lundi juillet 16, 2007

SDPY - Roller, Atom, ...
• Duplicates duplicates duplicates dup...
I've blogged about the huge progress made by Roller and how stable it has become. I'd say it's now a the Unix of blogging engines - reliable and highly configurable. Time to make it a Sun product?

• Mastering feeds is not an easy job...
APP interop is looking good, and Roller is Atom-enabled (of course).

( juil. 16 2007, 02:02:00 PM CEST ) Permalink

mercredi juillet 04, 2007

I don't mind when software fails

I wrote this post about the Roller upgrade to blogs.sun.com thinking all would be as painless as previous upgrades (blogs.sun.com has been running all versions of Roller starting with pre-1.0). But I actually had a hard time pushing it out because of some timezone bug which I couldn't really understand. Hours (minutes?) after the upgrade I noticed this and pinged the engineering team who responded really quickly with a fix. Unfortunately, the patch didn't fix all the problems I was seeing, so I had to do some more testing to provide a better test case. Eventually, less than 48 hours later (and much other things done) the service was fixed.

Granted I was talking to the people that both operate the service and write the code (blogs.sun.com serves as a beta tester). It's certainly not like having full support starting from level 0 and walking you through the entire process. You do have to go through due diligence before you ask (which is actually good - how many times did you find the answer yourself because you actually spent the time writing the question in plain text?). Looking back on this I'm really not upset with the whole issue (although I use the service to carry out my daily job) because it was solved in a timely and professional manner.

I could have looked at the source code (I've done that previously) but I couldn't seriously afford to spend possibly a day diving into unknown code (last I looked at it is must have been version 1.0). Having someone who knows the codebase just helps you solve the issue in a fraction of the time. Of course if I had no one to turn to, I would have been glad I had the source.

So it's not about having software that never fails, it's really about what you've planned you could do when it does. And with Open Source just like with any other software, support matters.

mardi juin 19, 2007

Now powered by Apache Roller 4.0

blogs.sun.com, the website with 3325+ weblogs, 3681+ users, 70416+ posts and 66976+ comments is now running on Roller 4.0 which now requires Java 5 and is built on Struts 2 and a JPA back-end. It all happened as you would expect for any SaaS. Transparently. Roller deployment has also gotten a lot simpler. You simply need to deploy the Roller WAR with no need to setup a JNDI data-source (no table creation either) or javamail. More here I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the BSC team for the excellent job they do every day. I'm always sad to see people leave JRoller thinking the software is the problem. For all three blogs I author, I've always had excellent service. Thanks!

( juin 19 2007, 12:51:00 PM CEST ) Permalink Comments [1]

mardi janvier 30, 2007

Tim Bray en français dans le texte
Tim Bray (employé Sun), est l'un des trois "inventeurs" d'XML (avec Jon Bosak, autre employé Sun et Jean Paoli de Microsoft) et accessoirement celui qui m'a entraîné dans la blogosphere. Parmi ses nombreuses attributions (Scripting JVM, ODF, RSS, Blogs, REST, ...), Tim parle dans cet entretient en français de l'impact grandissant d'Atom et de son protocole de publication associé.

Atom est la dernière incarnation d'un standard (IETF) de syndication (comme RSS précédemment). Roller, le logiciel qui supporte ce blog et désormais développé chez Apache, permet de publier des flux dans ce format depuis quelques mois (voici le mien) grâce à Dave Johnson (son créateur et employé Sun). Dave couvre le sujet Atom régulièrement sur son blog. Il y parle aussi de Rome (une création P@ maintenant chez Google), l'API Java probablement la plus utilisée pour consommer et générer de l'ATOM (sans jeu de mot bien sûr).

APP (Atom Publishing Protocol) est une partie complémentaire du standard pour faire de la publication. C'est une technologie clairement dans la mouvance REST dont GData de google est une première implémentation utilisé par exemple dans Google Calendar. Avec tous ses standards et ces implications d'ingénieurs, reste à voir ce que Sun va faire en matière de produits :)

Quant à la prédiction de Tim "Le protocole de publication Atom aura un impact plus grand que XML", vu ce qu'on a fait d'XML par rapport à ce qui n'était à la base qu'une simplification de SGML, je suis curieux de voir la ce que l'avenir nous réserve!

( janv. 30 2007, 11:05:46 PM CET ) Permalink

lundi janvier 15, 2007

Taking Roller's JSON and jMakifying it - short video

Building on Dave Johnson's Roller/JSON post I wrote a simple application consuming Roller-generated data using the jMaki framework and NetBeans 5.5. jMaki, as any framework in the AJAX space, consumes JSON data and provides a wrapper technology around existing AJAX components.

I slightly changed Dave's formating of the Roller template:

#set($pager = $model.getWeblogEntriesPager())
#set(  $map = $pager.getEntries())
  {
     columns: {'pubTime' : 'Publish Time',
                 'title' : 'Title',
                    'Id' : 'Identifier',
          'commentCount' : '# comments' },
     rows: [
           #foreach($day in $map.keySet())
           #set($entries = $map.get($day))  
              #foreach($entry in $entries)
                ['$entry.pubTime',
                 '$entry.title',
                 '$entry.anchor',
                 '$entry.commentCount'],
              #end
           #end
  ]}

The page generating live JSON data is available at http://blogs.sun.com/alexismp/page/jsontest.

From NetBeans 5.5 with the jMaki plugin installed (get it from the Update Center), I simply created a Web Application with jMaki as the framework, dropped a DOJO table and changed it's service attribute to the URL generating to JSON data (actually I had to copy/paste the data so that it was available from the same domain) and run the application.

Pretty simple and I didn't see a line of JavaScript.
Here's the simple jMaki tag from the JSP source :

<a:ajax name="dojo.table"
       service="http://blogs.sun.com/alexismp/page/jsontest">

All of this is shown in this short screencast :



Update: the JSON content should really be using double quotes and ideally not end with a trailing comma (and your blog post titles shouldn't use double quotes :)
Update 2: the answer to my initial questions (different domains requiring me to copy paste JSON content in the video to workaround security constraints, quite ugly) are all described here. Sorry I didn't update the screencast.
( janv. 15 2007, 06:09:19 PM CET ) Permalink Comments [1]