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Syndication, RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom, blah blah blah....@#$#@

Have you come across these jargons? I have come across lot of jargons like these, not only jargons, but different versions, different formats, even different expansions of one acronym. The funniest of all is the origin of RSS!!! Then decided not to bother about it but understand the basics.

I would have an application which will update me about the latest developements in the subscribed website, often for news or blogs. If you have subscribed to it, you will be notified whenever there is a new post (news or blog) is published.

The website would publish an XML that can be accessed by an URL (Feed URL), which is read by your client program, parsed and displayed to you. There are many XML formats, each have its own fancy name.

Example: RSS 2.0

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<rss version="2">

<channel>

<title>Title for the Channel comes here</title>

<link>Channel related URL</link>

<description>Brief textual description of the Channel

</description>

<item>

 <title>Title for Channel Item 1</title>

 <description>Description of Channel Item 1

 </description>

 <link>URL for complete article of Item 1</link>

</item>

<item>

 <title>Title for Channel Item 2</title>

 <description>Description of Channel Item 2

 </description>

 <link>URL for complete article of Item 2</link>

</item>

...

...

</channel>

</rss>

This file can be accessed using a URL (called Feed URL), and the content is constantly updated by the site.

Example:

BBC News Feed URL

The RSS Feed reader (or any news reader application) basically reads this content, parses it and displays in a friendly mannere.

Anyone who knows how to parse an XML document can write a reader applicatiton. There is nothing challenging in writing it, rather it is tedious, since it has to many syndication formats (if you want to) like RSS (many versions), Atom, etc.

There are lot of open source java APIs which allow you to read RSS feeds for many formats:

See the
list here [http://java-source.net/open-source/rss-rdf-tools]

Almost all of them I have come across are DOM based APIs except the one from Jakarta, FeedParser [http://jakarta.apache.org/commons/sandbox/feedparser] which is SAX based.