The application is packaged for quick download (less than 4MB for the most recent stable version 1.0.6) either in a Windows self-extracting installer, a Linux RPM, a generic ZIP format, or in source code format. A beta version, 1.1 v6, is also available. Download your preferred package, extract it, and install it according to the requirements of your operating system. You’ll also need to have Java Runtime Environment 1.4.2 installed locally, since Thingamablog is coded in Java.

Right from the start, I was pleased and surprised at how mature and easy to use this application is, even the beta version. To create a new blog, click File -> New Weblog. An interactive wizard guides you through the steps. First, you enter the relative path on the server where the files should be uploaded. For my Web host, it is /public_html/directory_name. Make sure you give your Thingamablog its own separate directory, but don’t worry about manually creating it on the server, since Thingamablog creates your blog’s directory automatically during the file upload.

Click to enlarge Next, enter the URL of your blog, which is simply the URL assigned to you by your host, with the Thingamablog directory name appended. The application creates subdirectories for archives and images on its own. One small nitpick is that the program doesn’t name the front page of the blog index.html by default, but instead dubs it blog.html, which unnecessarily lengthens the URL. I fixed this easily by clicking on Configure Weblog -> Front Page and replacing “blog.html” with “index.html,” then re-uploading the blog.

The wizard next asks for is the blog’s title and description, categories, and site authors (and in the beta version there is an option to post via email). You can then select from several included themes, and configure the application to upload the blog files to the remote host.

Thingamablog has a limited set of features that most blog owners expect, such as the ability to generate RSS feeds, the ability to create and maintain multiple blogs, and automatically ping your choice of blog aggregators. It doesn’t include any special bells and whistles for automatic search engine optimization, and unlike WordPress it cannot use plugins, but if you’re fairly adept with HTML it is simple enough to add your own keyword and content tags.

Click to enlarge The only deficiency in Thingamablog that could potentially be a dealbreaker is that it doesn’t allow your site visitors to leave comments. Since Thingamablog is a client-side application, the files on the server aren’t writable. One solution is to use a free commenting service like HaloScan. The only other option would be to recode it to allow commenting on the server side, a feature that Bob Tantlinger, the original developer, hasn’t added, probably since it would change the basic client-side nature of Thingamablog. Not every blogger wants or needs to allow discussion; for such bloggers, not having a comment option, which keeps away a lot of would-be spammers, could be a benefit.

The most recent beta version of Thingamablog was released in December, and there’s quite a bit of activity at the project’s discussion forum. Bob says a 2.0 version of Thingamablog is lurking somewhere in the future, but even now, this application could become one of your favorite blogging platforms.

Bodog CTO Carl Schmidt calls it a “fantastic story.” In late 2001, the company was going through the “dot-com craze.” Hits were racking up, and Bodog was trying to figure out how to scale to the increased traffic. But Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), a Sun product, started bringing everything to a halt whenever usage spiked. “Every time we ran into a peak load, our system stopped responding,” Schmidt says. “All the application servers would stop serving requests. It turned out to be a bug in EJB that was replicating over and over.”

With limited resources, Schmidt needed help from Versant and WebLogic. “We didn’t have catastrophic load testing but we knew there was a problem. We went to the vendors.” The bug could have been either in Versant’s or WebLogic’s object-oriented database, but neither company was willing to track it down; instead, each pointed the finger of blame at the other. “We needed them to work together,” Schmidt says. That wasn’t going to happen, so Schmidt and his team went for the other option: they decompiled the code themselves. “We found the bug and fixed it,” he says. “And life went on.” But that was the beginning of the end for proprietary code at Bodog.com. “We looked at that situation and went, ‘wow’. [The vendors'] whole ad campaign is that they’re supposed to offer you this great support, but we were hampered by it.”

Schmidt started shopping for an open source solution. “We felt that if we were going to have to fix bugs ourselves, we sure would like to have access to the source.” He looked at Java Open Application Server (JOnAS) and Enhydra before settling on JBoss. “They seemed to have the most momentum.” So Schmidt began taking down the three Sun application servers, gradually replacing them with generic hardware running Red Hat Linux Enterprise, Apache, and JBoss, as well as IBM’s DB2 relational database product. “We used to use the stock Red Hat 9, but we’ve found that it’s been worth it springing for the enterprise stuff.” Regarding the use of the proprietary DB2, he says, “I wanted to go with an open source database, but at the time I didn’t feel MySQL was quite ready. Today is a different story.”

