A blog engine to integrate with a java app. Which blog engine?

Question

I have to setup a blog engine that "has to be integrated with a java app". These are my requirements, I'm not kidding. The java app is a web app that serves very dynamically changed content.

What exactly the blog and this app are going to exchange - I do not know, because my client doesn't know. (yes, I know, my client is ..., but this is the case).

I think I have two options: a java blog engine and wordpress.

Wordpress is popular, stable, customizable, ..., but in PHP. Java blogs are not popular, but in Java.

In a previous project I was using a .NET blog, called dasBlog, it was not popular and not easily customizable. I don't want to make that mistake again.

If I can be able to fully control a Wordpress blog (publish posts, edit sidebar contents, make wordpress ask me for content for a sidebar, ...) via JAX-RPC or REST and if that is straightforward, maybe I would choose Wordpress.

What do you think?

Solution 1

For wordpress-java integration I found these:

Quercus (runs PHP): http://wordpress.tv/2008/10/27/spreading-the-word-to-java-bring-wordpress-and-java-together-with-quercus-slides/

Java API for wordpress http://code.google.com/p/wordpress-java/ (This is my favorite, but I don't know how powerful it is)

java port of wordpress: http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=50890 (I don't like this one)

Solution 2

It's not that uncommon to combine a java-app with a wordpress installation (I have done so myself at least once). Just front with an apache, running php and wordpress and have your java app running "behind" on it's own context. Tricky parts are if you need to share sessions and logins.

Comments

[pap]

Easiest is to do a mashup. Either you do AJAX partial updates, or you can iframe. If you absolutely must do it completely server-side, you can just fetch it between environments over http (HttpClient or somesuch). It all comes down to what level of integration you need. Like you said, your client can't properly articulate what this integration should accomplish so I think you need to work more on that. Just saying "integrate blog" is too blunt. Just linking to an external blog is one type of integration. Explore the use-case in more detail before you start working on implementation.

[mist]

wordpress-java did the job. It can't do all, but does enough