Since the start of this year, I've been busy working away at the Pebble 2.0 codebase and what you see here is the result of that effort. I've spoken to a few people about the future of Pebble and I spent a fair amount of time looking at how to make the jump from 1.9 to the next major version. Some of those thoughts included re-addressing the architecture to support large community sites and, at one stage, I had a prototype that consisted of a number of "business services", backed by Hibernate, with content being stored in a relational database.

However, I feel that Pebble has several unique selling points over other blogging solutions that provide this sort of functionality and I felt that these would be lost if we made this transition. So, I'm pleased to say that Pebble will stay firmly rooted in the individual/small group blogging space, remaining as lightweight and easy to setup as it did before. So, what's new?

New standards
From a technical point of view, the big news is that Pebble 2.0 has made the jump to Java 5, JSP 2.0 and Servlet 2.4 - it's faster, cleaner and the size of the JSP pages is significantly reduced through the use of the JSP expression language. Java 5 isn't quite mainstream yet, but I'm seeing more hosting providers and server vendors starting to adopt it. Running Tomcat 5.5, I've seen that Pebble is faster and has a smaller memory footprint than before.

New security
Container managed security has worked really well for Pebble but ultimately it's quite limiting in a number of respects. In addressing this, Pebble 2.0 uses the Acegi security system for Spring that provides a much more flexible and feature rich security implementation than that offered by the Java EE standard. As a Pebble 2.0 user you'll enjoy new features such as "remember me", the ability to use the same login from your XML-RPC blogging client software and a very pluggable mechanism for incorporating Pebble into your existing security infrastructure. I've used and recommended Acegi during my day job and it's a fantastic product.

User interface
Pebble 2.0 now has a consistent user interface throughout and the theme mechanism has been greatly simplified, partially thanks to the JSP 2.0 expression language. Feature-wise, Pebble 2.0 is on a par with the current version and is more about refinement than new features.

Next steps
What you see running here, today, will become Pebble 2.0 milestone 1. I'll be committing the code into the CVS repository and making a binary downloadable for you to have a look at. Following this, I'm going to look at integrating CAPTCHA support to further tackle comment spam and integrate some of the patches that you've submitted for the 1.9 codebase, some of which I'll also integrate into a 1.9.1 release. You'll be seeing more detailed information about Pebble 2.0 in the coming week.

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Posted by Simon Brown on 16 February 2006 09:39:50 GMT #