Raible Designs

[Request] Moblogger on Sourceforge

Hey Russ, what do you think about putting Moblogger on SourceForge? If you have something against SourceForge, that's fine, how about putting it on a publicly accessible CVS server so folks can contribute?

I have a few reasons for wanting this:

• I want to see title support - maybe signified by a space in the subject after the password.
• I'd like to see the ability to specify multiple blogs/e-mail boxes in the config file (agentsettings.xml).
• A sample web interface would be awesome. For instance, the ability to edit the config file via a JSP and start/stop the agent through this same interface. Maybe even use Betwixt for writing/reading the config file.
• Use Velocity or XSL for templates - rather than hardcoding it in the Java code.
• This seems like a great project to integrate Jabber-blogging into.

If you give the OK, I can request the project be setup - but I thought you'd like to be the admin on it.

Jabber and Roller

This would be a much better post if I'd already developed the software, and this was an announcement. But I don't want to develop the software per se, I just want to use it. So I'm putting this idea out there in hopes that someone has already developed the software. My e-mail to the jabber-dev mailing list pretty much sums it all up.

Hello,

My name is Matt Raible and I am a contributor on the Roller Weblogger
project (http://rollerweblogger.org).  I'm looking to add support for 
Jabber as a blogging client.  Currently, we support the BloggerApi and 
MetaWeblogApi.  What I'd like to know is if there is a project already 
that converts Jabber's XML files to XML-RPC calls - or if I could simply 
use an XSL stylesheet to transform and resend to my blog.

Thanks,

Matt

I'd love to add a Jabber Powered logo to my About page. I did some work with Jabber last year, basically just installing and configuring it - both very simple. The project I was on was also planning on adding support for creating new jabber accounts on-the-fly when a new user was created in our database. It's all XML, so it's probably all pretty easy. Anyway, I bought a Programming Jabber book and it's been collecting dust ever since. The cool thing about Jabber is if we setup a Jabber server (i.e. jabber.freeroller.net), then I think it'd be possible to blog via your favorite IM client. Please leave your thoughts and comments - and any links to anything that might already exists.

Braindump: Roller, Hosting and Wrox

I have a lot of things I want to mention, so let's just get right to it.

Roller should bundle Moblogger
It'd be cool if Roller bundled Russ's Moblogger as part of the application. It'd be pretty easy, all we'd need to do is slap a UI on it's config file - possibly put the config into a database, and maybe even use Roller's "page" feature for the e-mail templates. Then we'd have to figure out a way to start Moblogger's thread in the background and possibly do one thread for each user.

Roller Plugins
Should Roller add a Plugins feature like Blojsom has? Why should we? If we should, maybe we should just re-use an existing plug-in API - i.e. Struts' or Blojsom's. What would make a good plugin? Is this just a fancy name for a feature that can be turned on/off (i.e. comments).

Struts Menu for the Editor
I hope to add the ability to choose different menu types in Roller's Editor UI. First, I'll have to integrate Roller's tabbed menu as a displayer for struts-menu [demo]. The CoolMenu's displayer will work great (and require less mouse clicks). I mention this in hopes of making Lance and Dave aware of any schema changes that need to be made to support a user-selectable menu type. I'll also need to add the ability to specify struts-forwards in the menu-config.xml (not implemented yet in struts-menu).

This site and my provider
This site was down a lot today - probably because of all the hits from javablogs.com (just put Hibernate in your title). I noticed that Simon and Sam's sites were down as well. This leads me to believe that my kgbinternet.com is not up to snuff. Dave and Lance seem to never have issues with Roller crashing - so why am I? Please recommend any hosting providers that offer private Tomcat instances (preferrably with lots of RAM and disk space).

What's up with Wrox and Professional JSP 2.0
Who knows... I haven't heard a thing, from anyone. Think I'd get anyone's attention if I slapped both of my chapters on this site - free of charge? I doubt it. I might just do that if I don't get any feedback in the next week or so. Are they gonna sue me for the pocket change they paid me to write the chapters?

Now I'm going to assign this to my Java category and see if all you java.bloggers can crash this site again. ;-)

Hibernate Book Review

I started doing a book review for Manning this morning. It's called Object/Relational Persistence in Java, Practical O/R Mapping with Hibernate, by Christian Bauer and Gavin King. Once again, I find myself in a time crunch with a publisher - at least I'm not writing this time. The task: read/review and critique 105 pages by tomorrow. Shouldn't be too bad, I'd better get cracking! I'll let you know what I think when I'm done.

