Starts with overview of RSS, including uses for RSS, news readers, etc. Then moves into some more technical details of an RSS feed. Shortcomings of feeds:

• Users need one-click subscribe (no standards yet) - Safari RSS doing a good job
• 10% of all Feeds not well-formed XML
• Feeds can be lossy (don't poll often enough, will miss stuff)
• RFC 3229 (FeedDiff) can be used to address this
• Polling based -- traffic waste; HTTP conditional get and caching ease pain

FeedParser (SAX based) and ROME (DOM based) -- two Java libraries for parsing feeds. Atom is the future of feeds? Atom is becoming an IETF standard, which leads credence to this theory. It is a comprehensive and rigorous specification. RSS 1.0 uses RDF (ick), RSS 2.0 has most of the same functionality, but tosses the complexity of RDF. How to serve feeds:

• ROME serialization
• XML DOM serialization
• Template langauge: Velocity, JSP specification
• Plop it on a web server that supports conditional HTTP GET, etags, etc.

Publishing Protocols:

• OLD: XML-RPC based, ad hoc, simple: Blogger, MetaWeblog (most popular), Movable Type, WikiRPCInterface
• New: The REST based Atom Publishing Protocol
• Why not SOAP?

Atom publishing

• Supports features of existing protocols
• plus administrative features (add/remove users, etc)
• spec still under development, will be finished soon

Atom collections

• resources exist in collections
• examples: entries, uploaded files, categories, templates, users

What is ROME?

• Java library
• RSS/ATOM feed parsers and generators
• built on top of JDom
• Provides beans as API

Why ROME?

• existing solutions were incomplete, stale, had unfriendly un-Java API

Pros:

• simple to use, well documented
• single java representation of feeds
• pluggable
• widely used, got momentum

Cons:

• Loss of information at SyndFeed level (abstract all feeds, lose special features of specific feed types)
• DOM overhead