Matt, Security is one of the reason I prefer java over php. And believe it or not performance too. I use my own web framework and I get really good performance. Add in the fact that I can offload some work onto threads and the user experience gets even better. I think you can add threads in php now since php5 but I don't really like php. The php libraries also feel like an inconsistent mess compared to java libraries.
I didn't mean to come off so negative. I like Roller and I chose it because I feel it's the best java blog software out there and I did look at a few. My hope is that the roller community can grow even more, especially now that it's an apache project. With a larger community it can get even better. Two things I think Roller needs are better integration with popular IDE's and more themes. With Sun's support of Roller I'm really surprised that in the couple of years since I first looked at Roller, the ant scripts haven't been modified to be more NetBeans friendly. I can probably brush up my ant skills and hobble together some changes but I imagine someone on the NetBeans could make the changes and Roumen Strobl could put up a screencast while I'm still scratching my head. I'd much rather focus my efforts on some of the features I'm better capable of handling. Some of the things I plan on doing for a project that might be of benefit to others are the threaded comments I'm almost done with, the ability to install themes from the admin interface, hopefully a utility that can convert other public themes if possible. I wrote a dictionary based captcha servlet that supports internationalization that is configurable and pretty lightweight that I'd like to add as an option for a comment authenticator. There was an open source java one I found but from what I remember it was a pig and seemed to have a memory leak. I think people are working on OpenID integration but it would be nice if Roller was like blogger.com where you could choose how you are identified. Account management for users that only comment would be good to have and it looks like the current work done in user permissions should help enable that. One big thing I don't like, if I'm logged in as the blog owner, why do I have to enter info to place a comment. Roller should know me and themes can choose to highlight my comments. More importantly it shouldn't allow someone to try and impersonate me. Depending on what happens with that project I might have to implement some of these myself and don't mind giving back the code. My one biggest gripe with roller now is it's memory footprint. I have one blog running without planet and the RSS for my tomcat instance went from 45M with just my app on it to 140M after I deployed roller-weblogger.war. I don't know how much has to do with caching that I need to configure for a small, single blog site but there seem to be an awful lot of jars. Are all three spring, struts and guice really necessary? Why both freemaker and velocity? There are 18M worth of jars. -----Original Message----- From: Matt Raible [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 8:42 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: unzip and run On Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 6:22 PM, Java Web Development <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > That seems like a good idea but I have some concerns. Primarily because the > roller-webapp.war file is already 25M (mostly because of the 3rd party jars) > and adding the server on top of that might turn some people off. > > I feel there are three main types of users to target. Those that want to > simply use roller for a blog, those that want to setup a blog site and those > that want to extend roller. > > For those that want to evaluate it for use the simplest thing would be to > point them to jroller and have them create a free account. > > For those that want to view the maintenance side of things maybe apache can > host a demo site so people can play around with configuring weblogger and > planet. Then every night clean the slate. > > For those that want to extend roller I think it would be nice to split up > roller up into 3 projects and a 3rd party library folder that can easily be > integrated into Netbeans and Eclipse. I haven't used Eclipse for a couple of > years so I'll give the Netbeans example. > > * A lib directory for all the 3rd party jars > * A Java Library Project for classes common to > both weblogger and planet > * A Web Project for weblogger that pulls in the > 3rd party jars it needs from the lib folder and > is dependant on the common Java Library Project > * A Web Project for planet that pulls in jars and > depends on the library project as well. > > Since both Sun and IBM use roller maybe they can get their IDE people to > help do this? I started out developing java in notepad and vi and other text > editors but ever since NB 5 I can't see going back. When I need to I can > still run the nb ant scripts from the command line. > > In the case of the problem I was having, I googled for over an hour trying > to understand Roller's architecture to see what classes process the request > before it gets to CommentServlet and came up empty. After figuring out how > to properly attach the debugger it took a minute to find out that > WeblogRequestMapper was where I was hitting a problem. > > NetBeans does a superb job at giving developers a single install that gets > them up and running developing webapps quickly. Rather than trying to > replicate that just for roller, integrate roller better in Netbeans (and > Eclipse) for those that want to make enhancements. > > I'm not sure what Roller offers that Word Press doesn't, but I can think of > a lot of stuff in WordPress that would make me favor it over Roller. The big > draw for me is that it's written in Java and I'm looking into starting a > project that includes blogs that will be written in Java/JSP. I think that > most people that choose Roller for the same reasons and the easier it is to > get started developing Roller the better. The good news is Roller offers something that WordPress doesn't: Security http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/06/11/my-blog-was-hacked-is-yours-next-huge-wordpress-security-issues/ ;0) Matt > > > -----Original Message----- > From: Jeffrey Blattman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Thursday, June 12, 2008 12:38 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: unzip and run > > would it make sense to have a roller+[tomcat|glassfish|...] unzip and > run bundle available on the download site? this seems to be the way > things are going ... for eval purposes anyway. > > i was able to create a roller deploy-and-go WAR pretty easily from > the 5-min install. then we could of course create a unzip and run by > bundling roller and the web container, w/ roller.war in the > container's autodeploy folder. > > thoughts? > > > -- http://raibledesigns.com