Update: Sweet - only 86 pages (the rest is just headings). I'm halfway done. Mostly O/R Mapping concepts and comparing database types (i.e. relational vs. object-oriented) to this point. Next is mapping strategies - I hope to learn something here.

Mozilla going to Phoenix

The coolest part about Mozilla moving to the Phoenix codebase is that Matt Croydon got quoted. I've been using Phoenix ever since it came out over Phoenix. If you've been using Mozilla over Phoenix, you're losing precious seconds, possibly minutes throughout the day. It's soooo much faster. I used to be die hard IE user - but Phoenix blows it out of the water. I don't know that it's faster, but if not, it's only milliseconds. And once you're addicted to tabbed browsing, it's tough to go back. The best part about the move is that (hopefully) Phoenix will get better. It's already got way more themes, which allows you to make it look as cool as you want.

Cool TagLib Document

I found this gem on the strut-user list tonight.

* TaglibDoc
    This is a JavaDoc-like set of html and css files for browsing the
    taglib documentation.  Here's what this target does (I ran this
    about 15 minutes ago):

      http://struts.sourceforge.net/struts-atlanta/taglibdoc/

* TaglibReport
    This target will generate a grid-like view of the taglibs and their
    attributes so that you can see every tag in a typical package side
    by side.  This helps when comparing which tags implement a certain
    attribute, by allowing you to view them side by side and not have to
    look up each tag by hand. (also about 15 minutes ago)

      http://struts.sourceforge.net/struts-atlanta/taglibreport/

Project by Mohan Kishore, posting by James Mitchell.

WebWork Tutorial makes it look easy

I have to admit that this webwork tutorial makes WebWork look easy. In comparing this to Struts, it seems as if the Form and Action are the same thing. I wonder if I could use BeanUtils.copyProperties(wwAction, POJO) like I am with Hibernate/Struts currently.

The funny thing is that XDoclet has made it so easy (IMO) that I don't write ActionForm's anymore. All I really write is Actions, JSPs, DAOs and Services (a.k.a. Managers). So, with my current architecture I'm using, it actually looks like more work to use WebWork's Actions than Struts Actions. Especially since I have to write my validation in my Action. The XDoclet/Validator combo makes this super simple with Struts (and would with WW if they'd adopt it ;-). The only time I've been writing forms lately is when I have a form with indexed properties. Then I create a childForm that extends the generated form and has the appropriate accessors/mutators for the indexed properties.

The one thing the article does bring to light is how much cleaner Velocity is. JSP 2.0 will make JSP's a lot easier, but Velocity looks like it's already there. The one thing that worries me about using Velocity is that, according to their homepage, they haven't had a release in 8 months and their last release was a Release Candidate. What the?! Seems like someone might be dropping the ball on that project.

TagUnit for the Display Tag

Simon Brown was nice enough to whip up an application for testing the display tag library. Amazingly enough, it passes all the tests! At first glance, Simon's TagUnit seems to just test getters and setters and if classes are loadable. I think these are great tests, but for truly robust tests for the display tag, I think we need tests that test specific behavior (i.e. you click on a column heading and it sorts that column). IMO, WebTest is probably the best candidate. The problem is, it might take awhile to write these tests, and no one seems to have much time to work on the display tag project. Any volunteers? ;-)

J2EE 1.4 Installs just fine on OS X

I downloaded the Linux version of the J2EE 1.4 Beta today to install on OS X. I found that it installed flawlessly with the following nice little message:

[minime:~/Desktop] matt% ./j2sdkee-1_4-beta-linux.sh                            
Using /var/tmp as temporary directory...                                        
Searching for Java(TM) 2 Platform, Standard Edition...                          
Initializing InstallShield Wizard...                                            
running on mac

Cool! Now to see if I can get the Adventure Builder reference application running on the Mac. I also found this interesting article on the new JSP and servlet capabilities in J2EE 1.4.

What to do with my Chapters?

Julie suggested I just post them on this site. Then I got to thinking - what if all the authors made a PDF version of the book, and it was downloadable as the whole thing or as selected chapters. Let's say $5/chapter and you can pick and choose whichever ones you want. Sounds like a good idea, but the problem would be protecting the PDFs from being shipped around between friends. Or we could just give them away, in hopes that our knowledge would inspire others to hire us (as in a new job or a new book).

I don't know what to do, but I'd like to get my chapters out somehow. I'm afraid that if I just sit and wait, they'll never get out, and the technology will be old news shortly. The stuff I wrote about has staying power, but only until the next version of XDoclet and Struts.

I guess the good news is that I'll keep struts-resume up to date with the latest version, but the writing will be out of date by the end of the year.