How to build

BlogBaboon borrows the build system (and a great deal of library code) from the salma-hayek library. In addition to checking out the BlogBaboon code, you'll want to check out salma-hayek into the same directory.

Assuming you (a) want to use Subversion for the library code too and (b) only have read-only access to the blog-baboon repository, here's what you'd need on Cygwin or Unix:

svn checkout http://software.jessies.org/svn/salma-hayek/trunk/ salma-hayek
svn checkout http://blog-baboon.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ blog-baboon
make -C salma-hayek && make -C blog-baboon

To build, make will suffice. To run tests, make test. To build an installer for the platform you're on make installer.

Fully-supported build platforms include Cygwin (Windows .msi), Linux (.deb and .rpm), Mac OS (.dmg), and Solaris (.pkg), though any platform with recent GNU tools and Java 5 or later should suffice.

Coding style

Sun style, except two-space indentation and no hard wrapping.

How it works

We use GData-Java to talk to the blogger.com servers. We implement yet another wiki markup language (similar to the code.google.com one) that's reversible. So we just store the HTML on blogger.com, convert it to the wiki form for editing, and convert it back when you save draft or publish.

Useful links

gdata-java javadoc and guide.

WikiCreole suggests a common subset of wiki markup, but doesn't correspond to any of the wikis I personally use. They also didn't consider existing email practice (in contrast to, say, MarkDown), which seems very important for blog posts.

wiky is an interesting wiki markup subset, with a bi-directional convertor. The page has good links to various attempts at standardization and the differences between variants. Although the code seems to prove that you can write a codec with regular expressions, it doesn't have any unit tests to give an idea of how well it does, and the code itself is quite an argument against using regular expressions for the job.

Our model is the code.google.com wiki syntax, and we should look there before inventing new syntax.

Shawn Blanc wrote a good MarsEdit review that waxes eloquent on the advantages of markup, desktop clients, and various other things I wholeheartedly agree with. It might be useful to point people who want WYSYWIG there for more on why I don't think it's a useful idea, and the review might also be interesting to Mac users who don't like BlogBaboon (or don't use blogger.com) but want something along similar lines.