Switching to a Java blog
May 16th, 2004 by HenSo, the long term slow moving plan of upgrading MT is now dead, and I need to be planning a migration. Oddly, this makes me actually tackle the issue.
First off, Java based blogs. Easier to deal with and it reduces the necessary technology stack, so to speak, on my machines. There are 4 immediate contenders:
RollerWeblogger, Pebble, Blojsom and Blogmento.
Blogmento immediately drops out as I’m looking for a server solution and not a desktop based GUI. Throw in the ‘Windows’ only Installer as the main install and I’m not very interested.
So I proceeded to install the other 3, so my major customer [da wife] can have a peek and give me her opinion.
Roller requires a database setting up, but I’ve long since had that scripted [Thanks Steve, circa 99]. Drop the war in place, unzip it, edit the config. I wonder when the JCP will notice that the war spec is amazingly crippled by the lack of a sibling location in which configuration can go. conf/Catalina/localhost/roller.xml is a nice way to handle sub elements in the server.xml, but why not conf/Catalina/localhost/roller/ for entries that will ‘appear’ in the classpath.
Apart from specifying the admin user, this was nearly all happy J2EE.
I’m on a much older version of mysql than Roller talks about, so I initially had the mysql driver wrong. I also skipped a few of what seem to be optional install components [add an optional icon guys?]. Once I fixed that, we were go. Worked nicely, I blogged. Next.
Pebble. In fact pebble and blojsom are much alike. Both use the filesystem instead of the database and have a fair bit more configuration than Roller, including where things will be on the system, and what the url to the application will be [bit odd, it should just figure this out]. Pebble has a PDF user guide with a few pages of install, while Blojsom has a Confluence site with instructions that confused me a touch.
This proved to be quite telling. On hitting the site, Pebble gave me a nice page, though sod all in the way of things I can do, while Blojsom gave me errors as the user’s I configured are apparantly not configured correctly. Blojsom requires users to be configured outside the web interface it seems, which is quite painful and already knocks it down into 3rd for me.
It says a lot about user psychology that, despite Pebble and Blojsom being equally lacking in functionality [ie bugger all works], Pebble’s nice page makes me want to fix it, while Blojsoms Exceptions make me give up. Slightly affected by the fact that Blojsom seems to be more of a mess configuration-wise than Pebble. Still, out of energy and only Roller working, so I’ve a winner for Heat 1 [though i do need to find out how to disable Roller from handing out new accounts to anyone who asks].