Using and customizing Apache Roller
Feb 20, 2015
One of the reasons I wanted to host a blog on my own server is that I wanted to run it on Java. Searching around for blog applications written in Java, I narrowed down on Pebble and Apache Roller. Pebble doesn’t seem to have been updated in years. While development on Apache Roller seems to have slowed down, at least it is being actively maintained. So I chose it over Pebble.
(A note — running a blog on Java and wanting that blog to have as many features as that other blog you just saw on the Internet requires a fair amount of Java knowledge and effort. So if you are just looking to run a blog with minimal effort, you might want to stick to PHP applications like Wordpress. They have a ton of customization features which don’t require much programming knowledge. They also have a lot of themes to chose from).
Installing and running Apache Roller is a simple enough affair if you follow the documentation. The only issue I ran into was this, during server startup:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: javax/mail/Session
at org.apache.roller.weblogger.business.MailProvider.<init>(MailProvider.java:92)
at org.apache.roller.weblogger.business.startup.WebloggerStartup.prepare(WebloggerStartup.java:177)
at org.apache.roller.weblogger.ui.core.RollerContext.contextInitialized(RollerContext.java:140)