rebelutionary
Mike Cannon-Brookes on Java, J2EE, OSX, Open Source, Australia, Atlassian, Bug Tracking, JIRA and more...

Sunday, 26 May 2002

David Johnson (the Roller developer) has some interesting thoughts on my ideas to create an Open Source Radio in Java. (apparently I'm the rebel and I don't have a first name - hence I've changed by subtitle!). I too have been looking for blogs that cover J2EE and Java (they are few and far between!) - hopefully my collection will grow (I should really publish it as a blogroll one of these days). Rebelutionary is right, all the parts for building a pure-Java Radio knockoff are out there.  For example, you could start with the Netbeans Platform (just the framework, not the IDE), embed the Tomcat Servlet-engine/web-server to run Roller, integrate the JOE Outline editor, add Jython scripting, add the Hypersonic SQL database, throw in the Xindice XML database for good measure, and include the all-important ability to publish a static site via FTP. Sounds like fun. Does it ever! Thoughts: JOE looks very cool Embedding Tomcat is a bad idea because it's frankly crap - use Jetty instead (if you don't need to use Open Source, use Orion or Resin - both are 10x the container Tomcat is) - but as long as the application is specification compliant, any container should do. Jetty is coolest because it's totally embeddable so you could have the desktop client being a single executable JAR. I don't see the need for Xindice here (although it looks cool) - too much complexity. hsqldb (the new Hypersonic) or the newer McKoi would do nicely for persistence. You could even use Lucene to do persistence - speedy! Roller seems like a great start though. There are a lot of advantages to it being a server side system. I wonder if it would be possible to write a client side component, which sync'ed with Roller via XML-RPC or SOAP, that acted like the Radio desktop. Then you would really have the best of both worlds - a desktop website and a server side environment.  [Blogging Roller] 11:13:18 PM  comment []      David replied to my thoughts about Swing and HTML here. Lots of good ideas, but this is the nugget that it seems noone can understand: Now, I'll be the first person to tell you that displaying HTML in JEditorPane sucks. Sun has done a horrible job keeping this component up to date with the latest web standards. But, as you can see from the screenshots, it's not impossible. In fact, it's surprisingly little code. If Sun really wants to compete with M$, they need to fix horribly broken crap like this. Why, oh why don't Sun fix it? On another note, are there any Open Source efforts to replace it? (apart from connecting Mozilla with Java - which is a very ugly solution IMHO) If not, why not? No interest in Open Source Swing apps? (BTW David your RSS feed generates links without the port, and your redirect script doesn't include anchors - so you lose positioning when linking direct from RSS)  10:59:14 PM  comment []      Interesting Javalobby forum thread on the relationship between Swing, AWT and Java2D.  10:49:03 PM  comment []      Apache Xindice: "Apache Xindice is a database designed from the ground up to store XML data or what is more commonly referred to as a native XML database." Mental note - this might be useful one day. 10:46:39 PM  comment []      CocoBlog is more J2EE blogging software. XML / Cocoon based, but it's still J2EE! (thanks Be Blogging!) 10:44:31 PM  comment []      By the way, Scott seems like a pretty damn nice guy. [The FuzzyBlog!] 10:42:24 PM  comment []      Scott Johnson on why he won't move to Windows XP -"It's Unclear What Benefits I Get." [The FuzzyBlog!] 10:40:26 PM  comment []      Chris Anderson: New Rules for the New Advertising Economy.  The new equation for success in online advertising is simple: Effective advertising must be intrusive. But intrusive ads must be used sparingly to avoid ruining the medium. From this axiom comes a host of surprising implications - the new rules for the new advertising economy. Fascinating insights. The basic premie is that because unique users are more important than quantity of traffic, you want users to come to your site for very shrot periods, often - rather than for long periods. [Doc Searls Weblog] 10:39:01 PM  comment []      There's no reason to treat software any differently from other products. Today Firestone can produce a tire with a single systemic flaw and they're liable, but Microsoft can produce an operating system with multiple systemic flaws discovered per week and not be liable. This makes no sense, and it's the primary reason security is so bad today. [Bruce Schneier's April Crypto-Gram] [Charles Miller] [www.davidwatson.org] 10:29:43 PM  comment []      Letter by IT CEOs to Entertainment CEOs (HTML) is a document that I guessed few would read because the Judiciary Committee posted a link in small print here to its .pdf form. [Doc Searls Weblog] 10:25:32 PM  comment []      Amazon Scam. A "clever" author of a $3 Self Help PDF has developed a program to put his book in as a recommendation 12 times, on every single top seller at Amazon. As a result he is now the #3 best seller on Amazon. [Adam Curry] 10:22:49 PM  comment []      I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone completed a mod chip for the XBox. 12:19:51 PM  comment []      Buzz Bruggeman's Radio Weblog:: "Everyday, I find myself reading a dozen blogs. I am reminded of once telling a guy to get off the bench and get into the game of life." Amusing tail. How people can whine after selling $337 million in personal stock is beyond me. I guess it's all about perspective. 12:13:29 PM  comment []