mozilla and IE.

I keep myself motivated by using Roller everyday as the engine behind this site. Thanks Dave, Roller has made the re-design of my website much easier, and it's opened my eyes to the world of weblogging. Good Stuff!

Eclipse Goodies.

Jeff Duska has some good links for Eclipse plug-ins. I use Jalopy (love it) and have Solareclipse installed (I use HomeSite/Dreamweaver for JSP editing). I will be downloading and installing the others today, just because.

I've also heard of XML Buddy, but have never been able to download it. I click "I Agree" on the download back, and "doh!" I end up back at their homepage. Sounds like a website bug to me. If anyone knows of an alternative link, let me know.

The whole can of worms! In my search for some more Eclipse plug-ins, I found a list of 126 plugins. I'll be bookmarking this page. This site is very nice in that it shows user's comments about plug-ins. I even noticed someone had my same XMLBuddy comment. No workaround response though. :(

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Roller 0.9.5 is Released!

From the Roller Development mailing list:

This new Roller release includes some enhancements to XHTML support, bookmark management, database support for PostgreSQL and HSQL-DB, and some bug fixes. Thanks to new Roller contributors Lance Lavandowska, Matt Raible, Simon Stewart for their work on this release. New features:

* Support for XHTML and CSS in generated weblog pages (Matt)
* Better Page URLs in the Navigation Bar Tag and PageServlet (Lance)
* Support for HSQL and PostgreSQL databases (Lance and Simon)
* Export feature for backing up website (Dave)
* Bookmark import by file-upload of OPML file (Dave)
* Multiple bookmark move and delete on edit-bookmark page (Dave)
* Some bug fixes

Download it here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=47722&release_id=108217. Thanks to Dave and everyone else for getting this release out. I'll attempt an upgrade on this site this weekend. Maybe I'll even add a little footer with the version number so you'll know if I succeeded.

Eclipse 2.0.1 Released!

It is now available on the Eclipse download page at www.eclipse.org. I received a reply from the eclipse-dev mailing list today with some hints for OS X - noticed that 2.0.1 was out, and updated all my machines (Win/Linux/OSX) with ease. For Jaguar, You can find the latest "inofficial" build here. It worked great for me. If you already have 2.0 installed, you should be able to update your installation via the Update Manager.

Upgrading to Struts 1.1?

My opinion is "of course!" But that's party due to the fact that I'm an upgrade-happy developer. I'll upgrade just to be on the bleeding edge and know that I'm not missing anything. However, I do end up "backing out" of some upgrades. It's fun though, how else are you going to learn? TheServerSide.com has a new article discussing if you should upgrade to Struts 1.1 - check it out. I'm on the nightly build.

Java Server Faces Public Draft and EA download is available. I saw this last night, but Rick Salsa beat me to the punch on weblogging it. I was hoping to download and play around with it today, and give my opinion, but alas, the release I'm doing is taking a bit longer than expected.

Web Builder Conference 2002. Is anyone else going? We're having a Annual Shareholders Meeting in Vegas the weekend before, and I'm going to attend the conference the following week (Sept. 9 - 11). It'll be my first "reporting" experience, so watch this site for updates/reviews. I was one of the first to register so I'll have wireless internet access throughout the conference. My 3 goals for the experience are (1) win, (2) have fun, and (3) get some roller development done. Of course, if I'm accomplishing #1, then #2 is taken care of and #3 might slip a little.

Update on Netscape 7. It sucks worse than I originally thought - it installed on my WinXP box, but won't run - similar to OS X 10.2. The one successfull install? On Red Hat 7.3.

Coming tomorrow - JSF and Struts 1.1, should you upgrade?

Netscape 7.0 is Released!

I found on mozilla.org this evening that Netscape 7.0 has been released [ download ]. My first impression on Jaguar? It sucks, it won't even start! Oh well - it's got a cool new icon, looks like fun - but being based on Mozilla 1.0.1, I doubt it has anything I haven't seen before.

Transparent Dock Fixed!

OK, I got the transparent dock feature to work using ClearDock 1.1. How you ask? I rebooted.

My Review of Jaguar.

I'll probably be the first one to express disappoitment in the latest Mac OS X version. I received it in the mail yesterday and upgraded from 10.1.5 to 10.2 last night. The install was cake, and much smoother than any windows install/upgrade I've ever done, and definitely easier than Linux. However, I ran into a couple issues after I had everything installed.

• I had to hack my system to get Dave uninstalled (I'd give you the link, but www.thursby.com is down). 10.2 comes with Rendezvous now, so I don't need Dave anymore. After 10 minutes, I gave up on trying to figure out how to share my home directory - sounds nice, but I like Window's (XP) right-click on a folder -> Sharing and Security... feature.
• Eclipse 2.0 doesn't work, all the panels are jumbled and it looks like it got run over by a truck.
• I don't use Mail, I use Entourage - so I don't care about all the new features in Mail. Same goes for iChat - I use Yahoo and M$N Messengers.
• On 10.1.5, I could use a Courier New font in my Terminal window, and everything was smooth and sexy. Courier New on 10.2's Terminal window is boxy and blech.
• I tried TransparentDock (don't know where I got it from) and ClearDock 1.1 and neither of them worked to make my dock transparent. I was really looking forward to this enhancement.

I spent about an hour total trying to get the above problems solved - except for the Eclipse one, I just said, "yikes!" and left that one alone. All in all, I'm sure if I'd done a clean install vs. an upgrade, all of the above would not be an issue. I know I would never do an upgrade on a Windows machine, always a clean install. So I'm happy with the upgrade, just hoping for too much probably. I expected a lot more from the rave reviews it's been getting, but again, since I use it about 8 minutes per day - I probably wouldn't notice any sexy new features anyway.

In other Apple news, I had to boot into OS 9 at one point last night when hacking Dave - and WHOA - that OS screams! No wonder folks are having a hard time migrating to OS X. It's so fast and snappy that I almost "switched" to using OS 9 as my primary OS!