What is Pebble?
Pebble is a lightweight, open source, blogger that is written as a web application to run inside J2EE web containers using standards-based technologies such as JSP, servlets, filters, JSP custom tags, JSTL and JAXP.

Running as a web application in any JSP 1.2/Servlet 2.3 compatible web container, Pebble maintains blog entries as XML files and serves up blog content dynamically. All maintenance of blog entries, blog properties, themes and so on is performed through your web browser, negating the need to telnet/ssh to the host and making Pebble ideal for anybody who is constantly on the move, or accesses the Internet through a firewall/proxy server.

A wide range of features are provided in the current version of Pebble, a summary of which is as follows.

• Blog entries are stored as XML files using the filing system, although the persistence layer is pluggable.
• Blog entry maintenance is performed through your web browser.
• Blog entries can be categorised into one or more categories.
• New images for use in blog entries can be uploaded through your web browser.
• Visitors can leave comments containing a subset of HTML tags, with notifications of new comments being sent by e-mail.
• Support for MovableType TrackBacks.
• Blog entries and comments can be previewed before being posted.
• An RSS 2.0 feed is available for all recent entries, or a just those in a particular category.
• Calendar control.
• User friendly URLs and permalinks (e.g. /2003/04/01.html).
• Localization of dates and times (a future version will support i18n).
• Searching of blog entries, inclusive of comments.
• Logging of referers and visited pages (with regular expression based referer filters for filtering out referer spam).
• Ability to ping weblogs.com/XML-RPC compatible sites when blog entries are added/edited.
• Look and feel customizable via themes, with the ability to edit the current theme (CSS/JSP/HTML) via your web browser.
• Extensive web interface for editing of blog properties and options.
• Support for multi-contributor blogs.
• Support for full multi-user blogs (i.e. a single Pebble instance can serve more than a single blog).

Links
Project page
Home page
Download
User Guide (PDF)
Changes
Bugs and Issues
Browse CVS
License

Examples
Simon Brown's blogs
JavaRanch Radio
JavaRanch Staff Channels
Sam Dalton's Blog
Weiqi Gao's Weblog

Minimum requirements

1. J2SE 1.4
2. A JSP 1.2/Servlet 2.3 compatible web/application server (e.g. Tomcat or Resin), with access to setup new users and roles.

Licensing
Pebble is distributed under BSD license, a copy of which can be found here. Pebble also includes software written by the Apache Group and a copy of the license can be found here.

Alternatives
If Pebble isn't quite what you're looking for, why not take a look at some of the other Java blogging tools such as The Roller Weblogger, blojsom or Blogmento.