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. -----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?