Schmidt says the migration was relatively straightforward, with a team of six developers that completed a change from WebLogic to JBoss and from an object-oriented database environment to a relational database structure in about eight months. The new infrastructure has grown along with the site, which now sits on 14 Web servers and a 30-CPU application server cluster.

“What’s ended up happening is that we’ve taken what we would have spent on licensing and invested it in JBoss development training,” Schmidt says. “That’s translated into higher developer productivity on e-commerce, which is the lifeblood of Bodog.com.”

Terracotta is licensed under the Terracotta Public License (TPL), a modification of the Mozilla Public License that includes an attribution requirement. The license is not officially sanctioned by the OSI, but Terracotta doesn’t restrict access to the code, and allows modifications and redistributions as long as the code continues to be licensed under the TPL.

Pandey doesn’t want to call Terracotta a database replacement. “We try not to position ourselves [that way], because it will take us a long time to get to the point of having all the features and functionality of a database. It might be enough, though, to be a way to offload the database.” Pandey says the reason he created Terracotta was because he believes traditional databases were developed “for a world when Web apps didn’t exist. Databases were great when the access numbers were fairly limited. Fast forward 15 years and suddenly the problem has become very large scale. Peak loads can happen at strange times; databases weren’t designed to handle that complexity. What you get is Oracle coming up with solutions like rack clusters, or the customer gets fed up and says, ‘I need to write some custom software to do things like caching and offloading the database.’”

Since many businesses cannot afford the costs associated with developing custom software, Pandey says, “they’re hostage to licenses. There was an opportunity here for us, where we could come in and provide essentially what people are trying to do with that custom software.”

Terracotta was on the market for several months as a proprietary product, with less than stellar sales results. “It’s a fairly disruptive technology,” Pandey says. “We’re out there saying, don’t use a database, use us. And that’s not the first thing that comes to people’s minds. They think, ‘let me add more databases.’ We’d have to send sales reps knocking down doors to get them to go to trial with Terracotta. We were trying to change a mindset, and we thought hard: what would be a lower-friction way of doing this? What we wanted was more of a pull mode, where people get excited about the product. If you have all these expensive licensing costs up front, people are not going to try new ideas.”

When Terracotta decided to start giving away the product and the source code, things started to change. “Before we went to open source, we used to have to engage people,” Pandey says. “We don’t do that anymore. Open source is a great place for new ideas. If we find a customer that wants to do a proof-of-concept, we point them to all the resources and links. If they need any help there’s a forum where we try to maintain excellent service levels. We give them the option of calling and talking to us, but we don’t push anything on them and there’s no pressure to buy. So people are more willing to experiment.”

If Web traffic is an indicator of interest, then Terracotta’s audience has exploded. “When we launched, we would get a few hundred visitors a month; now we get 50-60,000,” Pandey says. “It’s that wonderful word of mouth, and it’s a feedback loop. We have people out there doing the marketing for us that we would have had to spend millions on to achieve the same results.”

Because Terracotta is still selling a commercially supported identical version of the product, Pandey says his biggest challenge is reining in the salespeople. “We had to address keeping a very clear wall between the sales team and the community side of the business. The temptation is, let’s call up all these people on forums and try to sell something to them. But the reason open source works is people have to feel that they do not have to buy anything to make it work. We make sure the developers have access to all the features they need — no doing any bait and switch. The other thing is we do not let the salespeople approach someone unsolicited. They have to come to us first.”

Pandey says sometimes it is frustrating to see larger companies taking advantage of the free version. “You say, wow, they have tons of money. But it’s worth the tradeoff. I would not go back to the other model.” For one thing, he says, the honest feedback from users is invaluable. “In my experience with proprietary technology, when you do a customer forum and ask for feedback, there’s always that elephant in the room. They are thinking, ‘how honest can we be, because they’re going to try to sell me something.’ So you’re dancing around. They will say, ‘I want this,’ but they’re not going to reveal the true value they get from that feature. You’re always second-guessing that. That kind of thing goes away completely with open source. The customer will tell you exactly what they need and how important it is to them, because they know it’s not something they’re going to have to pay for. You’re getting unadulterated information and you can actually build and design things that people find useful.”