I was using Flock for the last few years but moving to a shared servlet environment is making me reconsider using Flock. See this is the problem Flock has been worked on for the last 2 years and still has no ATOM support. It works well when its got a small amount of feeds but the fact you cant even change the duration of the feeds collected is troubling. After trying to install Flock on cubicgarden.com I got a reply from the excellent support from interadvantage.
I was excited to see that Flock runs on Tapestry, because I've never tried to get any Tapestry apps running on our servers. This is what I did:
1. I updated Apache's config to pass all /flock/* requests to Tomcat.
2. I then added security grants so any Webapp can read the net.sf.tapestry.* and flock.* system properties.
3. I then ran into a roadblock…Flock is going to be problematic because of the ridiculous tendency of open source Java developers to assume their apps will only run on a dedicated Tomcat instance.
The problem is that it tries to write to /username/*. As you know, we put your home directory at /home/username. Further, the only way (I can see) to override this behavior is to set a system property, flock.home. Sure, I can set this, but it'll be set system-wide so if another user wants to run flock, you'll have to share a directory. That's obviously not acceptable. Why can't they just use a flock.properties file in the classpath? I've recommended this on their mailing list. Of course, I could set flock.home to /home/forrei/public_html/flock/WEB-INF/flock or something, thereby limiting the server to a single instance of Flock (yours). But that's not a good solution, so let's see whether the developers are willing to do anything for us on this one before we implement a kludge.
Yeah and I'm honestly he's right. So till some nasty little hack is decided on, I will keep on running it on my local server but I'm on the look out for something else to replace it. Any offers? or even any thoughts around this problem with flocks home directory? I actually remember having a simular problem a while ago when I was first setting up Flock. I didnt want it to stick all its data in the home directory in documents and settings, so I did the classpath trick to fix it. Luckly Blojsom is much better built and this blog is well on its way to moving to its new home under http://www.cubicgarden.com.