Abstract

Major release to modernize infrastructure with Java 5, JPA and Struts 2. Also includes new theme management and easy-install features.

Requirements

Upgrade dependencies, switch to new back-end, improve blog customization and introduce other new features.

• Introduce new ASF-license-compatible persistence framework. Replace our existing Hibernate based Roller back-end with one based on Apache OpenJPA. Drop Hibernate from the Roller distribution (but keep it in SVN until everybody has transitioned away from it).

• Upgrade to Struts 2. The Roller UI needs significant improvement and modernization and by upgrading to Struts 2 if will be easier for us to meet the higher standards that are expected of "Web 2.0" web applications.

• Introduce requirement for Java SE 5. We've been stuck on Java 1.4.2 for a long time now, there are significant improvements in Java SE 5 and the libraries that we depend on are starting to take advantage of those improvements (i.e. Struts annotations and ROME)

Design

• New JPA based backend follows same design as old Hibernate backend
• New Struts 2 UI architecture is summarize in Allen's Struts2 Migration guide
• See individual proposals for design information.

Proposals implemented

• Proposal_ThemeEncapsulation - Better encapsulation and modularization for themes.
• Proposal Individual Templates By Action Support a way to define individual or separate template files for various weblog page actions
• Proposal_TemplateEditorEnhancements - Improvements to usability and functionality of Preferences->Templates pages
• Proposal Stylesheet Overrides for Weblogs - a way to allow weblogs to do stylesheet customizations without having to customize their theme and hack the templates
• Proposal Easy Install - Making it really easy to install Roller, targets 4.0
• Proposal_FeedHistory - Add Atom-friendly feed-history (paging) support to our feeds.
• Proposal_SearchFeeds - Add support to generate feeds from search results.
• Proposal Account Activation via Email - Add support for registration via email (patch from Sedat Çiftçi)
• Proposal Introduce DI with Guice - Use Guice to implement Dependency Injection (DI) in Roller to make the back-end more modular, flexible and testable.

Comments

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